America
Nick Hasted
“Hannibal Lecter meets Jason Bourne”: that’s how director Ryuhei Kitamura unbeatably sells No One Lives’ indestructible serial killer hero. But his film is at its most interesting before it’s clear who Driver (Luke Evans, pictured below) is, or where we stand with anything that’s happening.We meet this coldly urbane charmer as he motors through the American South, checking into a motel with a woman with an ambiguous relationship to him – maybe an accomplice to the murders glimpsed on TV, and certainly jealous of another woman who, we eventually discover, is being transported in the boot of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When The Newsroom’s first season started in 2012 the unthinkable seemed to have happened: Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network, had lost his mojo. Not even his previous, erratic show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, cancelled after its first season, had moments as excruciating as this. Set within a fictional cable news channel and centred on a ratings-hungry anchor man, Will McAvoy, who has rediscovered his fire for campaigning journalism, The Newsroom sought to combine the idealism and calling-to-account of Sorkin’s best work. But whereas Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys: Made in CaliforniaMade in California is a fantastic thing. Six CDs slot into the inside of the back cover of an LP-sized, full colour hardback book with a padded cover. As an artefact, it’s a triumph. As a career-spanning summary of the best of The Beach Boys’ music it’s flawless. Quibbling about individual tracks which aren’t included is possible, but ultimately pointless. Everything which needs to be heard is here. Made in California is a statement of who The Beach Boys were, are and even – as revealed by some of the originally unreleased tracks – who they could have Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was only today I learned that, for copyright reasons, it is impossible to use Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech in its entirety without paying a hefty licensing fee to his estate. That knowledge made it easier to understand why a new documentary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington seemed to gloss over its figurehead’s famous words.That those lines ring with familiarity half a century later is testament not only to King’s skills as an orator, but to the activists and civil rights leaders who pulled together what remains one of the largest, and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
There’s never a good day for traffic in the Hamptons, and a Friday in August takes the biscuit. The Montauk Highway, also known as Route 27, was bumper to bumper on the way to the Parrish Art Museum, recently relocated from nearby Southampton village to an exciting new building in the Watermill area. However the slow pace didn’t prevent me missing the turning for the museum, a remarkable achievement as it’s a vast barn-like structure, the length of two football fields, just off the highway on a site of a former tree nursery. But its tiny black sign was almost invisible and at first I thought Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-age films have frequently featured inebriated antics and ill-advised hook-ups, but it's usually the teenagers behaving badly. The Way Way Back sees a family decamp to an East Coast beach house for a summer vacation described witheringly by one teen as "Spring Break for adults". The film is the directorial debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (two of the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants), who also pen the excellent screenplay and take supporting roles.Duncan (Liam James) is a painfully shy 14-year-old from Albany who hangs uncomfortably in his own skin and can't seem to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The notion of childhood as any sort of state of grace gets exploded big-time in What Maisie Knew, a largely blistering celluloid updating of the 1897 Henry James novel from The Deep End team of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. True (for the most part) to the spirit of its literary source if by no means to the letter, the movie on its own terms captures the terror that adults can inflict on children, a bequest that a brilliant cast makes painfully plain. Suffice it to say that by the time Julianne Moore, playing the toxic mother of the eponymous Maisie (Onata Aprile), tells her six Read more ...
Simon Munk
The Saints Row series has always been something of a magpie, stealing liberally from other games. It started out as a cheap second-tier Grand Theft Auto clone. But here, it transforms into a very silly, but great fun knockabout superhero game - the most gleefully rampaging fun gameplay you'll see this week.Trying to summarise the plot of Saints Row IV should give you some sense of exactly how seriously the game takes itself. The members of a street gang, called The Saints, decide to put their gangbanging past behind them and turn their appetite for destruction to good – they take on a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.Jason Sudeikis plays David Clark, a small-time weed dealer who's never really grown up. When he's robbed of his drug stash and money after playing the good Samaritan he finds himself in debt to mwa-ha-ha Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shot in Seventies throwback grainy-cam, Amanda Seyfried is superb as Linda Lovelace in the surprisingly entertaining biopic Lovelace. Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Bobby Cannavle, Hank Azaria, Chris Noth, Juno Temple and James Franco round out a dream cast.Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Howl) and written by Andy Bellin, it charts the harrowing rise of 1970s porn phenomenon Linda Lovelace from her Floridian girlhood as Linda Boreman through to her starring role in 1972’s big grossing adult film Deep Throat - said to have earned up to $600m on a production cost Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Next Monday Bob Dylan releases Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), the tenth volume of his Bootleg Series which casts new light on one of his most maligned records, 1970's Self Portrait. Two days beforehand a selection of his pastel portraits will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery. (Both events, naturally, will be reviewed on theartsdesk.) At 72, popular music's most mercurial character is still throwing curveballs. For half a century now successive generations have wrestled with Dylan's mutations; mostly we pick and choose and settle for – at best – a partial understanding. His Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wilfully perverse avant-hipster darling Harmony Korine has always teetered on the paper-thin border between vanguard edginess and trendy, emperor’s-new-clothes vapidity. His previous work, from the opening salvo of Kids, with Larry Clark, through various warped cinematic visions of a freakish American underclass, have set out to repel a wider audience. Spring Breakers, while equally determined to shock, is a change of pace. It has a cast that includes High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens and Bieber/Disney pop princess Selena Gomez, as well as Hollywood heavyweight James Franco, and revels in Read more ...