America
Guy Oddy
Mastodon, to those who are unaware of these US rock behemoths, fill a similar musical space to Iron Maiden or perhaps Rush, if they had louder guitars. Their music is wholly escapist, tending towards the bombastic with a widescreen prog metal sound. Moving from monumental riffing to quiet, more orchestrated ambiances and back again, their lyrics tell dramatic stories but don’t especially engage with modern life and its trials and tribulations. They may be able to turn up the volume but Ministry, with Raging Uncle Al Jourgensen’s continued hectoring of Amerikkka or Slipknot and their dark Read more ...
David Kettle
The gag – and it’s about as pitch-black a gag as you could imagine – is there in the title. Three African American guys hang out, shoot the breeze, chew the fat, discussing everything from pretty girls to who the best blues musician is. They bicker, disagree, pass on nuggets of wisdom and even sing an out-of-tune song or two, seemingly just to pass the time. But constantly interrupting their impromptu discussions are tortured, awkward movements, as the three lynched bodies hang together by their necks in deathly silence.Writer and director Zora Howard’s brief but potent show comes to Read more ...
James Saynor
Anyone who’s ever been to a movie set can’t help but struggle to reconcile the utter dismembered chaos of these workplaces with the smooth joined-up pseudo reality of the finished screen product. This jaunty, knowing third feature from Jane Schoenbrun – in which the teen slasher genre more or less eats itself – half-wants us to believe that the tortured film production process flows backwards. That is, the movie comes first. Then it sets out to assemble itself in the real world, torturing everyone all the more.It tells of a 29-year-old cultish filmmaker called Kris (Hannah Einbinder) with a Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s been 35 years since Tony Kushner’s two-play, multi-hour epic gay soap opera-cum-spiritual meditation was first unleashed on the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it’s been 18 years since director Ivo van Hove unveiled his own raw, stripped-back production with what was then Toneelgroep Amsterdam, now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. It’s tempting, therefore, to see the Edinburgh International Festival’s revival of van Hove’s production as a classic traversal of a classic text, with all the nicely safe distancing and detached appraisal that that double status might invite.That’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You’re not going to catch Alan Ritchson playing King Lear at Stratford or doing Noël Coward at Chichester, but as an implacable warrior for truth, justice and the American way – or what was once supposed to be the American way – he’ll be a hard act to follow. Built like the Incredible Hulk’s smarter brother, and equipped with an extraordinary capacity for busting out of apparently terminal predicaments, Ritchson is in the midst of turning himself into the embodiment of Lee Child’s wrong-righting hero, Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise had a go at the character in the movies Jack Reacher and Never Go Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalised, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.We open in a platonic American suburban ideal, filmed with home movie dreaminess. It’s a deliberately Spielbergian scene, reinforced by Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pastiche John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith score; the director and his dark side Stephen King’s fondly recalled Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The strongest element in Tony is the performance that Antonio Banderas gives as ‘Chef’, the owner of a seafood restaurant in the holiday resort of Provincetown in the late Seventies. It’s a subtle, nuanced delivery despite a script which doesn't give the actor much to work with. He could have just drifted into playing a saintly mentor, but somehow Banderas finds complexity in the role.If only the same could be said of Dominic Sessa, who repurposes his debut performance as a surly youth, a cocktail of ego and insecurity, from The Holdovers. It’s easy to see why Sessa would be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of Taylor Sheridan’s all-female CIA special ops unit finds the war on terror cutting uncomfortably close to the bone, with team boss Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) targeted by a bunch of thuggish Russians in her own home in Virginia. Scenes of Joe being violently manhandled and strip-searched by her attackers as they search for the locator device they know is concealed somewhere on, or in, her body make for pretty gruelling viewing, even in a show that doesn’t shrink from graphic violence.However, even that pales into insignificance by comparison to the combat scenes in the opening Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This is Nicola Benedetti’s fourth opening concert while she has been in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, and I suspect it might be the one she’s most proud of. That’s not (only) because it featured All Rise, the jazz symphony written by the superstar jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (who is also Benedetti’s husband), but because it seemed to unite all the things Benedetti has previously striven for in her opening concerts. Like the rest of them, this pushed the envelope beyond the standard western classical canon, combined diverse musical forces, and focused on themes of building Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Spanning a hundred years, the Dulwich Picture Gallery's show of American photography is a twofold delight. Most of the great names are included, so practically every picture is a masterpiece of the medium and together they flesh out a story of cities in a constant state of flux and change. This is not an exhibition about buildings and cityscapes, though, so much as the people who inhabit them. And the most striking aspect of this look at city life is the squalor and grinding poverty in which so many Americans have lived for much of that time.The show starts with Alfred Stieglitz who, intent Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s an incendiary one-woman monologue to be had from Christine Lahti’s 2018 book about the misogyny of her upbringing, but The Smile of Her feels rather like an early draft of it. Lahti performs it with great candour and pops of dry humour, but you feel it could be even more arresting.Her book of essays, True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age, looks at different aspects of her life from early days to middle age (she is now, unbelievably, a sprightly 76). Somehow she has condensed this swathe of experiences into a 90-minute monologue, but inevitably this means Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
At every turn in Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, references to other stories pop up. There are the murderous sexual shenanigans of The Postman Always Rings Twice, a squad of Italian-American punks who could hold their own on the mean streets of West Side Story, a duelling cars scene from Rebel Without a Cause, even hints of Puccini’s Il tabarro. What it definitely isn’t, and deliberately so, is a representation of Bizet’s Carmen, while grounded in its superb music.This disjunction may be why I find the piece tricky. Hearing re-orchestrated extracts from the poignant arias Bizet gave Micaela Read more ...