America
Adam Sweeting
Netflix can’t get enough of Ryan Murphy, whose list of productions with the super-streamer includes Halston, Ratched and recent hit Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Now here he is again with The Watcher, a teasing little mystery based on a true story about a couple moving into their dream home in New Jersey only to be confronted with anonymous threats and hair-raising goings-on.Murphy’s seven-episode version is a mix of haunted-house chiller, Polanski-style horror and domestic drama, as well as (strangely) a kind of essay on obsessive, nimby-ish property ownership. Dean and Nora Brannock ( Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out.Made by the veteran arts documentarian Phil Grabsky for the Exhibition on Screen series, the film features undated on-camera interviews with Hopper and his wife. How difficult would it have been to caption them with a date and a source? And despite following a conventional chronological structure – birth to death – we don’t get much sense of when Hopper Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here.Four years after Michael Myers’ bloody Halloween return, Laurie Strode (Curtis) is healed enough to be bashing out a trite survivors’ memoir, and bonding with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Mabichak, filmed with Green’s customary lustrous devotion to youthful female beauty). A spectacular pre-credits sequence meanwhile introduces Corey (Rohan Campbell, pictured below with Mabichak), whose typically catastrophic spell Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American Hustle is carried by an enviable cast and benign, off-kilter charm.It's 1933, and Bert (Christian Bale) is a Catholic-Jewish doctor with a glass eye helping fellow traumatised Great War veterans in New York. His veteran best friend, lawyer Harold (John David Washington), asks him to autopsy their beloved commanding officer, whose daughter (Taylor Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter and showrunner Steven Moffat is renowned for some of his work, especially Sherlock, but other stuff not so much (I direct you towards Dracula or The Time Traveler’s Wife). When the history is written, Inside Man is liable to languish at the dog’s-breakfast end of the Moffat canon.There used to be a TV cooking show where contestants had to somehow create a meal from a random batch of ingredients they found in the fridge – a pineapple, a pork chop, a crumpet and a jar of mayonnaise, perhaps. Inside Man (BBC One) looked as if it was similarly devised as a kind of brain-teaser. How Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Unless you’re one of the infamous 1%, you might be forgiven for recently spending a bit of time searching for a booster to reinvigorate your mojo before a seriously difficult winter kicks in. Well, assuming that your electricity supply hasn’t already been cut off by profiteering greed heads, the Bobby Lees’ new album might just do the trick.There’s nothing like raucous and fiery rock’n’roll to replenish your soul and the Bobby Lees have enough of that for it to be prescribed by the NHS. In fact, kicking off with its raucous title track indicates just how Bellevue is going to go and it’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an atrocity – a ghoulish biopic of Marilyn Monroe that luxuriates in her maltreatment and misery, culminating in protracted images of the star’s lonely death from barbiturate pills distractedly swallowed like candies and washed down with Scotch in her Los Angeles bungalow.Ana de Armas’s expressions too often make Monroe a rabbit in the headlights, but that’s writer-director Dominik's fault. Whether the movie’s Monroe is on or off camera, De Armas speaks with that breathy undulating voice of incredulity Monroe impersonators use, but her real voice was softer and more Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can a play peak too soon? That's the quandary that attends the Old Vic airing of Eureka Day, Jonathan Spector's on-point if overextended comedy that was written prior to the pandemic but has absolutely come into its own just now. A skewering of liberal pieties that puts one in mind of a fellow theatrical satirist like Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park), Eureka Day takes few prisoners on the way to a flat-seeming ending.But Katy Rudd's production, featuring Helen Hunt (pictured below) in a notably unstarry London stage debut, is lucky enough before that to have sent the audience into the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When Sidney Poitier died in January at the age of 94, the obituaries were warm and respectful to the pioneering black movie star. Now comes Oprah Winfrey’s nearly two-hour tribute, complete with famous interviewees, some great movie clips, and intriguing archival material. It’s a little on the adoring side (producer Winfrey cries on camera), but director Reginald Hudlin does an excellent job at covering the ups and occasional downs of Poitier’s long and fascinating career. His parents were poor farmers in the Bahamas. Poitier recounts how he was born two months prematurely and not Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Across the pond Winslow Homer is a household name; in his day, he was regarded as the greatest living American painter. He was renowned especially for his seascapes and his most famous painting, The Gulf Stream, 1899/1906 (main picture) features in the National Gallery’s retrospective.A small boat with a broken mast bobs about on stormy waters, at the mercy of the waves. Clinging to the deck is a lone sailor, a black man desperately scanning the horizon for help. He needs it; the sail lies in a useless heap and nothing else is on board beside a few sugarcanes. As if to emphasise the extremity Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A tender love story has arrived at the Kings Head theatre from the US, where its author, Tanya Barfield, is an award-winning playwright for both television and theatre. The plot is simple: two women — one white, one Black — meet in an office where one is a supervisor, the other a science teacher turned temp, and their lives become entwined over the next 25 years.But Barfield mixes things up by structuring the narrative like a jigsaw puzzle. The audience then has to put all the pieces together.The structuring device guarantees a degree of pathos — there’s a poignancy in learning a relationship Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist.From this bedrock of delusional artistic struggle, grotesquerie and hurt, Safdies associate Owen Kline’s debut carves a queasy slice of observational tragicomedy.His milieu is a highly personal comics subculture barely seen in cinema since Crumb, where the likes of Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes (Ghost World) paralleled grunge’s breakthrough by chronicling self- Read more ...