America
Saskia Baron
Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean Baker has crafted a high-velocity drama in three acts with a star-making turn by its lead Mikey Madison in the title role. She prefers to be called Ani and makes her living in a lap-dancing club in Manhattan by night before sleeping away her days in a run-down house in Brooklyn, right next to the rattle of the elevated train. Self-possessed and skilled at getting cash out of clients with some well-rehearsed gyrations, Ani is the latest in Sean Baker’ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chuck Prophet speaks the old language of rock’n’roll as if it’s bright and new. His long gone band Green On Red were R.E.M.’s Eighties peers, and as rock’s cultural tide has receded, his loyalty to its spirit of liberty, askance at authority and place with those clinging to or embracing the bottom rung has become a natural act of faith.Wake the Dead is Prophet’s first album since his recovery from cancer, and splices his Mission Express band with ¿Qiensave?, Californian practitioners of cumbia, the Columbian sound which proved his musical light in dark times. He’s sought fresh inflections and Read more ...
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Disney+ review - the Boss grows older defiantly
Adam Sweeting
Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made documentaries about the making of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen On Broadway and several more. Road Diary takes as its theme Springsteen’s 2023-4 tour, and uses that as a platform for an often emotional survey of his 50 year history with the E Street Band.This was the first time the E Street Band had been back on the road since 2017 (the Covid interregnum didn’t help), and there are some wry observations about scraping off the accumulated rust. Drummer Max Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on stage in 1982, after The Godfather (Parts I and II) but well before The Sopranos. For ENO at the Coliseum, Elaine Tyler-Hall has now directed its 14th revival. ENO has lately borne the brunt of drive-by funding massacres by the ruthless (and opera-loathing) capi who control the UK arts-subsidy game. We get the appeal of guaranteed crowd-pleasers and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Ellwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects are out on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. His debut documentary’s protagonist Warren Ellis is a contrastingly loving renegade, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who became Nick Cave’s wild-maned right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist, and journeys here to the Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle.Ellis Park divides halfway between Ellis’s reluctant return to Ballarat and his subsequent sanctuary visit. Skittish time Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.Sony sparked the super-boom with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), only for their reliance on related properties to hasten its end with the calamitous Morbius and Madame Web. Venom’s ace is Hardy’s unlikely double-act as gloomy, whiny journalist Eddie and his capricious beast inside’s bombastic, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is star casting, and there is casting the right star – not the same thing. The Donmar’s new production, The Fear of 13, succeeds in the latter category, in spades. The star in question is Adrien Brody, a child actor who left stage work for the cinema more than three decades ago, where he became the youngest recipient of the Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist. More recently, he has also graced premium television series such as Succession and Peaky Blinders. At the Donmar he has been allied to the director Justin Martin, an award-winner for Prima Facie, Stranger Things and The Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again.Anna Kendrick directs for the first time and also stars in this gripping drama, written by Ian McDonald and based on the true- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins.This new film exists first as a failed franchise equation, adding Conjuring Universe producer James Wan to IT screenwriter Gary Dauberman as writer-director (he also wrote The Conjuring’s Annabelle series), but suffering heavy cuts prior to this much delayed release.King’s Salem’s Lot was a textured depiction of a Yankee small- Read more ...