Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Michael Thevis made his money from pornography. In the Seventies, his Atlanta warehouses were stuffed with most of America’s porn. Nationally, Thevis was the main distributor. Looking for something less edgy to fund with his profits, he turned to the music business and bankrolled the GRC label and its sister imprints Aware and Hotlanta. In time, they became three of America's most lauded soul labels. In parallel, Thevis sealed his reputation as a notorious criminal.Over 1973 to 1975, GRC issued just-over 100 singles – the total seems to be 104. Around 12 albums also appeared in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who was Stefan Zweig? It's likely that it's mostly older folk who studied German literature at A-level who have encountered this superb Viennese writer in his native language, though his short story from 1922, Letter to an Unknown Woman, eventually emerged as a starry Hollywood film in 1948.Christopher Hampton, who was one such German student, has decided to bring this novella to the stage, first at Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, where the story is set, and now at the Hampstead. It’s a bold move, but one that raises key questions about the material’s suitability for this treatment. Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Apparently when actress Maika Monroe first saw Nicolas Cage in his full Longlegs get-up, her heart-rate skyrocketed to 170 bpm (her resting heart rate is 76). Or at least so a promotional video tells us. Whether true or not, it’s an example of the savvy marketing campaign, courtesy of distributor NEON, that has drummed up a genuine sense of anticipation for Oz Perkins's latest film. A handful of glowing early reviews and whispers from early screenings confirmed that Longlegs was the summer’s must-see horror film. I can confirm that a movie inspiring such overblown rhetoric does, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Paint a Room is idiosyncratic, but it is an absolute joy. Accessible too. Permeated with a summery vibe, its 10 songs glisten like the surface of lake catching the setting sun’s rays. There’s a lightness, a buoyancy which instantly fascinates.Chris Cohen has fashioned an album which is jazzy yet cleaves to a sensibility placing it as a distant cousin to Allah Las at their best or the wispier side of early Tame Impala. There are flutes, brass, sax, coconut shell-type persuasion, guitars treated to sound watery and Cohen’s lazy, just-verging on off-key voice. Swooning album opener “Damage” Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival offers one thundering success, one uneasy compromise and one surprisingly enjoyable experience, in its three mainstage operas this year.Verdi’s Ernani is the thundering success. For the first time in years, the festival has the Orchestra of Opera North in the pit at Buxton Opera House, under artistic director Adrian Kelly’s hand, and the size of its string section and richness of its sound (with cimbasso underpinning the brass) are there from the moment the overture starts. The festival chorus – 24 of them if you count in the minor roles some members take – are Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The question Korean director Jason Yu is asking in this eerie little spine-tingler (his debut feature) is “how well do you know your partner?” He may also be inquiring whether or not you believe in life after death, while planting nagging seeds of doubt about the competence of the medical profession.A ride both disturbing and sometimes darkly comic, intensified by an edgy and neurotic soundtrack, Sleep has chosen for its claustrophobic battleground the apartment of married couple Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun, from the Oscar-blitzing Parasite, who shockingly killed himself last year) and his wife Soo Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s over 50 years since men last landed on our orbiting space-neighbour, but director Greg Berlanti's Fly Me to the Moon transports us back to the feverish days in 1969 when Apollo 11 was about to tackle the feat for the first time. The film’s promo material rather misleadingly bills it as “a sparkling rom-com”, but it has a few other strings to its bow. For instance, it’s partly a satire on American capitalism and the advertising business, takes a few sideways glances at the Vietnam war, and has inherited some of the DNA of a political thriller.It’s an eccentric mixture, but it works thanks Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mia Goth’s mighty Maxine finally makes it to Hollywood in Ti West’s brash conclusion to the trilogy he began with X (2022), which has become a visceral treatise on film’s 20th century allure, and the bloody downside of dreaming to escape.X riffed on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Eaten Alive (1976) as elderly killers stalk a 1979 Texan barnyard porn shoot, and found a haunting frisson in Mia Goth’s duel portrayal of murderous, ancient Pearl and youthful Maxine. Pearl then recast The Wizard of Oz’s Kansas prologue in a grim 1918 equivalent to Dorothy’s rustic home, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sarah Power, the writer of Grud, now in the Hampstead’s smaller space, is a self-confessed geek who excelled at science at school. She also had an alcoholic parent, and both autobiographical strands have turned up trumps in this, the second of her plays to be produced professionally. "Grud", we eventually learn, is the nickname Bo’s father (Karl Theobald, pictured below with Ashdown) has given his monster-self, a creature we see a lot of in the opening scenes. Bo (Catherine Ashdown), in the childlike play-world Grud has invented, where animals come to visit, is usually known as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau’s 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional workplace drama, though in a much gentler key than Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. But this slow burn catches fire.The first sign that this is not a lightly comedic tale of an endangered urban workforce comes when a young worker called Dez (Branden Cook, pictured below, bottom right)) produces a handgun from his backpack and stashes it in his padlocked locker in the break room. But again, this is not Chekhov. The gun will not fire.Dez’s place of work is an ailing car assembly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a former schoolteacher now scraping a nocturnal living as a cab driver in Liverpool (you’d never guess the show was filmed in Dublin). A haunted and lonely character, broken by his failed marriage, he becomes fixated with the small-hours radio talk show hosted by Lawrence Brightway (Sean Pertwee, pictured below), whose relaxed, sandpapery voice makes Read more ...