America
mark.kidel
Boz Scaggs is one of the greatest white soul men. Endowed with a distinctive silk-lined voice, he has navigated the waters of blues, country, jazz and quality disco with ineffable cool and a pretty consistent hit rate. Memphis, his first album in five years, is a return to the music of the South – in some ways a homage to Al Green - after a couple of gently impressive jazz releases in which he showed he could master the standards canon with delicacy and ease.The new CD was made with a cast of studio superstars: Ray Parker Jr plays guitar with a deft combination of minimal intervention Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.” Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, the composer’s Lecture On Nothing went on to become a core text within his 1961 collage-meditation of essays, Silence. Restoring it to spoken form (and thus reanimating the beautiful tensions of this un-speech, this voiced absence), Robert Wilson’s staging finds a whole new echo-chamber of resonances for a classic text muted by neglect in mainstream culture.Wilson’s affinity for the American minimalism of this period is most famously explored in his quasi Read more ...
emma.simmonds
No your eyes don't deceive you - Terrence Malick has directed another film, released not even two years after his last offering The Tree of Life. If you've no idea why that's worth remarking on, the gaps between his last four offerings were respectively six, seven and - drumroll please - 20 years. To The Wonder may be in the same ballpark of beauty as Malick's previous picture, and sound as if it shares the same astronomical ambition, but where that film soared this one sometimes struggles.It starts with an attractive couple, rapturously in love. They are the Neil (man of the moment Ben Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not a bad idea for a series, even if it is a tiny bit Boardwalk Empire Goes to Nevada. In short: whoosh back to the early Sixties and poke about in the wild and lawless underbelly of Las Vegas, a city awash with debauchery and corruption and under the thumb of the Mob. Better still, the show was created by Nicholas Pilleggi, screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks Goodfellas and Casino.Vegas is based on the true story of Sheriff Ralph Lamb, who aimed to tame the hookers, hustlers, hitmen and hucksters who helped make Sin City such a fun destination. Lamb is given some movie star Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You don’t so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada’s most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It’s hard to think of another director whose response to the Iraq War would involve an Elvis impersonator, menopause as a major plot point and a visual cadenza for twelve perspex chairs, but that’s the love/hate thrill of Lepage. Spades is the first in a planned tetralogy of plays each themed around one of the suits of cards. Conceived in partnership with round arts venues across the world, the cycle proposes a 360 degree theatrical experience Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bristling chest, the suggestive swell under the feathered crotch, the leering lipsticked mouth, the size 12 pink pointe shoes. Even the name of the troupe tickles the ribs, so serious yet so ridiculous. What's a camp word like Trockadero doing in the middle of a legendary Russian ballet company name?It's time to raise a scented handkerchief in respect to the male comics known as the Trocks, visiting Britain on their 40th anniversary tour. The beefy ballerinas with their fragile Russian nerves have been dying on stage before us for decades and show no sign of stopping, so much do audiences Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pre-Raphaelites, eat your heart out; and wherever he is, John Ruskin, once so dismissive of the artist, must be beaming with pleasure. The American landscape painter Frederic Church (1826-1900) was indeed seen as the heir to Turner, and his distinct landscape idiom is encapsulated by a handful of oil sketches – just over two dozen – of scenes from the Hudson River Valley to Petra, Ecuador to Newfoundland, Bavaria to Salzburg, Jamaica to Labrador. It is enough to give a tantalising glimpse of his extraordinary fluency with colour, texture and composition, at the service of a passionate Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult to categorise Benh Zeitlin's feature debut, which is engaging and flawed in equal measure. Part drama, part dream-like experience, it was made as a riposte to the catastropically poor management of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.We don't know when this story is set, though; it could be modern-day or it could be just as easily in a post-apocalyptic future when climate change is wreaking havoc in the bayous of southern Louisiana, whose strange beauty the camera lingers on in several scenes without drama or dialogue.It's set in a wetland area called the Bathtub by its poor and Read more ...
bruce.dessau
"Gonna shake the house," rasps Mark 'E' Everett on "Bombs Away". It is the first track of his tenth album and it certainly sounds like a statement of intent. Everett has often come across as something of a gloomy rock and roll runt in recent years, but this time around the worm appears to be turning and he ain't taking any cotton-pickin' nonsense any more.It is pleasing to note that the lyrics definitely have a gutsy, defiant optimism about them, albeit alongside Everett's usual misery: "watching the death of my hopes", he sings on the Johnny Cash-tinged, countrified sob story "On the Ropes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know Sylvester Stallone didn't do this movie for the money, since he's surfing the career revival wrought by the astounding success of The Expendables. Perhaps he wanted to work with Walter Hill, here directing his first movie in over a decade. Perhaps Sly just prefers working to loafing around the pool in between bouts of weight-lifting.Derived from a graphic novel by French author Alexis Nolent, Bullet to the Head is a strange beast, cynically and relentlessly violent but leavened with some incongruously smart wisecracks. It has a decent cast, but they're offered next to nothing in the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Aimee Mann must surely be one of the most unstarry of stars. While most of her fans were still in the bar thinking about what they might have as a pre-gig aperitif, she strolled onstage to join support act Ted Leo for a couple of new songs they have written together. No grand diva entrance here, she just strapped on a bass guitar and stood next to the Costello-ish Leo pulling at those strings. Moral? Never ignore the support act, it might feature the person you've paid to see.When Mann returned after the interval there was no costume change, no big fanfare to signal the start of her set, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
"You're a hero, man! You will never pay for a drink for as long as you live." Sounds easy enough, but after the sensational crash sequence in the opening scenes of Flight, heroism will never be the same. The Oscar-nominated script by John Gatins is a morally skilful examination of one terrifying what-if: what if Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who sensationally landed US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, had been a closet drunk?Also Oscar-nominated is Denzel Washington for his portrayal of Whip Whitaker, heroic pilot with a problem. Striding down a hotel hallway on Read more ...