America
Liz Thomson
What to make of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which began a week-long residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last night and which tours in the new year? A success “from Sydney to Seattle” apparently, with Elaine Paige having called it “amazing” and various regional newspapers offering superlatives. The programme proclaims it (with idiosyncratic use of upper case), "The World's biggest and most successful Simon & Garfunkel Theatre Show". Is there competition?The singing is pretty classy, Sam O’Hanlon as Simon and Charles Blyth as Garfunkel producing evocative close harmony, though Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A revelatory moment comes hallway through Wildlife when frustrated American housewife Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) is observed standing alone in her family’s backyard by her 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the film’s anxious, steadfast protagonist. Wearing curlers, an off-white sweater and jeans, her face made-up to go out, Jeanette has a harsh, fatalistic look on her face that is new. Initially optimistic, she has been steadily souring on her marriage since her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), too proud to take back the golf pro job from which he was sacked, departed to fight a Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Bury the Dead was penned by Irwin Shaw in 1936, when the prolific American writer was a fledgling playwright in his early 20s. The Finborough Theatre production marks its first professional UK staging in 80 years and matches this milestone with a big-booted production of military precision. On the centenary of the ending of World War One, the show allows us to fully appreciate the fresh power of a young man's play on war: a period piece, yes, but one that is still raw and has not grown old. (Shaw went on write numerous short stories, screenplays, and novels, including The Young Lions and Rich Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not to be confused with Nineties supernatural sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Netflix’s new incarnation of the high-schooler with infernal powers is a ghoulish thrill-ride which boldly surfs the dark side, with a pronounced feminist and gay slant. It’s the story of the titular Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka, who played Don and Betty Draper’s daughter Sally in Mad Men) as she struggles to reconcile the half of her which is a human teenager with the supernatural lineage of her warlock father Edward.As her 16th birthday looms, Sabrina prepares for her “dark baptism”, when she must sign Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Starr Carter is 16 years old and her life straddles two very different worlds, the posh prep school she goes to with its privileged white students and the troubled black neighbourhood she lives in with her family. And like its heroine, The Hate U Give straddles two very different genres, playing as both a teen drama about friendship, bullying and boyfriends and an African-American call-to-arms about police brutality. It’s not always the most seamless of hybrids and occasionally the joins show in the casting choices and the didactic expository dialogue, but the film is held together by a Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s an undeniably quirky set-up: an elderly Spanish farmer who takes it upon himself to travel to America and walk – alone – the epic, 2,200-mile Trail of Tears, following the westward route taken by the Cherokee fleeing white settlers. Alone, that is, apart from his trusty sheepdog Zafrana and Andalusian donkey Gorrión.It’s such a bizarre idea, in fact, that a travel agent whose help the old man attempts to enlist worries he’s being pranked. But what’s most successful, and memorable, about Chico Pereira’s poignant documentary – co-produced by the Scottish Documentary Institute, and winner Read more ...
David Kettle
More than 1,700 teenage finalists representing 78 countries take part in the annual International Science and Engineering Fair, virtually the Oscars for exceptional young biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, doctors and more.If they’re selected for ISEF, these young brainboxes get to show the fair’s forbidding judges what contributions they’re planning to make to our futures – and compete with each other to be named best in show. It’s a remarkable (and, as the contestants point out, very American) event, and an even more remarkable gathering of young people Read more ...
David Nice
Single adjectives by way of description always sell masterpieces short, and especially the ambiguous symphonies forged in blood, sweat and tears during the Stalin years. The Barbican's advance blurb hit one aspect of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony - "startlingly buoyant" - and another in Prokofiev's Sixth - "contemplative". Yet you could also, piling on the adverbs, call one fiercely disorenting and the other nightmarishly expressionistic. Sakari Oramo conducting a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form focused all facets without selling the unsettling underbelly short - while in between, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old trap. But it gives it a helluva good try, and even its less successful portions offer much to enjoy.Perhaps they shouldn’t have opened with the titular story of Buster Scruggs, because it’s so outrageously laugh-out-loud brilliant that the viewer is apt to suffer a kind of bereavement at the realisation that Scruggs won’t be reappearing in later Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century botanist who is one of the characters in Barbara Kingsolver’s eighth novel, could be talking about modern America. In fact she’s referring to the reluctance of the American public to accept Darwin’s evolutionary theories in the 1870s. It’s also a time, post Civil War, when the country is ruptured and “its wounds lie open and ugly”. But does that mean we can compare that era with our own?Unsheltered is set in Vineland, an actual New Jersey town Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One marker arrived on 1 August 1981, when MTV began broadcasting. With its format based around screening pop videos, American radio had a competitor and would lose the edge it once had. And due to the lack of local product, a significant proportion of the videos seen by US TV viewers were British rather than American – America had some catching up to do if it is was going to compete with the UK’s dandified, polished and television-ready exports.Another marker was the arrival of digital instruments, digital recording and – with the CD – digital playback. Vinyl hung in there but daft formats Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in 1963, and First Man neatly picks up the baton by taking us through the ensuing Gemini and Apollo missions, peaking with the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11.First Man plots Armstrong’s progress from test pilot to astronaut with all the training and preparation that entailed, though fans of the earlier film may find themselves missing its comic, Read more ...