America
David Nice
Looking for a sparkly operatic musical, well sung and played, slick and saturated in a range of mainstream styles that stop short in the year the movie masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life was released, 1946? Then Jake Heggie’s 2016 confection may be for you. One thing’s for sure, though: it may be trying to do something different from the Capra classic, and it’s welcome to have the Bailey family as African Americans, but this isn't a patch on the rather more layered film.Endemic of the problem is that Capra’s crumpled, blue-eyed angel hoping to gain wings from helping a human in trouble has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You expect gross-out movies to send your hands flying in front of your eyes. But Luca Guadagnino's ludicrous Bones and All is not just gory but grossly sentimental, too. Reuniting the Italian director with the star of his breakout hit Call Me By Your Name, the film finds a physical embodiment of its title in the wraithlike Timothée Chalamet, playing a cannibal-minded drifter who beneath his skin and bones is just a lost soul at heart. That it takes over two hours to get to that preordained fact is reason enough to forego a movie that wants to be provocative and edgy but merely Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.For those who can’t see it from their seats, the playwright has usefully included a line about this being a “sawdust restaurant”. If you happen to notice that there are oyster shells scattered over it too, and nod in recognition, you will probably feel less adrift given that the oyster shells and sawdust reference comes Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
On April Fool’s Day, in 1978, the godmother of American punk, Patti Smith, jumped offstage at the Rainbow Theatre in London halfway through a version of “The Kids Are Alright” and started dancing in the crowd. Her vertiginous feat was also a leap of the imagination, a typical punk act that seemed to collapse the distance between performer and audience.The kids were definitely all right with this sudden unexpected proximity to their idol – and I can say that because I was one of them. Indeed I remember being struck by the way her guitarist and collaborator Lenny Kaye seamlessly picked up the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even the jolliest number on Micah P Hinson’s new album, a banjo-pickin’, wistful campfire jig entitled “Waking on Eggshells”, has him singing, “Give me a knife, I’ll show you my vein”, alongside offers to “blow out your brain” with various firearms, and proclamations he “must be going insane”.If the listener is after jollity, best look elsewhere then, but those searching for world-weary Americana could do worse than settle down, lonely and broken, with these 10 tracks from the Texas-raised singer.Hinson has released numerous albums since he appeared 20 years ago. He has a penchant for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Two-percent movie-making and 98% hustling,” Orson Welles sighed not long before his death in 1985. “It’s no way to spend a life.” His 1962 film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was his penultimate full-scale completed feature, only 1965’s Chimes at Midnight similarly allowing him a regular director’s resources during his last quarter-century (the fraudulent documentary F for Fake from 1973 was later conjured from scraps with filmic legerdemain).Kafka’s paranoid tale, written as World War One began, and predictive of the totalitarian mindset which would murder his own family in the Holocaust, sees Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer and director Hugo Blick isn’t afraid of getting stuck into some knotty and morally complicated issues, whether it’s Middle Eastern politics (The Honourable Woman) or the Rwandan genocide (Black Earth Rising), but perhaps he wouldn’t be your automatic go-to guy for Westerns. Nevertheless, here he is, giving it some high-plains-drifter in a baleful tale of revenge, violence and twists of fate.It’s 1890, and we first meet Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) in the prairie flatlands of Kansas. The landscape is gaunt and bleak, the view only interrupted by a rickety wooden hotel which looks Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Call Jane could not be more timely, just as the American midterms loom and liberals reel from the overturning of legislation that allow women access to safe and legal abortions in the US. This well-crafted drama tells the true story of a group of women in 1960s Chicago who ran a secret organisation that provided almost 12,000 terminations when to do so was a criminal offence. Elizabeth Banks plays Joy, a housewife devoted to her daughter and lawyer husband, living a perfect suburban life reminiscent of The Graduate and The Stepford Wives. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Causeway is being heralded as Jennifer Lawrence’s return to the kind of low-budget, low-key films that first brought her to critics’ attention, before the megastardom of The Hunger Games franchise. It’s also the first film that Lawrence has produced, with theatre director Lila Neugebauer taking the helm. The actor-producer has talked in interviews about the evolution of Causeway; filming started in the summer of 2019 but stopped by covid, it didn’t resume until two years later. In the interim, Lawrence had married and become pregnant. It’s mildly intriguing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Taylor Swift’s transitions have become imperious, from the woody hush of her collaborations with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Folklore and Evermore, to the remade reclamations of her early work. Working at pace, she has assembled an impregnable coalition of critical acceptance and creative range.Her contemporary country roots remain in her focus on relatable personal stories, pushed now into a hyper-realm of total fame and universally pored-over relationships, dropped like paper trails in her lyrics. She confesses with wry assertion, a female star taking everything in her messy stride. Like Read more ...
India Lewis
Cormac McCarthy’s first books in over a decade are coming out this year, a month apart from one another. The Passenger tells the story of deep-sea diver Bobby Western, desperately in love with his perfect, beautiful, wildly intelligent dead sister, Alicia. Then, Stella Maris is her story, named after the asylum to which she commits herself.The Passenger is classic McCarthy fare: totally abstruse, excellently descriptive, and frustratingly digressive. It has elements of many of his previous novels, the strongest being the narrative of the perpetually wandering anti-hero. Western is a very Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s the second night of a four-night run at the London Palladium of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour – no other Dylan jaunt has taken an album for its title – and it begins with a blast of symphonic violence from the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The house lights fade to black, the symphony segues into a modal tune-up on stage, Dylan and his four-piece – second guitarist Bob Britt is not here tonight – barely visible in silhouette.And then it begins in a flurry of piano keys and guitar, the stage becoming eerily lit from below, and Dylan leans in to a song from the early 1970s, “ Read more ...