America
Saskia Baron
Why make a feature film about Ted Bundy, the notorious 1970s serial killer when you’ve already made Conversations with a Killer, a four-part factual series for Netflix about him? A charitable explanation would be that it offered documentarian Joe Berlinger a chance to explore aspects of the story that could only be told with drama. A more cynical explanation would be that features outsell documentaries at the box office. Zac Efron plays the law student turned rapist and murderer who became as infamous in America as Jack the Ripper in the UK. It's thought that he killed at least thirty Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Deft and funny and nicely cast, what's not to like about Other People's Money, the era-defining Jerry Sterner play in revival at Southwark Playhouse? The play's 1989 premiere Off Broadway allowed for a contemporary skewering of the roaring, rapacious, uncaring 1980s. Now it's a period piece, where Amy Burke, playing a pumped-up and pugnacious Manhattan lawyer, sports a swishing pale-grey pantsuit that would have done Paul Smith proud: her hair is as big as her ego.Under Katharine Farmer's direction, the stage is framed by offices at either end, two worlds apart. One desk belongs to Andrew Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a romcom of two radically different halves, vaulting so dizzyingly from insultingly unbearable to daringly hilarious that walking in half-way through becomes a viable option.It begins as a grim case study of the patriarchal odd couple, as schlubby gonzo journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) becomes the unlikely speechwriter then unbelievable lover of immaculate presidential hopeful Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron). Hollywood’s touching interest in improving nature’s stacked odds against such coupling noticeably dims when the genders are reversed.The flat cinematography, jolly synth Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Hey guys, it’s Kayla, back with another video. So, the topic of today’s video is being yourself.” Kayla Day (the wonderful Elsie Fisher, nominated for a Golden Globe and also heard as the voice of Agnes in Despicable Me) is in her last week of eighth grade in upstate New York, compounding the horror of being 13 years old by making self-help YouTube videos in her bedroom. “As always, make sure to share and subscribe to my channel. Gucci!” she signs off chirpily, with Enya’s Orinoco Flow as surprisingly effective background music. But is anyone watching?This directorial debut from stand-up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Torso Hell tells the story of an American soldier whose limbs were blown off in Vietnam. Amazingly, he and his buddies survived, and in the ensuing medical chaos his arms and legs were re-attached to them rather than him. The narrator says “At the hospital, it’s so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don’t know what from what … they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys. Two guys each get one of his arms … two guys each get one of his legs.” It’s a typically bizarre Terry Allen set-up. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times. When it opened at the Almeida back in 2013 – a West End transfer followed, along with an Olivier award for Best New Play – Lucy Kirkwood’s drama was (very loosely) about the geopolitical symbiosis between the world’s two largest economies, China and America (hence, the title). It was seen through the prism of a story that began back in 1989 on Tiananmen Square and continued through to the present day.Channel 4’s new four-part drama, adroitly directed by Michael Keillor, retains the original’s sense of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mel Gibson’s vile drunken rants a decade ago, his 63 years and the price of both inform his role as cop Brett Ridgeman. Writer-director S. Craig Zahler won’t comment. But as Ridgeman and patrol partner Anthony (fellow Hollywood right-wing rarity Vince Vaughn) discuss the “hypocrisy” of news channels “treating every perceived intolerance with complete intolerance”, and media exploitation of “a private phone-call”, the script clearly lets Gibson vent. This doesn’t stop the pair’s suspension for brutalising suspects, much as Gibson was thrown into exile.When we follow Ridgeman home to his sick Read more ...
james.woodall
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot, though that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from the hour-long documentary treatment. For blues lovers, it’s a benchmark. “Rock Island Line” dates from the late 1920s and was first recorded in 1934.Billy Bragg dependably and articulately fronted up this BBC Four history of the song, a protest paean to, or (as it might once have been called) a Read more ...
howard.male
Like Dylan when he went electric, and Waits when he went Beefheartian, Mark Kozelek (aka Sun Kil Moon) divided his fans when he moved from jangly elegiac rock of standard proportions to expansive, digressive prose enquiries into the crumbling state of a nation, and the crumbling state of the man just trying to negotiate it all. But my advice to dissenters is to surrender rather than resist. No, Kozelek hasn’t "lost it". If anything he’s found it, and found it in abundance. So on to specifics. In this instance his partners in crime are Donny McCaslin (sax) and Jim White (drums). McCaslin Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Crucible is a play that speaks with unrelenting power at times of discord, most of all when the public consciousness looks ripe for manipulation. Never more appropriate than now, you might think – and in a year in which the work of Arthur Miller seems all over the West End, the chance to see a more experimental production of his masterpiece of 17th century religious obsession, based on the Salem witch trials but reflecting as much the anti-communist hysteria of 1950s America, looks inviting. Especially so given that The Yard, the ambitious Hackney Wick studio space that is staging it, has Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you,” Al Roberts (Tom Neal) says in Detour (1945), as if his native pessimism and self-destructive choices had nothing to do with his inexorable descent into hell.Edgar G Ulmer’s minimalist film noir classic, which has been beautifully restored for this Criterion Collection release, tells a rancid tale. Roberts himself narrates it in an increasingly feverish voiceover. Early on, one of the flashbacks to his memories that comprise most of the movie, shows him as a talented pianist backing his singer girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) in a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Us is Jordan Peele’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2017 horror film, Get Out, which won the first-time writer-director an Oscar for best original screenplay. A lot has been riding on this, Peele’s sophomore film with questions being raised over whether he would succumb to the pressures of a bigger budget and make a far more obviously commercial movie. So far Peele is riding the wave, Us has already broken records in the USA where it’s had the highest grossing opening weekend for an R rated film ever. It's also won mainstream critics’ praise for its attack on America's neglect of its Read more ...