America
Adam Sweeting
As Anthony Joshua’s shock defeat by the unfancied Andy Ruiz Jr suggests, heavyweight boxers ain’t what they used to be. Antoine Fuqua’s sprawling HBO documentary (this was the first of two parts) bangs the point home with its vivid examination of Muhammad Ali, the sport’s all-time greatest exponent, a fighter whose influence stretched way beyond sport into politics, religious faith and racial identity.The boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay was born in Louisville, Kentucky in January 1942. He changed his name after he’d defeated world champion Sonny Liston in 1964 and converted to Islam – Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“When we were brothers we wanted more: more volume, more muscles, us three, us kings.” So begins documentary-maker Jeremiah Zagar’s faithful but watered-down adaptation of Justin Torres’s autobiographical coming-out novel, set in the 1990s.Zagar's first feature film, it stars sweet-faced Evan Rosado as Jonah, the 10-year-old narrator and youngest of the three brothers, all first-time actors giving stand-out performances. The movie lacks the book’s ferocious impact (best not to read it before watching) but, shot on 16mm film, it has a dreamy, lyrical beauty. Zagar cites Ken Loach's early films Read more ...
Matt Henry
When I first read One Night in Miami, I instantly felt a strong connection to the piece and its story. The fact that Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Jim Brown, four iconic black men at the top of their game in 1964, actually hung out in a Miami motel room on the night that Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston was fascinating to me. I had no idea of this encounter and as I read, I could imagine myself watching as a fly on the wall. Stepping back in time, seeing these icons of the Civil Rights Movement brought to life and imagining their experience of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As Martin Scorsese’s new feature film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, hits Netflix and cinemas, and a new 14 CD boxed set enters the official Bootleg Series, theartsdesk talks exclusively to Scarlet Rivera, the violinist on Desire and the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975 and 1976, about her experiences of encountering, recording and touring with Dylan.I wrote to Scarlet Rivera via her website, expecting only the outside chance of a reply, because few who have worked and spent time with Dylan tend to open up about their experiences in public. I stressed my interest in the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from other shows. Casual fans may be content with the excellent 2 CD Rolling Thunder set issued back in the Noughties; collectors, however, will be clearing shelf room to set it alongside the rest of an increasingly cyclopean Bootleg Series. The rehearsals, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard, and finally fruitless to attempt to describe Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic in conventional terms of genre: combining elements of dance and theatre, this visceral solo performance transcends both. It engages with frantic movement at the same time as nursing a text – an utterance, rather than a narrative – that attains a fervid urgency, a state that demands immersion from the viewer. The concentrated effort of its 80-minute run clearly takes a huge amount out of the Nigerian-American actor-writer: it’s hard to call her just a performer, this is an experience that she lives.Her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eating Animals begins as a David and Goliath tale of independent farmers versus industrial farming. Frank Reese specialises in rare-breed turkeys and chickens. He calls his farm the "Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch" because, for him, his traditional way of farming is akin to a religious experience. And when asked which of his birds matters most, the thought of having to choose almost reduces him to tears.Paul Willis has a similarly passionate commitment to the pigs roaming freely on his ranch; his pork is delicious, but while he sends 3,000 pigs a week for slaughter, a factory farm can produce 4, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“Get me rewrite!”: That’s likely to be a common reaction to Late Night, the well-meaning but surprisingly slipshod star vehicle for Emma Thompson set in and among the writing world of a New York late-night chat show that is hitting the skids. Thompson brings a peppery command (and some seriously stylish hair) to the role of Katherine Newbury, a disdainful small-screen personality who refers to her writing staff not by their names but by numbers.And yet time and again, Mindy Kaling’s script seems itself in need of doctoring from one of Katherine’s put-upon scribes. You applaud the film’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Gloria (2013), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Disobedience (2018), Chile’s Sebastián Lelio has earned a deserved reputation as a sympathetic director of women. It may seem a strange move for him to remake Gloria only a few years after the Spanish-language original, but Lelio claims he was inspired to do it by a meeting with Julianne Moore, who said she’d do it if he would direct.The action has been transplanted to Los Angeles from Santiago, with both the English script and many of the camera shots closely following the 2013 version. It’s the story of a 50-something divorcée determined to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sun, snow, and some unadorned silliness danced to the music of Björk: no one can accuse San Francisco of casting an insufficiently wide tonal (or climatic) net in this second of four programmes on view from San Francisco Ballet as part of their Sadler's Wells season (continuing to June 8). Having largely thrilled to their all-Shostakovich opener, I found this line-up more of a literally mixed bag. And yet, just when the sobriety of Cathy Marston's take on the American novel Ethan Frome is beginning to pall, along comes the tinsel-infused, take-no-prisoners kitsch of Arthur Pita's Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974). The latter was one of Potter’s "visitation" plays, in which frustrated or guilty protagonists conjur into existence an angel – or the devil, in the case of Brimstone and Treacle (banned in 1976, remade in 1982) – to commit an act of liberating violence.As in Schmoedipus (which starred Anna Cropper and an inspired Tim Curry), Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.Premiered in 1999, King Hedley II represents the Eighties – the front curtain makes much of it being the beginning of the Reagan years – though Wilson’s concerns go far beyond standard documentary. History in this black neighbourhood extends back a long way, something that Read more ...