America
aleks.sierz
This venue continues its promotion of American drama with another prize-winning play from across the pond. Hot on the heels of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, with its casting of Emila Fox, comes this play by David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his critically acclaimed Rabbit Hole, which also earned several Tony Award nominations and a film adaptation with Nicole Kidman. For Good People, Hampstead has tempted national treasure and Olivier Award-winning actress Imelda Staunton to play the lead.This is that rare thing — an American play about classHer character Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“Follow the instructions."David Lean’s suggestion to a costume designer shows the importance of the script – a film’s “recipe”. This is why the Oscar categories for Best Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay are so important: without great bones, we'd have nothing good to watch.In the second part of our Oscars preview, here are our predictions and picks for the screenplay gongs, alongside our look at the scene-stealers in the supporting acting categories.ADAPTED SCREENPLAYIn the Adapted Screenplay category, the leading nominee is, as expected, John Ridley’s superb script for 12 Years a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You could boil down the content of this new HBO import to an info-bite that reads "two detectives hunt serial killer in Louisiana", but that wouldn't give you the faintest inkling of the pace, mood or texture of what's shaping up as a remarkable chunk of television. You may find it a little slow, and the Deep South accents sometimes cry out for explanatory surtitles, but you're liable to find it seeping into your consciousness like a troubling dream you can't shake off.Unusually for an American show, this eight-part series has been authored solely by its creator, Nic Pizzolatto, and is helmed Read more ...
fisun.guner
The National Gallery recently embarked on a first: they acquired their first American painting. Men of the Docks, 1912, (main picture) may not be George Bellows’ most famous or best-regarded work; nonetheless, it’s a gritty and beautifully observed slice of New York life among the city’s dockside workers.“In this country, we have no need of art as culture,” Bellows’ former tutor, the artist Robert Henri, pronounced. “No need of art for poetry’s sake….What we do need is art that expresses the spirit of the people today.” Bellows absorbed Henri’s lesson and absorbed it well, at least during the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Bloomfield: From his Head to his Heart to his HandsMike Bloomfield was undoubtedly one of rock’s greatest and most distinctive guitarists. He was also wildly erratic and did much to undermine what others saw in him. He died at age 37 in 1981. He had been a drug addict and self-mythologist. The records he left behind were many, and he never landed in one band or place for long. Crucial to Bob Dylan turning his back on the acoustic, he was on stage with him when he went electric at Newport in 1965. His stinging tones helped define “Like a Rolling Stone”. Dylan told Bloomfield not Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
José Padilha’s glossy reimagining of RoboCop is entertaining but mostly forgettable. Geared towards the profitable 12A market, its good looking but illogical action sequences are no replacement for the grimy, grubby and magnificently realised dystopian world from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 scathing satire.Just like Verhoeven did back in the 1980s, Padilha is making his way into the Hollywood arena thanks to his adept hand at fast paced action sequences, which can be witnessed in his superb Elite Squad films. Unlike in Verhoeven’s version however, the screenplay penned by newcomer Joshua Zetumer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The annual reappearance of The Good Wife is always a cause for celebration. Why they persistently park it in the twilight zone of More4 remains one of the enduring mysteries of our era, since it's one of the best shows on TV, but the only question that need concern us is: will season five be as good as the ones that came before? On the evidence of this opener, yes indeed, so much so that American critics have been hailing it as the best ever,Change is in the air at Chicago's upmarket law firm Lockhart Gardner. Not only does Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) have to be mindful of her new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After his outsized triumph as conman Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle, Christian Bale is gaunt and stringy again (Jennifer Lawrence will be happy to hear) in this minor-keyed, intensely atmospheric story of two brothers in an America that time forgot. It's set in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, a ghost town all but abandoned by its devastated steel industry. "Born down in a dead man's town", as the Boss put it in "Born in the USA". As the camera roams over its poor, pinched houses in the rain, you know nothing good is about to happen here.Bale plays Russell Baze, still clinging to his job at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is the fate of political leaders to be played by actors. In the circumstances Richard Nixon hasn’t been dealt a bad hand. He has been portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, by Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon on stage and screen and by tall handsome Christopher Shyer in Clint Eastwood’s J Edgar. But towering over them all is Harry Shearer, who has been impersonating Tricky Dicky since Nixon was actually president.Shearer is best known in the UK for his voicing of Montgomery Burns and other characters in The Simpsons, and for Spinal Tap’s priapically challenged bass player Derek Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Assuming you care at all, your favourite incarnation of Tom Clancy's industrious CIA agent Jack Ryan is probably Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Before him came Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, and afterwards there was Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears.But Affleck's Ryan was a dozen years ago, enough of a gap to give fresh-faced new boy Chris Pine (who has also rebooted Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk) some space to put his personal stamp on the role. This new episode is a kind of Ryan prequel, a story created by screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It was Benjamin Franklin who said "money has never made man happy...the more of it one has the more one wants," and there is no shortage of examples of boundless greed and how an abundance of cash can upturn and empty lives. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, a former stockbroker convicted of fraud, The Wolf of Wall Street gives us one such example. This is Martin Scorsese's 23rd narrative feature and with it he proves that, at 71, he's inarguably still got it, with a flamboyantly immoral tale very much for and of our age, which is apparently the most effing foul-mouthed film in the Read more ...