America
Justine Elias
Superhero movies are the nearest equivalent to American holiday parades: they come along with noisy, bright regularity, and crowds either flock to them, many eager persons deep along the sidewalk, or flee to quieter neighbourhoods.The Flash, yet another foray in the DC Comics Universe (the one that contains Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman) is extraordinary only for the pre-release bad press surrounding its star, Ezra Miller, who after brushes with the law in the US and Iceland, announced that they are seeking psychiatric care.As a movie, The Flash turns out to be a mix of adequate, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Groundhog Day, appropriately, is back where it started. The hit film about a TV weatherman’s endlessly reiterated day in small-town USA moved to the Old Vic stage in 2016; but then its progress became bumpy, despite the awards showered on it and its lead, Andy Karl, on both sides of the Atlantic. Karl was injured during a Broadway preview and the show's US tour didn't happen.Leading it again, Karl is still a galvanising force, perpetually in motion and hardly ever offstage. And with Matthew Warchus back in the director’s chair, the piece is as full-on, raucous and tricky as before.Karl’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Set on the lands of the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota, War Pony focuses, in a hazy way, on the lives of 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), who has two toddler sons with two different mothers, and 12-year-old Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) who seems to have no mother at all. Both are struggling to get by. Drugs, violence and chaos rule on the Pine Ridge reservation. The women are mainly exasperated with the men. A poodle called Beast also plays an important role.It’s an extraordinary film: bleak, gritty, tragic, sometimes funny, and a seemingly unlikely directorial debut from actress Read more ...
Tom Carr
In 1995 Dave Grohl returned with a new project and album, called Foo Fighters, following the death of Nirvana band-mate and close friend Kurt Cobain. Given his close connection with Kurt, and his avoidance of the media spotlight, this new album was pored over by many for any reference to Cobain or Nirvana.Fast forward to 2023, Foo Fighters are arguably the pre-eminent rock band with their huge, stadium rock sound infused with punk energy and melodic sensibilities. But they return with a new album following a year of deep, personal hurt once more: long time drummer Taylor Hawkins passed away Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The actress Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character, the real-life American whistleblower Reality Winner, that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the forseeable future.Sweeney’s eyes are big to begin with but they seem to expand as Winner agonizingly bleeds out the truth of the unauthorised action she took to protect democracy during Donald Trump’s presidency; the eyes of Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), one of the two FBI agents grilling Winner, never blink, his stare Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Gardener Narvel (Joel Edgerton) sniffs soil the way Blue Velvet’s Frank inhaled gas, finding erasure and release. Following Ethan Hawke’s priest in First Reformed (2017) and Oscar Isaac’s titular job in The Card Counter (2021), Paul Schrader’s latest driven protagonist verges on absurd, finding solace in pruning before deploying his secateurs with a prior, particular set of skills.Narvel is the head gardener at the plantation-style estate of aristocratic Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). He’s a middle-aged historian and philosopher of horticulture, keeping a journal at a monastic desk. “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke. When he’s called out to investigate a tip-off about a bank heist, he finds himself tumbling down a rabbit-hole where time, space and identity itself all get swirled in a kaleidoscopic blender.Already, things haven’t been going Read more ...
Justine Elias
Wandering the wrecked streets of Memphis in search of blues and rock history, two teenage Japanese tourists debate who and what’s better: Elvis Presley vs. Carl Perkins, the sleek ultramodernity of their hometown Yokohoma vs. the “vintage” charms of a nearly deserted Tennessee train station.He’s cool and poker-faced, she’s sweetly extroverted, but they’re young and in love, and no matter how much they argue, the road-tripping couple (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh) discover America in a way that natives rarely do. And check out an exchange between her and a downtown denizen who asks for a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margaret Simon (a brilliant Abby Ryder Fortson) is 11. What she wants above all is to be “normal and regular like everyone else”. This means getting her period at the right time – “I’d die if I didn’t get it till I was 16,” she tells her mother (Rachel McAdams) – and filling out her Gro-Bra. An only child, she makes God her confidant and asks him to help.Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s charming, atmospheric movie is mainly faithful to Judy Blume’s iconic novel, fans will be relieved to know, though transferring such an interior life on to the screen is by definition problematic. It Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kesha is one of the 21st century’s most characterful pop stars. She’s regularly stepped out of the boxes people have put her in, musically and otherwise. But, even taking into account truly oddball songs such as “Godzilla” (from 2017’s Rainbow), or projects such as working with Flaming Lips, Gag Order, created with cosmic ultra-producer Rick Rubin, is by far her most out-there work. It’s also the sound of a tormented human being.On her first two albums Kesha personified young American women raucously embracing hedonism, breaking out of the cultural straitjackets that had head-melted Britney, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage through the particular prism of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as “Jazz Fest”, which is held on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May. It had a celebratory fiftieth anniversary edition in 2019 before being forced to close for two years by the pandemic.The film does a good job of explaining the festival’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose.The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the Read more ...