She’s still best remembered for her portrayal of Carrie Mathison in Homeland, but Claire Danes is an actor with plenty of moves up her sleeve. In this eight-part drama penned by Gabe Rotter, she plays author Aggie Wiggs, renowned for her book Sick Puppy but now crippled by writer’s block. This is in the aftermath of her break-up with wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), following the death of their young son Cooper in a road accident, leaving Aggie living in splendid isolation in a mini-mansion in leafy Oyster Bay, Long Island. Indeed, this locale is so upscale that it has tempted real estate Read more ...

If you’re old enough to remember LPs and the lost art of reading sleeve notes (let alone writing them), this one’s for you. The titular session man is the fabled keyboard player Nicky Hopkins, whose teeming creativity and dancing digits left their indelible mark across an extraordinary swathe of records from the golden age of rock’n’roll.Among Hopkins’ most recognisable feats are his Jerry Lee Lewis-style romp through the Beatles’ "Revolution", contributions to several tracks on John Lennon’s Imagine including "Jealous Guy", rollicking ivory-tickling on George Harrison’s "Give Me Love", his Read more ...

A lone slice of cherry pie sits on a plate inside a glass case (pictured below), waiting to be released from its solitary confinement and guzzled by a hungry diner. There it is again, in an eye-watering display of sickly offerings (main picture). This time, four slices are lined up alongside their chocolate, pecan and lemon meringue counterparts. The display goes on and on, for as far as the eye can see.At first glance, Wayne Thiebaud’s pictures of cakes, pies, hot dogs, ice creams and gob stoppers look like euphoric celebrations of abundance; but gazing at this glut of comfort food soon Read more ...

Don't be fooled by the shambling geniality which first defines Bryan Cranston's Joe Keller at the start of the Belgian director Ivo van Hove's scorching revival of All My Sons. By the time we get to the interval-free finish, some 2-1/4 hours later, this seemingly affable chap will be as done in as the tree we see topped in the production's wordless prologue. As Joe goes down for the count, so too does the America of which he forms an all-too-ruthless part. Written in 1947, Arthur Miller's breakout play depicts a nation given over to deception and rapacity that responds only to one God - Read more ...

At least two facts stare us unflinchingly in the face here. For all the programme’s harping on how “everyone has their own view about the death penalty,” I don’t think there was any doubt in the audience’s mind about the horror of its Old Testament vengeance. And I also doubt if anyone was ultimately left unmoved or stunned by the hard-hitting performances of a perfect cast. This is music-theatre at its riveting best. Jake Heggie’s work, premiered 25 years ago and staged 80 times around the world to date, isn’t perfect. It starts with a haunting, lopsided flow not a million miles away from Read more ...

What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen. Like Malick, Bentley is scrutinising a small group of people living in a bygone era in a remote part of North America; Malick focused on the Texas panhandle, Bentley on small-town Idaho at the turn of the century. Here a logger called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) ekes out a tough, often isolated living, moving with the Read more ...

Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on the book by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love is an unsettling dive into the disturbed psyche of Grace, played with mercurial brilliance by Jennifer Lawrence. Grace is a new mother still struggling to get accustomed to the demands of her baby, and with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), she has moved into the house that belonged to Jackson’s dead uncle, out in the remote backwoods of Montana.The plan is for Jackson to fix the place up, when he can get around to it. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, with Jackson’s parents living nearby Read more ...

“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).Yurgos Lanthimos’s gripping black comedy Bugonia (nothing to do with begonias, by the way, but a Greek word concerning bees’ ability to spontaneously generate from a cow’s carcass) is marvellously deranged, taking a conspiracy theory to its logical, or illogical, conclusion. The screenplay is adapted by Will Tracy (Succession; The Menu; The Regime) from Jang Joon-hwan’s film Save the Green Planet!. And Robbie Ryan’s cinematography using large-format Read more ...

Before Million Dollar Baby and Fight Girl, before women could compete in boxing at the Olympic Games, there was Christy Salters Martin. The hard-punching West Virginian known in the ring as the Coal Miner's Daughter and to U.S. television audiences as a sassy sports phenomenon was a housewife who just happened to knock people out.  Dressed in baby pink for the ring and floral, puffy-sleeved dresses for her many TV chat show appearances, Martin embodied all the contradictions of the ‘90s and early 2000s’ view of female athletes. "I’m not trying to make a statement about women in boxing Read more ...

After cancelling his Birmingham gig an hour before curtain-up due to illness, the anticipatory hype around whether Benson Boone’s London show at The O2 would actually go ahead was almost as electric as his infamous song. But a reassuring ping from the ’gram confirmed: it’s on. And indeed, it was.Two hours of rip-snorting kitsch-pop later, and any trace of illness or fatigue was well hidden. Somehow, Boone summoned the energy to bring full Bennie-style spectacle to a sold out arena in a show equal parts confetti-drenched musical dream and emo-tinged, power-grabbing balladry, delivered by a Read more ...

There is a scene in the second act of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking in which the man condemned to death, Joseph De Rocher, with his spiritual advisor Sister Helen Prejean in tow, have a devastating interaction with his mother.  A final, inconsolable goodbye before De Rocher is processed for his impending execution. As an opera conductor, I find myself maintaining a fine balance between keeping a practical, level-headed overview of the elements under my leadership; the balance of the orchestra, the way the stage is connecting with the music, the singers’ cues, Read more ...

Kelly Reichardt has a thing about losers. You often see them in her films. It's the failure of American individualism that concerns her.Even when she tells stories of her country's history, like in the anti-western Meek's Cutoff (2010) or the 2019 Old West drama First Cow, her focus is always on marginal characters – sometimes homeless (Wendy and Lucy), sometimes betrayed by casual infidelity (Certain Women) – that are never romanticised, but presented with all their faults and quirks. Reichardt's new film, The Mastermind, is again about an outsider, but this time there's a Read more ...