drugs
Thomas H. Green
Nick Mulvey (b.1984) is a singer-songwriter who draws from a refreshing and unexpected palette of global roots music, modernist classical and electronica. His second album, Wake Up Now, was released earlier this year, and showcases a man on a quest, an artist who regards music as a direct expression of spirit. Along its course, it contains some of 2017’s finest, most intriguing music.Mulvey grew up in Cambridge, studied music in Cuba, and became part of pop-jazz experimental group Portico Quartet while studying ethnomusicology at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies. He played the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
She’s only 30, but Mae Martin has been at this comedy lark for a long time. By her own admission she was a rather strange child; she became obsessed with stand-up after her parents took her to a comedy club when she was 11, and she started performing in clubs in her native Toronto two years later – when the high from making people laugh took over her life.The comedy obsession was part of a pattern in her younger years, and in Dope she explores the compulsive behaviour that resulted in a serious drug addiction by the time she was in her mid-teens. She’s honest about the reasons why – hanging Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is fictional Nordic noir. And then there is this, the real thing. Subject matter really couldn’t be much darker than that of Mayhem: A Memoir in which publisher, philanthropist and heiress Sigrid Rausing gives her perspective on her younger brother Hans Kristian’s long-term drug addiction. She tells the story of the effect it had on her, of her own descent into depression which coincided with one of his relapses. She recounts his arrest with his wife for drug possession in 2008, when they attempted to smuggle drugs into a party at the US Embassy. As she has said elsewhere: “Your life Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How funny are gun-running, drug-smuggling and money-laundering? It depends who’s doing them. In American Made none other than Tom Cruise gets behind the controls of a twin-engine plane and flies back to the 1980s, a sepia-tinted yesteryear when all America had to worry about was commies and cocaine. He plays a colourful chancer from the period called Barry Seal. His story was previously told in Doublecrossed, a 1991 docudrama starring Dennis Hopper. It has now been shamelessly hijacked by director Doug Liman and scriptwriter Gary Spinelli in a bouncy action caper that prospects for laughs in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Duff McKagan is a survivor. He’s a bass player too, from the fledgling Seattle punk/proto-grunge outfit 10 Minute Warning to the stadium-filling behemoth of Guns N’ Roses, but if you were judging by the narrative weight of this 2015 documentary, you’d have to conclude that he’s mostly survivor. Now, it’s true that drugs and booze burst his rock’n’roll bubble – and very nearly his pancreas – but it seemed odd that the film concentrated so heavily on the effect rather than the cause.Part book reading, part documentary, part animation, It’s So Easy… never succeeded in being any one thing well Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid. That said, it's difficult to imagine audiences anywhere remaining unmoved by Audra McDonald's occupancy – "performance" seems too mundane a word – of the wrecked glory that was Billie Holiday toward the last months of her life in the Lanie Robertson musical play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. A monologue fleshed out with three (excellent) musicians, one of whom doubles as a sounding board of sorts, Lady Day was originally intended to run in London this time last year when pregnancy unexpectedly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Oh dear, writing this review is a bit like being mean to a small cuddly animal. Dough has such very good intentions – characters separated by race, religion and age can find common ground in a bakery – it’s a shame that it doesn’t rise into a tasty loaf but instead remains just a bit wholemeal and stolid. The excellent Jonathan Pryce plays Nat Dayan, an orthodox Jewish widower whose sole reason to get up every morning at four is to work in his beloved shop. He inherited it from his father and still bakes traditional bagels, pastries and challah bread. But the neighbourhood’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hoyt Axton’s songs were heard most widely when recorded by others. Steppenwolf recorded his “The Pusher” in 1967. It featured on their early 1968 debut album but was most pervasive in summer 1969 after it was included on the soundtrack of Easy Rider. Axton himself didn’t release a version until 1971, when “The Pusher” appeared on his Joy to the World album. The title track, another of his best-known compositions, had charted earlier that year for Three Dog Night. Back in early 1963 "Greenback Dollar", which Axton had co-written, was a US hit for The Kingston Trio.While his songs could have Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"This had better not be shite, Danny," was the warning delivered to director Danny Boyle from his cast, amazingly reunited from the original Trainspotting 21 years later. They had reason to be fearful, knowing how things often go with sequels, but Boyle, teaming up again with original screenwriter John Hodge, has pulled a fabulously misshapen rabbit out of his hat, which triggers echoes of the 1996 film yet can stand unaided in its own right.The first film's odyssey of a bunch of Edinburgh heroin addicts yawed vertiginously between horror and farce, though its pounding pop-culture veneer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having been to Hollywood hell and back, Mel Gibson is perfectly placed to play the battered big daddy par excellence. Here he is, in the person of John Link, ex-jailbird on parole, recovering alcoholic and former outlaw biker, now eking out a living as a tattooist on a trailer park in the California desert. Weatherbeaten and bearded like an escapee from a jungle PoW camp, Link looks like a man a coin-toss away from extinction.In his downbeat isolation, Link enjoys a little light relief by bantering bad-temperedly with his trailer-neighbour and AA sponsor Kirby (William H Macy, pictured below Read more ...