There I was, gleefully prepared to give this a good kick-in but, annoyingly, it’s defied my expectations. I’ve come to associate James Blake’s singing with the worst excesses of I’m-so-vulnerable-me, post-Jeff Buckley, falsetto-voice-breaking, and his public persona with joylessly prescriptive and enfeebled ultra-wokeness. While Friends That Break Your Heart closes with three tracks, including the title song, that fulfil my Blake stereotype, ie translucently wet Bon Iver-tronica, there’s also much on board that is impossible not to admire.Blake did, after all, begin his career with huge Read more ...

Despite its painfully relevant title, How To Survive An Apocalypse was written in 2016. If only Canadian playwright Jordan Hall knew, eh? The end times aren’t just creeping but hurtling towards us, these days. Luckily for those weary of Covid stories, this play is more about millennials sensing impending doom, and how that experience impacts upon their personal relationships, than the doom itself. Jimmy Walters’ production for the charmingly intimate Finborough Theatre sparks intriguing ideas on which it doesn't quite fully follow through.Jen (Kristin Atherton, who really knows how to wear a Read more ...

A gorgeous song exists in search of a show to match over at Bagdad Café, the 1987 film that gave the world the memorably plaintive "Calling You", which is threaded throughout Emma Rice's stage adaptation of the movie with understandable insistence.What hasn't yet been achieved in this Old Vic premiere is much narrative heft to go with the abundant heart of an evening that ends with a collective Zoom, a reminder in our fraught times of the collective call-out to community. All that's needed now is something more of substance. Rice has always been great when it comes to feeling and Read more ...

Mamma Mia! hovers unhelpfully over every frame of Off the Rails, a road movie of sorts in which three women make a music-fueled pilgrimage to Mallorca to honour the wishes of a fourth friend, who has died before time of cancer.The difference here is that the scenery keeps changing and the music of choice isn't ABBA but Blondie. And while no one would cite Mamma Mia! as a paragon of writing for our time, it at least makes sense within the particular world it describes. That's more than one can say for this collaboration between Jordan Waller (screenwriter) and Jules Williamson (director), Read more ...

Last Easter has become a lot more relatable since it was forced to postpone this run at the Orange Tree Theatre, originally scheduled for 2020. It’s about a group of theatre-makers – an actor, a drag performer, a prop-maker, and a lighting designer – getting through tough times by leaning on each other, but Bryony Lavery wrote it in 2004, way before the lockdowns and the theatre closures and the months of Zoom productions. Now that it’s made it to the stage, Tinuke Craig’s production is timely, if strangely off-putting.June (Naana Agyei-Ampadu, pictured below) is dying of breast cancer, and Read more ...

If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the science section by mistake. It's a novel that throws its reader in at the deep end, where that end is made of "streaks of bacteria" and "vigorous mycorrhizal networks" that would take a biology degree (or a browser) to decipher. As is often the case, though, it’s worth it once you’re in. Double Blind is one of those rare books that does everything the blurb claims it will do. Humorous, philosophical, gripping and – yes – scientific in turn, this is a Read more ...

If you’re after a relaxing Sunday watch, Fyzal Boulifa’s Lynn + Lucy is not the one. It begins as a story of old friends in a small town and ends as a complex and uncomfortable tragedy. The banality of the everyday is stripped away throughout the film to reveal the resentments and tensions that underlie even the quietist of communities. The town itself (Harlow New Town) becomes a character in its own right, and is celebrated in a 1956 documentary in one of the extras on this BFI release. Lynn + Lucy is a very powerful film, told well, but the moralistic overtones can sometimes feel a bit much Read more ...

There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely feminism lite, a palimpsest for young women in London who are into yoga and small plates. But that is not to detract from the fact that it is eminently readable, and frequently charming.The narrator and protagonist of Ghosts, 32-year-old Nina Dean, is a very thinly veiled portrait of the author. Alderton has amended some details, but the bare bones are very obvious to any readers of her 2018 Everything I Know About Love. Nina is short where Alderton is tall, dark-haired where Read more ...

The emotional rawness of Xavier Dolan’s films reflects a rare humanity and empathy. For someone still only 31, the French-Canadian writer and director displays an uncanny sense of the passionate turmoil that animates his characters. The subtle shifts in moods he achieves may often be sustained through an unusual talent for picking the right music or song, but the tone is never set in a way that manipulates the audience. This makes for a movie that feels powerfully authentic and for this reason deeply touching without ever being sentimental.The central story of his eighth film focuses on the Read more ...

It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...

British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature film debut with a bruising account of female-friendship torn apart by personal tragedies and gossipmongers, on a council estate in Harlow. At under an hour and a half, Boulifa shows a gift for economic storytelling, but that doesn’t mean it comes without an emotional wallop. The story centres on two twenty-something mothers who have been best friends since school. Lynn is played by street-cast actress Roxanne Scrimshaw, who makes a startling debut, and Lucy by Nichola Burley (Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights), who delivers at Read more ...

The way that theatres and other arts institutions have leapt into action over the past week, providing a wealth of material online and new ways to connect with audiences, has been truly inspirational. Yesterday, the Hampstead Theatre re-released on Instagram a recording of its production of American playwright Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, specially filmed for IGTV and initially broadcast in 2018. It’s free until 22.00 on Sunday 29 March – and is well worth a watch.All stories have been recontextualised by the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent shutdown (have actors in TV dramas always Read more ...