America
joe.muggs
I work in an office where music is generally played in the background. Picking the soundtrack for a Friday afternoon can be a particularly fraught moment: one person's idea of a wind-down from work and a promise of leisure to come can be too cheesy, or too laid-back, or too pounding. It's been a minefield. But no more: thanks to this album.Tuxedo is a kind of supergroup. Los Angeleno Mayer Hawthorne has recorded for the ever-sophisticated Stones Throw label, delivering a particularly sophisticated, 1970s-scented retro soul. His records have always oozed class, but have often struggled to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. With his chilling follow-up Mitchell goes full horror, presenting us with a STH: a sexually transmitted haunting.It Follows updates Halloween's suburban horror story – where the adults disappear, leaving Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic groups such as The Orb have taken advantage of. Conversely, the new album from Public Service Broadcasting mines the area for neither irony nor comedy. The London duo’s second album is, instead, determined to celebrate humanity’s wide-eyed initial glee at blasting beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.Musically Public Service Broadcasting are somewhat Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Michael Mann, the director of the monumental crime epic Heat and the original and best Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter, this lumbering saga of cyberhacking is really rather disappointing. Not that it doesn't include several torrid action sequences in exotic locations, while the basic theme is at least urgently topical. It's just that there's little evidence that the project fired Mann's imagination, or inspired him to breathe plausible life into his characters.The set-up is as widescreen as you could wish. A nuclear plant in China is sabotaged by an unknown hacker (Mann makes sure we get Read more ...
Jasper Rees
First there was the movie, the album, the book and the app. Now there is the tour. American Interior, Gruff Rhys’s postmodern narrative concept, has spread tentacles in any number of media. At the heart of it is the mythic story of John Evans, a young Welsh explorer who in the 1780s took himself off deep into the unvanquished heart of America in search of a myth, the lost Welsh-speaking tribe of Madog. A serpentine river odyssey that involved him in vast geopolitical forces, it has spawned a suite of songs about the solitude of adventure. Onstage, Rhys presents them in the form of a lecture Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are two lucky people. They work in New York City where Ben paints and George teaches music. After they marry, the church school where George works fires him for being openly gay. Their life has come apart with the loss of one income. The couple must sell their co-operative flat and live apart - Ben with Elliot, his nephew (a convincing Darren E Burrows) and George with a couple of groovy gay cops (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez) one floor below their old flat. From there on, grumpus Ben looks on the dark side where George finds miracles in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Finally the moment the Breaking Bad diaspora has been waiting for, with the arrival of Vince Gilligan's new show about the earlier career of New Mexico's least scrupulous lawyer, Saul Goodman. Mind you, the title is a little bit misleading, because Saul doesn't exist yet. In this incarnation, he's still just a hustling low-life called Jimmy McGill, a man who never knowingly leaves any barrel unscraped.Goodman was often used as light relief in Breaking Bad, providing interludes of comic sleaze amid the remorseless descent into moral darkness, but here we must, perforce, get a fuller sense of Read more ...
Simon Munk
High school – lockers, cliques, jocks. Do these things really even exist? Like Downton Abbey for American viewers, "high school" for non-Americans is a set of abstracted tropes, with most of us unable to tell how close or far from reality they are. Here they're played out to full effect in this tale of an emo girl who suddenly finds herself with time-rewinding powers.In Episode 1, so-called because this is a new-fangled "episodic" game, its plot and secrets released in stages like a TV season, there's no glamour to these time-travel powers so far – no Hitler assassinations, no amazing bets Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. She pitches her film perfectly, presenting an intimate portrait of a man struggling to live up to his own legend and maintain the momentum of a movement, filtered through the powerful story of a series of initially small, eventually seminal protests in the town of Selma, Alabama.Beginning in 1964, it follows King's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize with a crime of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bob Dylan closed his recent concerts with a heart-rending version of “Stay with Me”, a melancholy lament made famous by Frank Sinatra. It's worth remembering that, born in 1941, Bob Dylan didn’t grow up on a diet of folk and blues. Sinatra was the biggest hit-maker of his early youth, a dominant presence on the airwaves he was exposed to as a child.This is no tribute album, neither is it a piece of opportunism, as Dylan has never traded on received ideas or well-tried music business tricks. Even his Christmas album was shot through with irony as well as joy. With Time out of Mind, which now Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Last autumn Rumer reappeared with her third album, Into Colour, surprising everyone with a lead single that was disco-flavoured. The rest of the album was closer in scope to the opulent LA easy listening and classic West Coast singer-songwriter fare that the singer has made her own since her first major label single, “Slow”, blew up in 2010.Born Sarah Joyce in Islamabad in 1979 to a large British family, she found she was the result of an affair between her mother and their Pakistani cook. The death of her mother in 2003 affected her profoundly and, when she attempted to track her blood Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person testimonials will disappear into a past.So it was more than fitting that Touched by Auschwitz should see historian Laurence Rees (whose past films like The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are as authoritative as they come) following the lives of six survivors through to the present day, examining not least Read more ...