America
Tom Birchenough
One of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Julius Shulman was the subject of a show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this autumn, “Altered States of America”. That title surely alluded to the visual modernism that changed the face of that country over the course of the 20th century, which Shulman, working in close tandem with the architects concerned, captured over a career of almost eight decades, in California especially.Visual Acoustics, Eric Bricker’s documentary about that career, was originally released in 2008, the year before Shulman died, just a year or so short of his Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life was cut tragically short this year from bowel cancer. This adaptation of Wilson’s play is the second in a ten-part cycle that chronicles the Black experience throughout the course of the 20th century. It’s produced by Denzel Washington, who himself starred in Fences, another Wilson play, back in 2016. This chapter focuses on the life of Ma Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After months of watching movies on computer screens, how delightful to have a press screening at the Waterloo IMAX cinema, albeit under Covid restrictions. Not so delightful was the realisation that Wonder Woman 1984 is crying out for some editing shears (151 minutes! Are they serious?), while the uninspired climax that Gal Gadot’s title character spends so long labouring towards really isn't worth the wait.Whereas 2017’s Wonder Woman found World War One mysteriously arriving at the island of Themyscira, mythical home to the Amazon women, this one (again helmed by Patty Jenkins) leaps forward Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Terrence Malick completists might consider this Blu-ray of The New World the dream version. Criterion's three-disc release contains the three different cuts of Malick's 2005 opus, which critics either believe is an incomparable masterpiece or an overly lavish work of self-indulgence.As well as a 4K restoration of the 172-minute version, there’s the 135-minute theatrical cut and the 150-minute first cut. Also included are an on-set documentary and new interviews with the producer, the production designer, the editors, and the stars, all of whom speak reverentially of Malick and made Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which doesn't so much derive suspense from withholding information as revel in an opaque narrative that I, for one, tuned out of well before the close. There's no denying Brosnahan's commitment to material that couldn't be further from her star-making work in TV's The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, but you can only tease a spectator along so far before one's patience Read more ...
Tom Baily
American Utopia is not your average Spike Lee joint. He has teamed up with David Byrne of Talking Heads to make a concert movie based on Byrne’s lauded Broadway show of the same name, which opened in October 2019 in a limited run. After the success, Byrne invited Lee to direct this screen version. Two unlikely titans match, with good results. Byrne hasn’t lost anything of what he always had, and Spike Lee does interesting things with the camera, but it's hard to avoid envying the real audience we see singing and dancing in the grand Hudson Theatre. I wanted to be there.But who wouldn’t? This Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Christmas albums are traditionally, pretty cheesy affairs and Seasonal Shift sees Tex-Mex rockers Calexico join in with the spirit of things, invite a disparate group of friends into the studio and lay the Panela on seriously thick. As well as some original tunes, which often find themselves channelling Roy Orbison at his most family-friendly, there are covers of songs by the Plastic Ono Band and Tom Petty, and even some surprising cultural cross-overs. There’s not too much that actually references a birth in Bethlehem though and sometimes it works and sometimes it really doesn’t. Quite what Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Four Broadway denizens resolve to change the world "one lesbian at a time" in the cheerful if often cheesy The Prom, the film adaptation of a recent Broadway musical that continually reminds you of at least a half-dozen similar titles, almost all of which are better (Hairspray, to name but one). That the film is nonetheless entertaining enough is due to material that wears a generous heart on its sleeve and that wants to reach across the aisle, so to speak, to temper bigotry and small-mindedness with dollops of acceptance and a jazz hand or two.Insofar as the film often feels like a none-too- Read more ...
India Lewis
Don DeLillo’s latest novella, The Silence, has been marketed with an emphasis on its prescience, describing the shocked lacuna of time around a devastating event whose repercussions are yet to be truly felt. It is a compelling short read, but a little bit too pretentious to be read without a certain amount of cynicism (particularly when the characters reel off long, declamatory statements about cryptocurrency).The Silence has echoes of other texts, with two in particular that stand out. The first was DeLillo’s own 1997 behemoth Underworld, with significant ball games being played in both. The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A top-rank cast swims against the tide in Uncle Frank, writer-director Alan Ball's well-intentioned but fatally contrived film that presumably contains more than a trace of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's own past. Telling of a gay southerner called Frank (Paul Bettany) who is called back to his native (and bigoted) roots from the freedom he has found as a university professor in New York, Ball's narrative begins intriguingly before swerving towards implausibility and melodrama that not even the always-terrific Bettany and a distinguished cast can forestall. The film begins as a memory Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Published in June 2016, J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy became a best-seller around the time of that November’s presidential election as people sought to understand why working class whites in the American heartland supported Donald Trump en masse. Vance’s account of his arduous upbringing at the hands of his drug-addicted single mother Bev incorporated his criticisms of the defeatist culture he grew up in. The film version directed by Ron Howard predictably focuses on the domestic upheavals endured by J.D. and his sister Lindsay. The socio-political context is submerged so deeply it’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...