America
emma.simmonds
Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. She pitches her film perfectly, presenting an intimate portrait of a man struggling to live up to his own legend and maintain the momentum of a movement, filtered through the powerful story of a series of initially small, eventually seminal protests in the town of Selma, Alabama.Beginning in 1964, it follows King's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize with a crime of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bob Dylan closed his recent concerts with a heart-rending version of “Stay with Me”, a melancholy lament made famous by Frank Sinatra. It's worth remembering that, born in 1941, Bob Dylan didn’t grow up on a diet of folk and blues. Sinatra was the biggest hit-maker of his early youth, a dominant presence on the airwaves he was exposed to as a child.This is no tribute album, neither is it a piece of opportunism, as Dylan has never traded on received ideas or well-tried music business tricks. Even his Christmas album was shot through with irony as well as joy. With Time out of Mind, which now Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Last autumn Rumer reappeared with her third album, Into Colour, surprising everyone with a lead single that was disco-flavoured. The rest of the album was closer in scope to the opulent LA easy listening and classic West Coast singer-songwriter fare that the singer has made her own since her first major label single, “Slow”, blew up in 2010.Born Sarah Joyce in Islamabad in 1979 to a large British family, she found she was the result of an affair between her mother and their Pakistani cook. The death of her mother in 2003 affected her profoundly and, when she attempted to track her blood Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person testimonials will disappear into a past.So it was more than fitting that Touched by Auschwitz should see historian Laurence Rees (whose past films like The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are as authoritative as they come) following the lives of six survivors through to the present day, examining not least Read more ...
graham.rickson
Boyhood is an intimate film on an epic scale. Twelve years zoom past in 189 minutes, as we follow Mason Evans Jr.'s journey from primary school pupil to university student. That the film exists at all seems miraculous; you admire the producers’ nerve in funding such an open-ended project, and director Richard Linklater’s luck in securing a loyal cast willing to commit for 12 years. Especially the two young leads; Linklater’s daughter Lorelei as Mason’s sister Samantha must have been a known quantity, but watching six-year-old Ellar Coltrane mature into such an engaging, confident screen Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Stream-of-consciousness is a tough thing to pull off in the movies. Voice-over narration has now fallen so far out of favour that no internal monologue survives the journey from page to screen even remotely intact, and having your lead character slavishly deliver chunks of a novel seldom recreates the odd magic of reading those same words in one’s own head.But with his deft adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s bruising memoir Wild, Nick Hornby has pulled off an unusually close approximation of the literary stream-of-consciousness. Blending hazy voice-over and staccato flashbacks alongside a near- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back for its third series [***], Sally Wainwright's saga of Yorkshire folk continues to tread a precarious line between syrupy soapfulness and a family drama with sharp little teeth. Its excellent cast helps to carry it over the worst of the soggy bits, and its best moments have a way of catching you unawares. You'd have to guess that it also scores strongly by not being crammed with serial killers, paedophiles and corrupt cops.It's a sign of the confidence that healthy ratings bring that they dared to open this new season with Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) sitting at a restaurant Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The recent comedy awards on Channel 4 threw up little in the way of surprises – or, indeed, laughter for that matter. It was, however, notable for the first real-time, on-screen mugging at an awards bash, as Harry Enfield strolled off with the Best Comedy Actor gong, leaving Mathew Baynton looking very much the wronged man. That James Corden wasn’t even nominated was another crime.The sense of outrage (all mine) was directly proportional with how much there was to like in the first series of the pair’s excellent comedy drama, The Wrong Mans, which saw Berkshire County Council employee Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack White (the former John Anthony Gillis) was born in Detroit and now lives in Nashville, a geographical progression you can hear in his music. He loves rude, dirty rock'n'roll but also has a fine instinct for country music, both of which tendencies are splurged all over this consistently inspired album (his second solo venture and the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss). You won't hear any country music played sweeter than "Entitlement" (not that the lyric's particularly sweet, mind), yet White can also create a rockin' wall of chaos like "Three Women", which sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis and Read more ...
Heather Neill
For a Christmas-weary Brit who's already had it up to here with commercial bonhomie and festive schmaltz, there were going to be barriers to overcome. Here is an avowedly sweet American play – actually nine playlets – on the subject of love, set in snowy Maine, in a small town "that doesn't quite exist". In John Cariani's two-handers, lovers most often – although not quite always – overcomes disappointment, misunderstandings or awkwardness to reach mini-happy endings. The piece is phenomenally popular in the States, having replaced A Midsummer Night's Dream as first choice for high school Read more ...
Guy Oddy
We have been told for years by the media, the record industry and “taste-makers” everywhere that popular music is resolutely a young person’s game. Carefree youth is what it’s all about and any sign of ageing, maturity or artistry and most musicians will be shown the door and put out to pasture unless they are revisiting past glories. In 2014, Swans put paid to this myth by releasing To Be Kind, the most impressive album of their 32 year (on-off) existence under the direction of Michael Gira – the band’s 60-year-old vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and band leader.To Be Kind is a Read more ...
David Nice
All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold’s American Shakespeare, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Not all the accents are gold either, though working on them only seems to have made a splendid ensemble underline the meaning of every word all the better – and having come straight from the often slapdash verse-speaking of the RSC’s Henry IV, that comes as all the more of an invigorating surprise.Goold leads his team inexorably from the swank to the skull beneath the skin, a Shakespearean “problem-play” trope well suited to Read more ...