America
Adam Sweeting
Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke. When he’s called out to investigate a tip-off about a bank heist, he finds himself tumbling down a rabbit-hole where time, space and identity itself all get swirled in a kaleidoscopic blender.Already, things haven’t been going Read more ...
Justine Elias
Wandering the wrecked streets of Memphis in search of blues and rock history, two teenage Japanese tourists debate who and what’s better: Elvis Presley vs. Carl Perkins, the sleek ultramodernity of their hometown Yokohoma vs. the “vintage” charms of a nearly deserted Tennessee train station.He’s cool and poker-faced, she’s sweetly extroverted, but they’re young and in love, and no matter how much they argue, the road-tripping couple (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh) discover America in a way that natives rarely do. And check out an exchange between her and a downtown denizen who asks for a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margaret Simon (a brilliant Abby Ryder Fortson) is 11. What she wants above all is to be “normal and regular like everyone else”. This means getting her period at the right time – “I’d die if I didn’t get it till I was 16,” she tells her mother (Rachel McAdams) – and filling out her Gro-Bra. An only child, she makes God her confidant and asks him to help.Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s charming, atmospheric movie is mainly faithful to Judy Blume’s iconic novel, fans will be relieved to know, though transferring such an interior life on to the screen is by definition problematic. It Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kesha is one of the 21st century’s most characterful pop stars. She’s regularly stepped out of the boxes people have put her in, musically and otherwise. But, even taking into account truly oddball songs such as “Godzilla” (from 2017’s Rainbow), or projects such as working with Flaming Lips, Gag Order, created with cosmic ultra-producer Rick Rubin, is by far her most out-there work. It’s also the sound of a tormented human being.On her first two albums Kesha personified young American women raucously embracing hedonism, breaking out of the cultural straitjackets that had head-melted Britney, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage through the particular prism of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as “Jazz Fest”, which is held on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May. It had a celebratory fiftieth anniversary edition in 2019 before being forced to close for two years by the pandemic.The film does a good job of explaining the festival’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose.The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does the “special relationship” really exist? Judging by Netflix’s sparky new political drama, yes it does, with London-based CIA agent Eidra Graham (Ali Ahn) going out of her way to spell out the unique intelligence-sharing arrangements between the US and the UK. Just as long as everyone remembers that the Americans are well and truly in charge, nothing can possibly go wrong.The titular diplomat is Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who thought she was about to be posted to Kabul but is instead diverted to become the US ambassador in London, following an attack on a British aircraft carrier in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Lisa Cortés’s fast-paced documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything opens with a TV interview made in 1971, 16 years after the rock 'n' roll pioneer became an overnight success with groundbreaking hits like "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly".Wearing a baby pink onesie and a crown-shaped tiara, Little Richard smiles coyly to camera, bats his beautifully made-up eyes, and says, “A lot of people say I’m shy, but I let it all hang out – the love, the tenderness, the kindness. You ain’t supposed to hide them; if you’ve got ’em, God damn it, show ’em to the world.”And show them Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Sight & Sound’s recent Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) placed joint 48th with Ordet (1955), just ahead of The 400 Blows (1959) and The Piano (1992). Loden’s existential indie drama about an uneducated working-class Pennsylvanian woman (played by the writer-director herself) haplessly fleeing the role society allotted her might lack the intellectual heft of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which topped the poll, but it’s the more accessible and compelling film.Loden made a diffident, self-deprecating guest when Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dracula’s fly-eating henchman Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) seeks solace in a self-help group from his co-dependent, fanged boss (Nicolas Cage), in a comic horror action flick which posits the pair as a vampiric Steptoe and Son – though that relationship was more genuinely nightmarish.The Dark Universe Universal hoped to create around its classic 1930s monsters crashed with the redundant medieval origin story Dracula Untold (2014) and braindead Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy (2017), but standalone hit The Invisible Man (2020) – ditching H.G. Wells for an Elisabeth Moss domestic abuse Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Whether grinding or eerie, bellicose or plaintive, the exquisite jazz- and classical-infused prog rock dirges disgorged by King Crimson over the last 54 years stand apart from the more accessible sounds made by their illustrious peers, including Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Curved Air, and ELP. Given the discomfiting aesthetic of Crimson’s music – a fulminating anti-panacea, relentlessly modernistic – is it any wonder there was much misery in its making?Watching Toby Amies’s documentary In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is an enthralling and often amusing Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two wolves. An old Cherokee’s grandson is grappling with internal tensions; self-hatred and self-aggrandising. For Phoebe Bridgers, one-third of indie supergroup boygenius (usually styled with no initial capital letter), this analogy sits at the heart of album standout ‘Not Strong Enough’. In it, the trio, completed by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, let out the divine line “Always an angel / Never a god,” adding a wry smile to the delivery.Subverting male hero worship is one of the (many) things that’s so refreshingly brilliant about a Read more ...