America
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t really want to belong to the Buckley family, a star-crossed dynasty who run their fishing business out of Havenport, North Carolina. As Bree Buckley (daughter of Harlan and Belle) tells recently-discovered family member Shawn, “I wouldn’t wish us on anybody.”The family members all have their problems. For instance, Bree (Melissa Benoist, pictured below) is a recovering (with difficulty) addict, and she’s stricken by the memory of how she inadvertently burned down her home with her young child in it.As it happens, the family fishing operation is struggling to survive, and in order Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Marvel goes back to its origins, gulping the fresh air of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first hit comic The Fantastic Four in 1961. Ignoring recent flop film versions, it revels in a self-contained, space-age world as yet uncluttered with other costumed characters, and heroes who aren’t brooding vigilantes but human beacons of light.We’re on an alternate Earth (isn’t every story?), in a retro-futurist dream of New York in ‘64, four years after scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal, pictured below) flew a pioneering space mission with his pilot friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), wife Sue Storm Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Indigo de Souza, a singer from North Carolina, has established some reputation, mostly in the States, for combining indie, pop and emotionally open lyrical heft. This is her fourth album, but her first on a larger label, Loma Vista (she was previously on Bright Eyes-associated Saddle Creek). On Precipice she lays down a fusion of chart-style femme-pop and heartfelt guitar anthems.It’s usually engaging and sometimes outstanding. Precipice was put together with musician-producer Elliott Kozel, who’s worked with SZA, Billie Eilish’s brother FINNEAS, and others. It has a polish to it – Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Shannon's long legs reach to the stars – or perhaps one should say the moon – in the Almeida's hypnotic revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, the late Eugene O'Neill play that hasn't been seen in London since Kevin Spacey and Eve Best led an Old Vic revival of it in 2006. And Shannon, seen in London early in his career Off West End in Tracy Letts's Bug, makes an occasion of a play that I, for one, am always happy to welcome back to the repertoire.Sure, there will always be those for whom O'Neill goes on too much, and for too long, and who resist the heightened tendency to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.It’s a man’s world in the LAPD, people. She now heads a cold case unit, staffed by a motley group of part-timers and civilians, and one of the first cases it revisits is the unsolved murder of the sister of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A three-century-spanning countdown rapidly ticks to a version of now, and a beaten Superman (David Corenswet) ploughing into Arctic snow. His super-whistle fetches Superdog Krypto to excavate him like a favourite bone, and drag him to crystalline sanctuary the Fortress of Solitude. James Gunn’s vision for this fourth modern cinema Supes and DC Universe launch embraces the character’s simplicity and silliness as Zack Snyder constitutionally couldn’t. But by leaving the familiar origin largely implicit in a tale set three years into Superman’s adventures, the DCU’s hoped for new dawn Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.It remains a curious and unique piece, at once overly familiar (take you pick from Williams, Steinbeck, Miller or even Chekhov as inspirations) but also continually surprising. The songs Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The journey not the destination matters in The Road to Patagonia, an epic pilgrimage of 30,000 miles that, unexpectedly, turns into a love story. Surfer boy and ecologist Matty Hannon grew up in Australia but after reading a book at university about the shamans of Mentawai in western Sumatra he dropped out and went to live with them in the Indonesian rain forest.The prelude to Hannon’s film, which he assembled from 16 years of diary footage, celebrates the tenacity of the Salakirrat family in spite of efforts by politicians and clerics to outlaw their animistic culture: “We tell the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Bob’s not the kind of guy you can say no to,” said Sting, reminiscing about the origins of 1984’s Band Aid charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. “He’s persistent.”He spoke, of course, of Bob Geldof, then best known as the singer with Dublin band the Boomtown Rats, but destined to be remembered as the driving force behind Band Aid and the subsequent massive Live Aid concerts which took place on both sides of the Atlantic in July 1985. Experts believe the shows were watched by 1.9 billion people (onstage at Wembley Stadium, pictured below).The Boomtown Rats had some success on the UK Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Courtauld Gallery’s Abstract Erotic is a delight for two reasons – because an institution that has often seemed locked in the past is now embracing change and also because the sculptures on show are clever, suggestive and subversively funny.For the first time since 1966, the exhibition brings together Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams and Eva Hesse – the three women included by New York critic Lucy Lippard in a show of artists using offbeat materials like plaster, latex, rubber and papier maché. Reacting against the clean lines and sharp edges of the Minimalism currently in fashion, they were Read more ...
Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a characterful, very American blues rock queen
Thomas H. Green
If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio balladry, that somehow works best, and perhaps only, on those endless highways and dusty plains.Tonight she imports that spirit – the best of America at a time when the world is seeing the worst of it – to a 200-year-old hall full of septuagenarians on the British south coast.Raitt plays for an hour-and-a-half and has real presence, a gregarious chatty Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...