America
Helen Hawkins
There’s a Coen brother directing, plus a cast that includes Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo and Margaret Qualley, the standout hitchhiker in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… so why does Drive-Away Dolls feel so insubstantial?Ethan Coen has co-written the script with his usual editor, also his (gay) wife, Tricia Cooke, and the talent has duly signed on. But even they can’t provide enough ballast. It’s a film of sporadically funny moments that strain to be bad-ass. The first such moment comes in the opening scene, a Philadelphia bar in 1999, where a jittery well Read more ...
David Nice
How lucky those of us were who grew up musically with the young Simon Rattle’s highly original programming in the 1980s. He’s still doing it at a time when diminishing resources can dictate more careful repertoire, and last night’s Americana proved spectacularly original. Four of the five works gave a different perspective on the decade and a half in which Shostakovich’s very different Fourth Symphony, LSO triumph of the earlier part of the week, failed to reach public performance.Did the sequence work? Not entirely. Bookending a John Adams premiere, an unfamiliar expansion of Gershwin’s Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Opera in Britain is currently cursed by funders, politicians and ideologues – of right and left – who heartily detest the form. Alas, some directors do their work for them with interpretations seemingly designed to undermine the very art they are employed to serve. English Touring Opera (rare beneficiaries of a recent boost to their public subsidy) have regularly excelled in the past. They will do so again.Indeed, their new version of Puccini’s first mature success, Manon Lescaut, began its cross-country progress at Hackney Empire on Saturday with plenty of striking vocal moments – notably Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is given a new lease on life in Mexican director Michel Franco’s moving, complex film, full of fine performances.Saul (a wonderful Peter Sarsgaard), who has early-onset dementia, plays the song constantly. It’s a kind of comfort blanket for him and his fading memory gives those loopy lyrics a new significance.The film starts with a slightly confounding, busy scene in which Sylvia (an unadorned Jessica Chastain), a care worker in an adult day centre, attends an AA meeting in a Brooklyn church with her teenage daughter Anna (an impressive Brooke Timber, Read more ...
James Saynor
The Iron Claw is the sort of solid, mid-market Hollywood “programmer” that is often said to no longer exist on the big screen, and this family saga set in the world of Texas wrestling certainly has the feel of a museum piece. Many have warmed to it, perhaps for that nostalgic reason. American sports movies tend to do poorly in overseas markets, so it’s a little surprising that this one has the prominent involvement of BBC Film. It tells the true-ish story of Fritz and Doris Von Erich and four of their sons, who entertained the public with their tight-trunked slaprobatics in the 1970s and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Floridian-born, longtime Brooklyn resident, now Asheville, North Carolina based Roberto Carlos Lange doesn’t rush things, but he gets them done. This is his ninth album in 15 years, during which time he’s built a substantial body of audiovisual / computer art / installation work too. And as with all this creative endeavour, it’s not showy, it doesn’t demand your attention, but it spreads out its ideas and emotions very much at its own pace.His relocation to Asheville came after the Covid lockdown experience in New York – which explicitly inspired 2021’s Far In – and it’s easy to hear a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American artist Barbara Kruger started out as a graphic designer working in advertising, and it shows. Her sharp design skills and acute visual intelligence now produce funny, clever and thought provoking installations in which words and pictures illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie.The Serpentine Gallery show opens with one of her most iconic pieces – a hand holding up a card which reads: “I shop therefore I am” (pictured below), a witty rejoinder to the famous maxim “I think, therefore I am” penned by philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. Read more ...
The Handmaid's Tale, English National Opera review - last chance saloon for sub-Atwood baggy monster
David Nice
Never underestimate the enduring power of a great story over an unwieldy operatic setting. Few of us who saw the first ENO production of The Handmaid’s Tale back in 2003 thought the work stood much chance of revival. Yet Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel has justifiably gained even greater hold since then, so here we are on a third run of Poul Ruders’ baggy monster.If there’s a reason to go, it has to be American mezzo Kate Lindsey’s transcendent performance as Offred, one of the many “handmaids” enslaved in the Republic of Gilead to bear children for the wives of powerful men. I missed this Read more ...
Matt Wolf
How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two entirely different (and lauded) runs, the story of a Southern Black woman's self-empowerment across nearly 40 years is a movie once again, this time drawing on the stage musical and carrying over several alumnae from that show – leading lady Fantasia Barrino included. Fantasia, as the then single-monikered talent was known at the time, took over Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.She moved to Nashville to be with her future husband, and some of the songs reflect this, but musically Jarosz holds the line with what came before, highly polished, reflective folk-Americana.It’s a matter of taste as to whether listeners find her style of production Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At its best theatre is a seducer. It weaves a magic spell that can persuade you, perhaps against your better judgement, to love a show. To adore a show; to enjoy yourself. This, at least, is my experience of Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois, a queer Western extravaganza which opened at the RSC last year and now arrives, in all its shiny silk-costumed glory, at the Royal Court in London. Normally, I would hate the idea that this venue, which is meant to be our foremost new writing theatre, being just a receiving house for the RSC, but this fabulous romp just blows my doubts clean away.Set in a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics. It’s a masterclass in meshing screenwriting, acting, cinematography and music direction in a seamless blend. The script, by David Hemingson, takes an old trope – the curmudgeonly teacher versus the bright but wayward student – and gives Read more ...