America
Adam Sweeting
Strictly Ballroom aside, I’ve never been entirely persuaded by Baz Luhrmann. Once you rip open the plush packaging of his films, you often just find satin and tissue paper inside. Elvis isn’t his worst movie (they can’t take that accolade away from Moulin Rouge!) but it isn’t the monumental ode to a great American legend that one hoped it might have been.Hats off to Luhrmann’s leading man Austin Butler, at least, who makes a heroic stab at stepping into Elvis’s blue suede shoes and Las Vegas jumpsuits. He doesn’t really resemble the King, but with help from lighting, makeup and some jittery, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s great to see August Wilson’s early play – the first of his “Century Cycle”, that remarkable decalogy that explored a century of Black American experience through the prism of the playwright’s native Pittsburgh – back on the London stage. It’s been two decades since it premiered at the National Theatre, winning the 2002 Olivier Best New Play award.Another reason to celebrate is Tinuke Craig’s terrific production at the Old Vic (produced with Leeds Playhouse and Headlong), which gives Jitney an energy and sense of wider perspective that the play, concentrated as it is around a single Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The piercing-eyed German actor Udo Kier is best known for his supporting roles in many high-profile films, including those of Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Fassbinder. In Swan Song, he carries off his first starring role magnificently as wry ex-drag queen and Ohio hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, though the film itself is rather meandering and has mawkish, saccharine moments.Director Todd Stephens (Another Gay Movie; Gypsy 83) based Mr Pat on a real character from his home town of Sandusky, Ohio. The film is a nostalgic journey, looking back at the days before gay dads became a norm (“I Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Franchise burnout continues apace, in this asteroid strike of a finale. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed the previously agile and humane Marvel machine weighed down by plot mechanics and fan service, and this Jurassic Park/World trilogy unification bout proves a pointless, often ponderous 146 minutes. As post-pandemic cinema moves to total dependence on such sequels, their creative entropy could be an extinction event for filmgoing itself.Mainstream cinema has long been based on childhood nostalgia, and is now aimed at adults weened on Jurassic Park, the Star Wars prequels Read more ...
We Own This City, Sky Atlantic review - 'The Wire' creator David Simon is back on the Baltimore beat
Adam Sweeting
It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon.This is not going to be a relaxing or easy watch, and flopping out on the sofa with a large glass of something mellow is not the ideal way Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title The Great Awakening is a metaphor for America’s switch from its previous presidential administration to the current: the arrival of a new era and, with it, a fresh phase of life. Emblematic of this is the xenarthran, a type of armadillo, which lends its name to the album’s third track. Native to South America, it slogs its way into Texas where it deals with a new environment.While Texas outfit Shearwater’s seventh album, the follow-up to 2016’s Jet Plane and Oxbow (there are other, less formal, releases) is chock-full of allusions, the band’s driver Jonathan Meiburg has chosen a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As the pandemic receded, Wilco huddled together in Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio and played country songs, an easefully naturally act as the world around them shook. Though famed for the experimental, eerily timely Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) and the crackling electric contrails of its further-out follow-up A Ghost Is Born (2004), Wilco have often returned to simpler verities.Now their 12th album adds a recognisable branch to Tweedy’s ex-band Uncle Tupelo’s tree, as this founding father revisits Americana: 21 songs framed by steel and acoustic guitar, stripping himself and his country to their Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The 2001 Reese Witherspoon-starring film Legally Blonde, upon which Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s peppy Broadway musical is based, was something of a Trojan horse: a bubblegum-pink comedy with a feminist spine.Now Lucy Moss, co-creator of the juggernaut Six, updates it further with progressive casting choices and a winning kitsch stylisation in this joyous 21st century revival. Malibu princess Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) has it all: president of her sorority at UCLA, and on the cusp of getting engaged to her dream man, Warner Huntington III (Alistair Toovey). But Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Barry Gibb was at the considerable peak of his era-defining songwriting powers when he provided the song that played over the opening titles of the iconic 1978 film, so it's a wise decision by director, Nikolai Foster, to go straight into "Grease is the Word" after a brief prologue.The energetic dancing by the boys and girls of Rydell High, the strength of the harmonies and the warm familiarity of the tune builds two bridges – one back to the movie, the other across the fourth wall. For all its flaws, this new production recognises that, perhaps in big musicals more than any other genre Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with – she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and hit an apple from thirty feet with a knife. Yet in a play that’s so uncompromising it could give Neil LaBute a sprint for his money, what happens on the night of her seventeenth birthday raises questions that tear through the lives of her closest friends for decades.Naomi Wallace’s script burns like ice. It’s a coming-of-age story that asks profoundly uncomfortable questions about money, sex, class and violence. Yet it works because it also makes you Read more ...
David Nice
As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth Langmore, so clever and empathetic that in another life she would have taken wing, as much caught in the web of drug-dealing and cartels as her elders, but still the nearest thing we’re going to get to a moral core among the leading players.You wonder whether the team responsible for Ozark envisaged as big a role for Julia Garner when Ruth first Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in 2011, is a collaboration with the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, a sure-fire fan of African-American church music.It’s a only just more than a decent collection, with a few moments of glory, not least a rocking and rolling version of the classic “You Got to Move”, but there's something a little too efficient rather than ecstatic about it, even if Read more ...