America
graham.rickson
A United Artists studio executive was treated to a pre-release screening of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter in 1955. His damning response was, “it’s too arty.” The studio showed little interest in promotion and it was deemed a flop. Laughton, stung by his directorial debut’s muted reception, never directed another film. A sorry tale, but at least the studio didn’t butcher the finished product à la Magnificent Ambersons. Laughton and screenwriter James Agee’s faithful transcription of Davis Grubb’s source novel holds up superbly well as thriller, fairy tale and gothic horror. The Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A revival of a multi-award winning musical, with a big star or two, may look like a safe choice to re-open London’s largest theatre, the Coliseum, but there was a tingle of jeopardy in the air, exemplified when the show catches you by surprise, the curtain rising when (surely) people remain in the bar? And then you notice (for the last time - hurrah!) that all those seats all around you are deliberately left unoccupied and the game’s afoot. And besides, we'd already been given a glossy, garish programme: the West End is back, baby! At first with this new reiteration of the Broadway Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She became one of the most successful pop stars in history, but Britney Spears has also become a paradigm of the horrors and pitfalls of life in the white heat of showbusiness. This new documentary by Samantha Stark (made by the New York Times) tracks Britney’s path from her upbringing in the small Bible Belt town of Kentwood, Louisiana through her precocious progress from an 11-year old star of TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club – also featuring Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera – to monster-selling hits like "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!.. I Did It Again". But then come Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The general uptick of late in film versions of stage musical hits continues apace with In the Heights, which, to my mind anyway, is far more emotionally satisfying and visually robust onscreen than it was on Broadway, where it won the 2008 Tony for Best Musical. (An Off West End version had multiple iterations, as well.) Already mired in controversy about the alleged "colourism" of its creators and the fact that its opening weekend underperformed at the box office, Jon M Chu's adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's pre-Hamilton vehicle for himself survives such discussion and transcends it, too. Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
There’s something refreshing about fiction you can easily trace back to the question “what if?” What if this or that existed? What would happen? What could? That question doesn’t have to send you down memory lane, wondering about roads not taken, or into the future, into space. You can stay right here, more or less in the present, in charted territory. And arguably, to adventure there (here) takes as much, if not more of what you might need elsewhere: bravery, imagination, wit, honesty. Better yet, fidelity – to the way things are: not only what could happen but does. It requires a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Fourteen months after the Manhattan premiere of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place Part II – and three years after his taut, spare original spawned the most suspenseful sci-fi horror franchise of recent times – the movie is setting post-pandemic box office records. Not unexpectedly, it finds the reduced Abbott family still in desperate survival mode in decimated upstate New York.Forced to abandon their farm for hopefully safer waters, newly widowed Evelyn (Emily Blunt), her deaf 17-year-old daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds, who herself is deaf), and her panicky adolescent Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the last series of Line of Duty having left portions of its viewership dismayed and disgruntled, one consolation prize has been the way the many fine qualities of HBO’s Mare of Easttown (on Sky Atlantic) have seen it promoted it into the “unmissable” bracket. It isn’t anything like LoD, of course, and indeed the way it has stepped nimbly around the conventional pigeonholes of thriller or cop-show is one of the keys to its success. The series even ended after a thoroughly unconventional seven episodes.But perhaps seven was the perfect number, not too short but not lumbering interminably Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 2021 is like taking a trip in a time machine and stepping out into a totally different world. The 1982 teenage comedy marked the debut of director Amy Heckerling (who would go on to make Clueless) and writer Cameron Crowe (who later wrote and directed Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous). Rolling Stone journalist Crowe was 22 and went undercover, impersonating a student at a notoriously wild high school in California to write about kids taking drugs, partying, and having sex. It’s hard to imagine journalism’s codes of practice allowing Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s something definitely inspiring about producer Sonia Friedman’s decision to reopen one of her prime West End venues with a season, called RE:EMERGE, of three new plays. The first drama is American playwright Amy Berryman’s ambitious debut, Walden, and this will be followed later in June by Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert and then in July by Joseph Charlton’s Anna X. With top directors and excellent casts, this is a vote of confidence in the power of new work from one of our best producers. Berryman’s Walden, for example, is directed by Ian Rickson — who curates the season — and stars the ever Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pop music, like Hollywood, is a dream factory: a place where you can be anything you like, as long as that’s not a middle-aged woman. I’ll hit the last year of my 30s next week, with the number one spot in the country held by a woman who has her driving licence but isn’t old enough to drink. Cannot relate. In either respect. Thank god, then, for the return of Liz Phair.Coming more than a decade since her last album, Soberish is a record with plenty to say. The woman who wrote “Divorce Song” when she was 23 has, in her 50s, written what may be the greatest ever song about divorce: “Spanish Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thirty years since its original release, Jungle Fever appears on Blu-ray for the first time, courtesy of the British Film Institute. Some aspects of the movie have aged well – it’s electrifying to revisit Samuel L Jackson’s breakthrough performance as a crack addict plumbing new depths to feed his habit. But other aspects haven’t fared so well, primarily the script’s sexual politics and the casting of Wesley Snipes as the (anti) romantic male lead.Racial politics are the overt subject of Jungle Fever, a cautionary tale of a black man and a white woman having an affair. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The focal point of Matthew Barney’s Hayward exhibition is Redoubt, a two-and-a-quarter-hour film projected on a giant screen that invites you to immerse yourself in the rugged terrain of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, where he grew up. The entrance ticket allows you to watch the film at home, yet while I was there almost everyone stayed the course, which is remarkable given that there’s no dialogue.It’s winter so everything is deep in snow which makes it difficult for people, dogs and horses to get around. Only the most intrepid are out; there’s a hunter played by Anette Wachter, who is a Read more ...