America
Boyd Tonkin
Where do you draw – how do you draw? – a credible line between jazz and “classical” music in 20th-century America? With the reliably boundary-busting Britten Sinfonia, trumpeter Alison Balsom mixed and matched works from different formal lineages in her packed programme at Milton Court, “An American Rhapsody”. From Stravinsky and Ives to Gershwin and Miles Davis, open-minded and big-hearted dialogue blossomed, led by the sure, sweet and versatile voice of her own “genre-defying instrument” – as she called it in one of the informal chats with conductor Scott Stroman that threaded the items Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A classic specimen of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school, Bruised is Halle Berry’s directorial debut. It was back in 2002 that Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and Bruised suggests that, at 55, she may have found a way to sustain a career in Hollywood long after the age when the industry likes to throw its leading women on the scrapheap.She plays Jackie Justice, a successful MMA fighter (that’s Mixed Martial Arts, otherwise known as cage fighting) whose career has disastrously stalled as her personal life has fallen apart. We meet her while she’s living in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell has flown under the radar since he made his name with the Cassavetes-vibed 1992 New York comedy In the Soup. He recently explained that his career was sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who was jealous, Rockwell suspects, of his close friendship with Quentin Tarantino. The intervening years haven’t been fallow, but Rockwell’s 10th feature, the lyrical childhood mini-odyssey Sweet Thing (2020), represents a major comeback.Rockwell's revival began with 2013’s hour-long Little Feet, made for $11,000 and starring his kids Lana (b. 2003) and Nico Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Iliza Shlesinger is an American writer, performer and presenter whose film work includes roles in Pieces of a Woman and Good on Paper, the latter which she also wrote and produced. She's also an established stand-up comic, with five Netflix specials to her name. For her latest stand-up show, Back in Action, she was on a fleeting visit to London as part of an international 70-date tour, delayed by COVID, before she performs some dates in the US.From the off her performance was full of energy, with lots of adroit physical comedy – two standouts being how a woman taking off her bra looks like Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
‘Night, Mother remains a play of piercing pessimism, something that’s not necessarily the same as tragedy, though the two often run congruently. The inexorability of the development of Marsha Norman’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner certainly recalls the tragic arc of drama, but its sense of catharsis remains somehow limited.The cathartic impact for the audience is incremental, and it is absolutely felt in the closing minutes of Roxana Silbert’s production for the Hampstead Theatre – ‘Night, Mother received its British premiere there back in 1985, and it’s revived now as part of the theatre’s 60th Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be yearning for a trawl through Netflix or Walter Presents.Created by Simon Kinberg and Davis Weil, with a reported budget of $200m, Invasion seeks to depict the consequences of its unearthly incursion by showing the varying fates of a contrasting group of characters. In Afghanistan, we hook up with a squad of US soldiers led by bullish, rifle-waving Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey’s eighth album would tell her story “and pretty much nothing else”, she teased, as her planned, near instant follow-up to Chemtrails Over the Country Club slipped back from spring to autumn. Del Rey has often claimed autobiography at the heart of her artful glamour, flesh and blood behind the celluloid poise, the ad man’s daughter, metaphysics student and Williamsburg singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant still writing intently beneath the film star veneer.Chemtrails’ masterful opener “White Dress” certainly turned a teenage waitress job into a transcendently glowing snapshot of an Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
From underground curiosity to cult icon, now label head and superstar, Atlanta’s Young Thug has continued to reinvent himself, as well as rap at large, for the better part of a decade. After being announced over two years ago, his new album Punk is finally here.It’s an album which sounds like previous Young Thug eras in conversation with each other. There are weird and heavy beats which could be taken straight from 2019’s So Much Fun, but mostly there are sombre plucked guitars, reminiscent of 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls. It’s enjoyable but, unlike Thug himself, kind of predictable. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I can't sleep": So goes the fateful opening line of White Noise, the Suzan-Lori Parks play disturbing enough to spark many a restless night in playgoers who are prepared to take its numerous provocations on board. To do so requires various suspensions of disbelief, one quite substantial, on the way to a finish that, in Polly Findlay's Bridge Theatre UK premiere, comes at least 20 minutes earlier than I recall from this play's Off Broadway debut in spring 2019. Comparative speed (the play still feels overwritten) isn't all that's changed in the trans-Atlantic crossing of this portrait of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for time alone with Frances, an attractive young widow who’s just moved back into town.Important facts become quickly apparent: Russ resents his long-suffering wife, Marion, and he has suffered a humiliation at the hands of Rick Ambrose, the groovier pastor (“a little black-moustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves”) who leads Crossroads, the church’s youth group. Ambrose’s way is less God, more sensitivity session, and it goes down a storm with the kids. Even worse, Russ’s teenage children, Becky Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Its more than 50 years since Yoko Ono first presented Mend Piece at the Indica Gallery, London in the exhibition through which she met John Lennon. The piece is currently being revisited at the Whitechapel Gallery and, in the intervening years, its meaning has subtly shifted. Strewn over four tables are dozens of broken cups and saucers along with everything you need to attempt a botched repair – glue, sellotape, scissors and string.According to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired using lacquer mixed with precious metals like gold and silver that are clearly visible Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last year a stoneware jar by David Drake sold at auction for $1.3 million. It fetched this extraordinary price because of its history: Drake was a slave on a plantation in South Carolina who not only made fabulous pots, but dared sign and date them at a time when it was illegal for slaves to read and write. Needless to say, his descendants haven’t received a penny in royalties from sales of his work.Theaster Gates includes one of Drake’s storage jars in his Whitechapel Gallery exhibition A Clay Sermon; on it is written “Jan 13 1862. I am Dave” – evidence of Drake’s defiance as well as Read more ...