America
Daniel Baksi
Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens to take his life, Morbius self-enrols in an experimental cure, combining his DNA with that of a vampire bat and so destining himself for a future as a living vampire.Symptoms of Morbius’s newfound condition are as follows: super-human speed, super-human strength, echolocation and, as he ultimately discovers, flight. Morbius, for all intents and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography Scar Tissue, an extreme example of wisdom through sometimes squalid excess, explains a great deal about the Chili Peppers’ mix of priapic lust and wistful romance. The return of guitarist John Frusciante and producer Rick Rubin, ever-presents on all their good albums, signals the band’s retrenchment after an inconsequential decade, Rubin’s usual back to basics MO ensuring that Unlimited Love sounds comfortingly familiar, naturally following on from peaks such as Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991), Californication (1999) and Stadium Arcadium (2006).Opener “Black Read more ...
David Nice
Kudos, first, to Edward Gardner for mastering a rainbow programme of 21st century works in his first season as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor. Three Americans and a Berlin-based Brit, two women composers and two men, one of them a Pulitzer Prize-winning Afro-American who wrote the work in question in his nineties, all had the benefit of committed, clearly well-prepared performances, enthusiastically received by an ideally mixed audience.The concert kicked off a five-day Southbank Centre celebration of new and newish music from around the world, SoundState (though Read more ...
Mason Bates
What do Beethoven and Pink Floyd have in common?Narrative – ingeniously animated by music.From the Ninth Symphony to The Wall, narrative music has brought a new dimension to the forms and genres it has touched.Musical storytelling is on my mind this month as the London Philharmonic Orchestra performs Liquid Interface, my first large-scale exploration of musical narrative in the form of a “water symphony”. Premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2007, the work features watery orchestral textures and electronic sounds that range from field recordings of glaciers calving, to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park arrived at London’s Royal Court like a blazing comet in 2010, a bold kind of satire about race relations that was both sassy and savvy.Now it’s back for a run at the Park Theatre, N1. Twelve years on, we have learnt to don a tin hat and duck whenever somebody enters the minefield of other people’s sensitivities. But Norris’s play is a reminder that it’s possible to barrel straight into no-man’s land and lob grenades from there at targets on all sides, to hilarious and provocative effect.The piece is structured like a Rohrschach blot: two acts set a half-century Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ti West’s slyly self-referential horror film about a Texan porn shoot subverts expectations. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre/Debbie Does Dallas genre mash-up promised by the premise, pumping out head-spinning sex and gore, is in fact a muted exercise in craft, with memorable ideas on desire.From the moment blonde Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) steps out of the Bayou Burlesque club beneath a mural of an alligator snapping at a bikini bottom, and the camera pans to the industrial estates and belching refineries behind this particular American dream, West wittily depicts sex as small-town escape and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Patricia Highsmith must be spinning in her grave. This ridiculously incompetent adaptation of her 1957 crime novel lacks all suspense or credibility. It’s hard to believe that Adrian Lyne, responsible for huge box-office hits like the provocative thriller Fatal Attraction and the dodgy but watchable 9 ½ Weeks and Indecent Proposal, could make something quite so feeble as Deep Water.The movie was originally intended for a cinema release, but COVID-19 provided the perfect excuse for shuffling it out for streaming in the hope that its stars would draw an audience at home. Deep Water Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The relative runt of the Godfather litter was hacked out in a Las Vegas casino, as Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo worked up scenarios for an assignment taken on for the money. Coppola the inveterate cinematic gambler, crippled by the dashing of his indie mogul dream with Zoetrope Studios, could no longer refuse Paramount’s sequel offer. Now that he’s reframing this renamed, subtle yet radical re-edit of The Godfather Part III as “a summing up, almost an illumination of what the first two films mean”, its ignoble, desperately hot-housed origin should be remembered. Much feels forced, as Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Had he never written a note of his own, George Walker would still have left a record of trailblazing achievements. Born in Washington DC in 1922, he studied piano at Oberlin College and the Curtis Institute (the conservatoire that notoriously rejected Nina Simone). He was taught by Rudolf Serkin and, in 1945, debuted as a soloist first at the New York Town Hall and then, playing Rachmaninov’s third concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.Needless to say, neither Town Hall nor Philadelphians had ever seen an African American soloist before. By 1946, however, Walker had Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
"Get into the scene late and get out early." So wrote David Mamet in his 1992 book On Directing Film, and Southwark Playhouse, among London's most charmingly eclectic theatres, has delved very early into Mamet's canon, reviving his 1977 play The Woods – a two-hander not seen in London since 1996. While the play revolves around a dynamic that is hardly obscure – man and woman's ultimate incompatibility – a spirited production can't disguise why we will see plenty more of American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross before this Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the John Ford scholar Tag Gallagher quietly observes in the penetrating – and deeply moving – video essay he contributes to Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray disc of Ford’s 1953 masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright. It’s good advice. There’s plenty in the movie for cancel culture advocates to sink their teeth into – should they be so blinkered. Gallagher asserts here, as he did in his book on Ford, that the film might well have been titled Intolerance, such is its condemnation of bigotry.The Sun Shines Bright, which Ford claimed in 1968 was his favourite of his films Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Pattinson’s Batman is lean and aquiline, his Bruce Wayne an obsessive recluse. Matt Reeves’ reimagining is similarly handsome and cerebral, much like his genre craft on the Planet Of The Apes franchise. But superhero reboots have become tellingly frequent, as if being jolted back to life by increasingly desperate electro-shocks. For all the consummate care expended on The Batman’s beautiful surface, its substance subsides through familiarity.We’re in Batman’s second year on the job, no one having the stomach for another origin yarn (though you can’t help thinking – not for the last Read more ...