America
Adam Sweeting
Trailing a string of Grammys and multi-platinum albums, and now a successful actress and purveyor of her own "My Life" perfume for good measure, you wouldn't think R&B legend Blige had much left to prove. However, she evidently sees it differently, and she ripped through this compressed and streamlined Roundhouse set as if lives were at stake.The show was handily timed to help stoke up anticipation for her forthcoming album The London Sessions, due in November and featuring contributions from Disclosure, Emeli Sandé, Sam Smith and more. This is evidently a talismanic project designed to Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The problem with programming Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony - and only the very bold and resourceful and/or the BBC are ever likely to do so - is that it eclipses everything, and I mean everything, in its proximity. And if it was my 90th birthday - as indeed it was on this day for the BBC Singers - I’m not sure I’d want to bask in its aura, especially since the world premiere commissioned for this big birthday - Kevan Volans's The Mountain That Left - had to be postponed due to the indisposition of its soprano soloist, Pumeza Matshikiza. This being the BBC Singers, however - a group for whom Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Denzel Washington steps into the shoes of avenger Edward Woodward (TV series 1985-89) as a quiet, private man wrestling with his demons as he tries to stifle his natural gifts for violent justice. He’s reluctant to hurt people but, you know, he has skillz. Washington's easy grace and intelligence give this predictable policier manqué almost edible allure.It was Antoine Fuqua who directed Washington to an Oscar in 2001’s Training Day. In the tough world of Hollywood, Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen won a match race between two White-House-in-jeopardy films. So, this vigilante story that’s been Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It hardly sounds like the springboard for an album, a film, a book and an app. In the 1780s a young Welsh explorer called John Evans journeyed across the unmapped North American continent in search of a tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans. His only source for the tribe’s existence – and linguistic preference – was a legend which claimed that a Welsh prince by the name of Madog ab Owain Gwynedd discovered the New World 300 years before Columbus. It’s no plot spoiler to reveal that Evans did not find the tribe.Evans’ journey has spawned American Interior, the album, the film, the book (not Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Let's face it, there are so many big-budget, densely plotted US TV imports around now that it seems a little hackneyed to compare them to buses - but even by those standards, scheduling the two newest ones concurrently seems a little careless. Your choice: Legends, an FBI procedural with a twist from Homeland show-runner Howard Gordon; or Guillermo del Toro's vampire virus horror The Strain.Neither premise is particularly original but Legends (***), with Sean Bean in the lead role as veteran FBI agent Martin Odum, stands out as an audacious tribute not only to genre conventions, but also to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Created by Gideon Raff, mastermind of Homeland and its Israeli forerunner Prisoners of War, and produced by Howard Gordon (who worked on Homeland and 24), Tyrant parades its roots on its sleeve. Its mix of action thriller and family drama, all souped up by a stiff dose of combustibly unstable Middle East politics, adds up to a slick entertainment formula, but do such deadly and complex issues deserve to be handled quite so glibly? If The Honourable Woman was a crossword without clues, this is more like a shopping list scrawled in felt pen.Nonetheless, the basic premise is reasonably promising Read more ...
Heppy Longworth
Even before I stepped into the Royal Opera House, it was clear to see that it had been transformed for the opening performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole. A red carpet outside; the pervasive smell of popcorn within; the stage curtains, usually red, now a gaudy shade of purple: the opera house clearly had a case of All Things American.This exciting atmosphere was upheld throughout the opera, which was unlike anything I had ever seen. Its theme is the life of the world’s first reality TV star, Anna Nicole Smith, whose short life was filled with controversy (marrying a billionaire Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dan Stevens puts Downton behind him to become a CIA-built killing machine laying low in a New Mexico small town, in Adam Wingard’s bonkers new thriller. He looks all the better for it. Aristocratic English charm translates into Southern civility as his character David insinuates himself into a family grieving for a son he served with in Iraq. David’s just here to help. If young Luke (Brendan Meyer) needs to be shown how to quieten down the bullies at school with a few broken bones, Dad (Leland Orser) would have his promotion prospects improved by a nasty accident to a colleague, or Mom ( Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Blue Ruin, the American thriller which won the coveted FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes last year, will amaze. It stars actors you don’t know, made by a director you don’t know yet Blue Ruin is proof of life beyond Hollywood: this is a tremendous independent film. We’re not talking something shot through an iPhone with one location. We’re talking an entertaining, incredibly smart and deftly-made story with heart, a message and memorable characters and scenes. Clue: when the cinematography, script, acting and direction are mesmerizing, you’ve got a winner.Macon Blair is Dwight, a long-haired vagrant Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shared yearning for a place to belong is not a revelatory concept, nor is it given new dimension in this gently saccharine piece, yet although the whistle-stop tour only covers familiar landmarks, the journey is a convivial one. Adam Mathias and Brad Alexander’s pop/rock-cum-contemporary Broadway show meanders through six vignettes – with a loose thematic thread – that take place at American tourist attractions; some are all too brief, others outstay their welcome. Graham Hubbard’s economical staging is mostly effective, bar some cumbersome box moving and the strange decision to keep one Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not quite true to say no one would have heard of JJ Cale without Eric Clapton. Clapton’s cover of “After Midnight”, released in 1970 as the first single on his debut solo album, put Cale on the map as a songwriter and paved for his own inimitable recording career. But Clapton didn’t actually record “Cocaine” until Slowhand in 1977. In between Lynyrd Skynyrd slipped in with their account of “Call Me the Breeze”, the song which lends its name to this Clapton-led tribute a year on from Cale’s death.Cale was a reticent inspiration to more than Clapton. The major singer-songwriters of a Read more ...
David Nice
It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin’s - or rather “The Gershwins’”, as this title frames it, though Ira wasn’t quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy and Bess? An opera? Trevor Nunn made the three-hour-plus score, much cut here, dazzle at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. Michael Tilson Thomas’s Barbican espousal of bleeding chunks alongside Berg’s Lulu, left as a torso in the year of Porgy’s premiere, 1935, even put me in mind of the sheer generous optimism of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. A musical? This threepenny version made me think rather of Carousel, a Read more ...