America
Markie Robson-Scott
Fern (a luminous Frances McDormand) used to work in HR. Now, aged 62, she’s harvesting sugarbeets, hauling rocks, cleaning toilets in a trailer park and doing shifts in an Amazon warehouse. And she’s living out of her camper van, a shabby, lovingly restored RV she calls Vanguard. “I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,” she says, driving through vast Western landscapes under spectacular skies.Chloé Zhao’s hypnotically beautiful, multi-award-winning third feature builds on the same docu-fiction MO as her extraordinary The Rider (2017) and Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) where she used non- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Zack Snyder’s CV includes such fantastic fare as Watchmen, 300, Man of Steel and his career-launching zombie-fest Dawn of the Dead, so who better to helm a zombies-in-Vegas heist movie? Army of the Dead has suffered an interminable gestation, spending years in limbo with Warner Bros before being picked up by Netflix, but it’s a riotous ride and was well worth waiting for. Even at two and half hours long.It all kicks off when a US Army convoy ferrying a high-security cargo from the notorious Area 51 is involved in a road accident in Nevada. The cargo, a ferocious zombie, escapes, and infects a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many a director might have considered that televising Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad was impossible, but Barry Jenkins, Oscar-winning director of Moonlight, has proved it can be done. His 10-part series for Amazon Prime is a remarkable achievement in its authorial depth and cinematic scope. The only cloud on its undoubtedly award-winning horizon is the fact that large chunks of it are almost too horrific to watch. The cast found some of the material so disturbing that Jenkins had a mental health counsellor on set.Traumatised responses were probably inevitable, given that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the UK, we usually get a peek inside The Villages in Florida every four years, when intrepid reporters take to their golf carts in the retirement community to test the water in presidential elections among its 132,000 residents. Their views provide a useful guide as to where the silver-haired vote stands.And on first sight, this “Disneyland for retirees” may seem like Nirvana, especially as one of the first people featured in Lance Oppenheim's quietly poetic and touching film says: “You come here to live, not to die” and another posits: “It's like going to college. Everybody can be who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Anxiety, injustice and desperate disorder are the themes of these six disparate noirs. In one, The Dark Past, Lee J. Cobb’s psychiatrist draws a crude diagram of the brain with a line dividing the conscious and unconscious, and these films visit the choppy depths under the surface calm of suburban Cold War America, its terrors in the night.Venturing beyond the obvious classics, Columbia Noir #3 shows the range and intensity of Hollywood’s response to the post-war malaise. Often blighted by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-communist witch-hunts, and increasingly shot in real Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
From her indie roots to the Grammy-winning angular art-rock of her self-titled 2014 album and the new wave glam of MASSEDUCTION, St Vincent has refused to allow her work to be pigeonholed. Her latest pivot draws from the grit and glamour of early 1970s New York: pay phones and back-street movie theatres, smoking in bars, cheap vinyl records, never writing your screenplay, last night’s high heels in a dirty subway car.It works. It always works because, however radical the so-called reinvention, hers is a collection of interests and inspirations you can imagine in the same space: just behind Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Throw in footage of film adaptations of their work, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more, and you have a riveting mosaic of two men marginalised by society who came to occupy pride of place in the cultural zeitgeist. It's not only Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens is not only prolific, multi-talented and wide-ranging in his experimentation, but he never fails to make interesting work. He’s undoubtedly one of the giants of American contemporary music. His originality and creative risk-taking have led to him being one of the most underrated artists of his time. His latest album – over two hours of instrumental composition and made during lockdown – is a daring, profound and fiercely personal requiem to his recently-deceased father.Convocations, hot on the heels of Stevens' s previous album The Ascension (2020) is a lengthy suite of both Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read our review of the season finale hereDark family dramas set in unglamorous, unprosperous communities in the north-east of the USA have become a genre unto themselves. One thinks here of the work of writers such as Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone), and maybe Chuck Hogan and The Town for good measure.New from HBO, Mare of Easttown (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a fine addition to this lineage, thanks to a superb and surprising lead performance from Kate Winslet and excellent work from the show’s writer and creator Brad Ingelsby ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There are moments in Straight Shooting (1917), the first feature directed by John (then "Jack") Ford, when its star Harry Carey (1878-1947) exudes a naturalism that the famous Western actors who followed him, most notably John Wayne, strove to emulate.When Carey's character Cheyenne Harry is looking confidingly at the camera, his surly almost-smile is millimetre-perfect in its grudgingness and sense of the ironic. His unsteadiness and glazed expression when drunk convey that bizarre mix of hyper-selfawareness and dimmed comprehension everyone knows when they've had two or three too many. In Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After winning a couple of Baftas, and with five nominations at next week’s Oscars, Promising Young Woman comes surging in on the crest of a wave. Emerald Fennell, already known for acting roles in The Crown and Call the Midwife and for showrunning series two of Killing Eve, hits it out of the park here as writer and first-time director, and she’s the first British female to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. She’s brilliantly supported by Carey Mulligan’s sizzling lead performance.Promising Young Woman isn’t easy to pigeonhole, but that’s part of its tantalising allure. It’s by turns a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the wilderness. “Men will never be my owners again.”The distinctive minor-key arpeggiated riff that punctuates the track was, says Dozier, “originally supposed to be a worship song”. Dozier grew up up in Dothan, Alabama – a city named for the biblical location where Joseph’s brothers threw him into a well before selling him into slavery – in a strict Read more ...