America
Dragged Across Concrete review - Mel Gibson's hard-boiled highThursday, 18 April 2019
Mel Gibson’s vile drunken rants a decade ago, his 63 years and the price of both inform his role as cop Brett Ridgeman. Writer-director S. Craig Zahler won’t comment. But as Ridgeman and patrol partner Anthony (fellow Hollywood right-wing rarity... Read more... |
Chimerica, Channel 4 review - fake news, true dramaThursday, 18 April 2019
Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times. When it opened at the Almeida back in 2013 – a West End transfer followed, along with an Olivier award for Best New Play – Lucy Kirkwood’s drama was (very... Read more... |
Rock Island Line: The Song That Made Britain Rock, BBC Four review - the early dawn of BritpopSaturday, 13 April 2019
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot... Read more... |
CD: Sun Kil Moon - I Also Want to Die in New OrleansMonday, 08 April 2019
Like Dylan when he went electric, and Waits when he went Beefheartian, Mark Kozelek (aka Sun Kil Moon) divided his fans when he moved from jangly elegiac rock of standard proportions to expansive, digressive prose enquiries into the crumbling state... Read more... |
The Crucible, The Yard Theatre review - wilfully over-stirredWednesday, 03 April 2019
The Crucible is a play that speaks with unrelenting power at times of discord, most of all when the public consciousness looks ripe for manipulation. Never more appropriate than now, you might think – and in a year in which the work of Arthur Miller... Read more... |
Blu-ray: DetourTuesday, 02 April 2019
“Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you,” Al Roberts (Tom Neal) says in Detour (1945), as if his native pessimism and self-destructive choices had nothing to do with his inexorable descent into hell.Edgar G Ulmer’s minimalist... Read more... |
Us review - can Jordan Peele deliver the thrills again?Wednesday, 27 March 2019
Us is Jordan Peele’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2017 horror film, Get Out, which won the first-time writer-director an Oscar for best original screenplay. A lot has been riding on this, Peele’s sophomore film with questions being raised over... Read more... |
Downstate, National Theatre review - controversial but also clear-eyed and compassionateThursday, 21 March 2019
"Some monsters are real," notes a retribution-minded wife (Matilda Ziegler) early in Downstate, Bruce Norris's beautiful and wounding play that has arrived at the National Theatre in the production of a writer's dreams. But by the time this restless... Read more... |
Admissions, Trafalgar Studios review - topical and whiplash-smartWednesday, 13 March 2019
Joshua Harmon knows how to stir and excite an audience and does that and more with Admissions, newly arrived in the West End as part of the ongoing tsunami of American theatre across the capital just now. Opening the same day as news reports of... Read more... |
Dorothea Tanning, Tate Modern review – an absolute revelationSaturday, 09 March 2019
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died... Read more... |
Waitress, Adelphi Theatre review - sweet if sometimes silly musical arrives from BroadwayFriday, 08 March 2019
There's a lovely, quietly subversive musical lurking somewhere in Waitress, and for extended passages in the second act that show is allowed to shine through. The flip side means putting up with an often coarse first act that seems to have taken its... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Freak ShowFriday, 08 March 2019
You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’... Read more... |
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