America
ellin.stein
The clue is in the name: Selma, after the Alabama city that was the site of three crucial confrontations in the 1960s struggle for African-American civil rights, not King, after the eloquent spokesman and de facto leader of that struggle. Because director Ava DuVernay is more interested in saluting the power of a grassroots movement than in lionizing a Great Man of History, this inspiring, profoundly moving film avoids the pussyfooting and over-reverence that has afflicted biopics of other secular saints like Gandhi, Lincoln, and Mandela.The moral courage of David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Merle and Willie – these kind of senior country summits can either be a bit of a coaster, all well and good underneath your tumbler of Bourbon, or actually something to write home about. Keep this one away from the liquor. It’s produced by Buddy Cannon, who's worked with Willie Nelson on five albums since 2008, including last year's excellent Band of Brothers, and is co-writer on four more late-period Willie Nelson tunes – small, well-turned gems that continue to make the world a better place by being here, and collaborated on by text messaging, according to an interview in The Tennessean. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wild is solid, but Reese Witherspoon wasn’t necessarily the best choice to play a woman who took a 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail – from the Mojave Desert to the Bridge of Gods, which links Oregon to Washington State – to banish her demons. Considering Witherspoon's chipper personality, can-do spirit, fabulous smile, and natural aura of resilience, her casting loaded the dice. Were we expected to believe her character would sobbingly abandon her trek a third of the way through, or, for that matter, not find transcendence and a handsome, laid-back guy (Michiel Huisman) to Read more ...
elaine.lipworth
B B King was the greatest blues guitarist of the age. Many contemporary rockers credit him as a formidable inspiration, from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton to Bono. But when I met him in 2006, the then 83-year-old musician had a different perspective on his ability. "I don't think it's true," he says with a shrug. "A lot of kids tease me when they see me, they start to bow. I'm not trying to stop them. I think I'm a pretty good musician, I don't think I'm the best, that's all. I just do what I do my way."When I point out that he's often hailed as the second-most gifted guitarist of all time, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
More than an hour and a half, and not a moment too long: this moving and enlightening visual essay was a near-perfect example of broad brush modern history, enlivened by telling detail. It was a curiously intense history, written and narrated by a leading historian of the world wars of the 20th century, Professor David Reynolds, and predicated on the telling assumption that politics may be personal, and the personal may be political. The underlying motif was the personality, in terms of physical health and psychological complexity, of that skilled and idealistic politician Read more ...
fisun.guner
We’ve not been short of memorable London productions of Arthur Miller’s best known works. Ivo van Hove’s triple Olivier award-winning A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre from the Young Vic earlier this year, and the Old Vic’s The Crucible, directed last year by Yaël Farber, were two exceptional productions. And now we have the seminal play of the 20th century. The RSC’s Death of a Salesman arrives from its short run at Stratford garlanded with plaudits, but it’s even better in this West End transfer.The smaller stage and more intimate auditorium of the Noël Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Already a couple of Golden Globes to the good after debuting in the States last year, The Affair effortlessly hit its stride as it landed in Blighty. This opening double episode began generating a subtle miasma of intrigue and vague menace from the off, as teacher and aspiring novelist Noah Solloway (Dominic West) gathered his untidy family together for a summer holiday trip to the in-laws in Montauk, in the Hamptons.A holiday romance might take many forms, but with any luck will turn out to be just a fleeting by-product of too much sun and alcohol. However, the one getting ready to crash up Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I hear America singing," wrote Walt Whitman, the American poet whose language playwright Richard Nelson has co-opted for the title of the second (Sweet and Sad) of his remarkable quartet of Apple Family Plays. And those wanting to know what song is being sung in certain corners of liberal America right now should make every attempt to see any or all of these plays, whether on their continued European tour (Weisbaden and Vienna beckon) or perhaps on screen: their original Off Broadway stagings at New York's Public Theatre have been recorded for public television Stateside, and much the same Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What Nashville did for country music, Empire may very well be about to do for the lurid world of hip hop. If not more so. Created by Lee Daniels (director of Precious) and written by Danny Hunger Games Strong, it's about ailing music mogul Lucious Lyon and how he must decide which of his three sons to hand over his Empire Entertainment conglomerate to.It's a potentially powerful setup, even if it is basically King Lear with beats and sons instead of daughters. In the lead role of Lucious, a worried-looking Terrence Howard effectively conveys an aura of disillusion and world-weariness, as he Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
From the great, gasp-inducing rush of colour when the curtain opens on American Buffalo to the embrace that closes it, this revival of David Mamet’s career-making rummage through the junkyard of the American Dream has you in a vice-like grip. It’s been eagerly anticipated, and doesn’t disappoint.Most great plays have an air of having just been written. American Buffalo is now 40 years old, yet speaks loudly and painfully about the state we’re in today. While a number of our bankers and businessmen are crooks, Mamet’s crooks regard themselves as businessmen. And business, declares junk store Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Coming-of-age comedy, moonlit romance and a gentle folk soul: can this really be Eugene O’Neill? The master of darkness makes a surprising departure with semi-autobiographical 1933 work Ah, Wilderness!, which visits staple tropes – addiction, family strife, responsibility and regret – with a marked lack of rancour. Like its youthful protagonist, world-weary cynicism is a mere pose, abandoned in favour of beguiling, hopeful innocence.Though tonally divergent, the play’s setting identifies it as a prelude to Long Day’s Journey Into Night. We’re once again transported to the small-town coastal Read more ...
David Nice
Vaudeville is alive and well in the silvered Lilliputian cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night’s showbiz audience, beguiled to cheering point by the shreds-and-patches routines put together by the ultimate theatrical whirlwind, Mamma Rose, that’s because everything in this London transfer from the Chichester Festival Theatre, parody included, is solid gold. Heck, I’d even have paid to hear the first trumpet in the fabulous wind-and-brass orchestra tune up.Then, of course, there’s Imelda Staunton Read more ...