America
Jenny Gilbert
Theatres are currently banned from moving scenery and props about on stage and you might expect this to present a major obstacle to a production of The Seven Deadly Sins. How else is the opera’s protagonist to be seen to visit seven American cities, succumbing to a different sin in each? But Opera North’s version of Kurt Weill’s 1933 “sung ballet”, in a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s libretto, a new orchestration for 15 players and with new choreography by director Gary Clarke, has found unlikely inspiration in the restrictions. Even the safe-distancing of cast and orchestra is made to Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“Films are about the mystery of fate or the mystery of faith,” proclaims director William Friedkin in Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest documentary, Leap of Faith. At 84 years old, Friedkin proves himself to be a master of storytelling, not only behind the camera but in front of it, spiritedly discussing the genesis of his horror masterpiece with Philippe.Unlike the Swiss filmmaker’s previous works 78/52, which tackled the shower scene in Pyscho, or Memory: The Origins of Alien, Leap of Faith consists mainly of a single talking-head interview with Friedkin. It could feel like a DVD extra, or a Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Listen to "The Blues are Brewin", "You Better Go Now", or even "I’ll be Seeing You", and you can hear the hurt reverberate in every note Billie Holiday sang. Her voice rang with the wisdom of experience – perhaps too much experience. She lived a wild, impulsive life, until it was cut short by cirrhosis of the liver when she was only 44, handcuffed to a hospital bed with only $700 to her name. Now, director James Erskine offers a fresh, albeit harrowing, insight into the singer’s life with his new documentary Billie. Erskine elegantly demonstrates that while the drink was a problem (as Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Adam (Charlie Plummer) is being tested for glaucoma at the start of Words on Bathroom Walls, the director Thor Freudenthal's adaptation of Julia Walton's 2017 Young Adult novel. In fact, the indrawn teenager is suffering from schizophrenia and will soon embark upon a disorienting sequence of events that finds him on meds and then off again, in and out of school, experiencing bullying from a group of boys and the possibility of romance with an especially clever girl. All the while, the frequently straight-to-camera narration promises that a difficult story is not going to go all Hollywood on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s surprising, perhaps, that the dramatic potential of chess hasn’t been more widely exploited. There was a nail-biting tournament in From Russia with Love, while the knight’s chequerboard struggle with Death was the centrepiece of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In 1972 the game became a proxy for global power politics when Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in Iceland, an event former world champion Garry Kasparov called “a crushing moment in the midst of the Cold War”.But mostly this enigmatic pastime remains the preserve of its devotees, and its labyrinthine and intellectually Read more ...
graham.rickson
A New Century The Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst (Cleveland Orchestra)Have we reached peak box set? This debut release from the Cleveland Orchestra’s own label ups the stakes considerably, an exquisitely designed and engineered construction involving ribbons, silver card and a 150 page booklet. You approach it nervously, with gloves on. Musically, it’s astonishing, the three discs containing six works spread across three centuries, all in recent live performances under long-serving Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. His string orchestra performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
A long shadow looms over Robert Zemeckis’ new take on Roald Dahl’s classic 1980s book The Witches, starring Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway and newcomer Jahzir Bruno. That shadow is cast by Nicholas Roeg’s strange and terrifying 1990 adaptation starring Anjelica Huston, which expertly captured the wicked humour of Dahl’s book. Roeg’s film may have diverted from Dahl’s original plot in some respects, but it shared the author’s peevish delight in terrifying and delighting in equal measure. Zemeckis’ film is a much more bubble-gum affair, made all the worse by an over-zealous Chris Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious. Go to the cinema wanting to be plunged into a fever dream of gothic Americana, replete with glaucous close ups of Elisabeth Moss as a writer wreaking revenge on her unfaithful husband, and you’ll be more than satisfied. But if you’re hoping for a linear narrative that adheres to the actual biography of Shirley Jackson, the artful elliptical editing which blurs elements from her fiction with cherry-picked aspects of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Black people, since the beginning of time, have always made things cool. Jazz, rock ’n’ roll… pick anything from a cultural standpoint and we have always been the arbitrators of cool,” says sports journalist Jamele Hill. “And it was really no different with sneakers.”One Man and his Shoes is not about sneakers, though, so much as the clever marketing campaign that transformed a small American company specialising in running shoes into the global giant, Nike, and the dramatic impact this had on black youth in America.The star of the campaign was basketball super hero, Michael Jordan, except Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a brave film distributor who releases a documentary about an American journalist in the UK at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic, so first salute goes to Eve Gabereau at Modern Films for giving Raise Hell a proper launch. The late Molly Ivins was a hugely popular figure in the US, her witty, acerbic political columns were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, but she’s practically unknown in Britain. It’s impossible to think of an equivalent figure here, unless you imagine The Guardian’s Marina Hyde crossed with Jo Brand.Janice Engel’s highly enjoyable Read more ...
mark.kidel
As he cruises into the autumn of his life, 71 year-old Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, as he's generally known, revisits territory that will sound very familiar to his fans. Perhaps that's what's needed, at this time when those core American values he's sung about with enduring passion seem threatened as never before.There are new songs – like the title track “Letter to You”- that sound quintessential, as if nothing had changed: the trademark twangy guitars, rolling Hammond B Organ and churchy rock’n’roll piano, the romance of Bruce’s sweet desperado voice, wrapped up in a wall of sound that Read more ...