America
Adam Sweeting
1. Nightmare AlleyIt’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power), it’s the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose journey starts with his miserably paid job at a travelling carnival.It could have used a trim here and there. But once you get sucked into the narrative, it’s a wild ride – like a ghost Read more ...
Veronica Lee
US comic Alex Edelman first came to the attention of British audiences in 2014, when he was named best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for his show Millennial, in which, said one critic, “he regales us with tales of smart-arsery and backchat”. He has since toured with more of his clever and erudite observational comedy in Everything Handed to You and Just For Us, as well as performing them in the West End.Edelman is also a comedy writer and has contributed to The Great Indoors and Teenage Bounty Hunters, as well as Saturday Night Seder, a virtual celebrity Passover seder held during Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Pain is, at one and the same time, something to avoid, and also something you can use. Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American mystical author of the 1923 best-seller The Prophet, concludes that, despite suffering, “all is well”, but how true is that? In his award-winning play, which premiered in Boston in 2011, American playwright Stephen Karam examines the issues in a thoroughly original, brilliantly constructed and thematically compelling way.Now getting its belated European premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, Sons of the Prophet is an enthralling experience, both intellectually and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There’s no stopping Harry and Meghan. Logic, reason and facts can’t stand in the way of their “war on oppression and injustice” and determination to become “advocates of healing”. Even though their notorious interview with Oprah Winfrey was littered with demonstrable untruths, it seems their target audience buys into the notion of them telling “their” truth, surely the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. The absurdity of preaching eco-awareness while travelling everywhere by private jet and motorcade never seems to prick their perma-bubble of blissful self-regard.Finally their Netflix Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is Noah Baumbach’s most capacious, overreaching work, corralling Don De Lillo’s novel of catastrophising, neurotic academia into a film jazzily dependent on rhythm, hooked on language and wildly diverse in tone.Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a paunchy, middle-aged professor of Hitler Studies in a small Midwestern city in 1985, married to Babette (Greta Gerwig), with three kids who act as a hyper-articulate Greek chorus. He dreads death, suffering nightmares of a foreign figure in his bedroom, and closer still, beneath the suffocatingly stretched bedsheet where his wife should be, scenes Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy James Graham, and he conjoins the two to riveting effect in Best of Enemies.Telling of the televised 1968 debates between William F Buckley and Gore Vidal during that year's presidential race, Graham's hurtling drama is now in the West End after its Young Vic debut nearly a year ago; Broadway, presumably, is the next destination, not least given his play's American setting. We've been down this road before in varying ways, via Frost/Nixon on the one hand and Graham's own Ink, which posited two male Read more ...
David Nice
Looking for a sparkly operatic musical, well sung and played, slick and saturated in a range of mainstream styles that stop short in the year the movie masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life was released, 1946? Then Jake Heggie’s 2016 confection may be for you. One thing’s for sure, though: it may be trying to do something different from the Capra classic, and it’s welcome to have the Bailey family as African Americans, but this isn't a patch on the rather more layered film.Endemic of the problem is that Capra’s crumpled, blue-eyed angel hoping to gain wings from helping a human in trouble has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You expect gross-out movies to send your hands flying in front of your eyes. But Luca Guadagnino's ludicrous Bones and All is not just gory but grossly sentimental, too. Reuniting the Italian director with the star of his breakout hit Call Me By Your Name, the film finds a physical embodiment of its title in the wraithlike Timothée Chalamet, playing a cannibal-minded drifter who beneath his skin and bones is just a lost soul at heart. That it takes over two hours to get to that preordained fact is reason enough to forego a movie that wants to be provocative and edgy but merely Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.For those who can’t see it from their seats, the playwright has usefully included a line about this being a “sawdust restaurant”. If you happen to notice that there are oyster shells scattered over it too, and nod in recognition, you will probably feel less adrift given that the oyster shells and sawdust reference comes Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
On April Fool’s Day, in 1978, the godmother of American punk, Patti Smith, jumped offstage at the Rainbow Theatre in London halfway through a version of “The Kids Are Alright” and started dancing in the crowd. Her vertiginous feat was also a leap of the imagination, a typical punk act that seemed to collapse the distance between performer and audience.The kids were definitely all right with this sudden unexpected proximity to their idol – and I can say that because I was one of them. Indeed I remember being struck by the way her guitarist and collaborator Lenny Kaye seamlessly picked up the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even the jolliest number on Micah P Hinson’s new album, a banjo-pickin’, wistful campfire jig entitled “Waking on Eggshells”, has him singing, “Give me a knife, I’ll show you my vein”, alongside offers to “blow out your brain” with various firearms, and proclamations he “must be going insane”.If the listener is after jollity, best look elsewhere then, but those searching for world-weary Americana could do worse than settle down, lonely and broken, with these 10 tracks from the Texas-raised singer.Hinson has released numerous albums since he appeared 20 years ago. He has a penchant for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Two-percent movie-making and 98% hustling,” Orson Welles sighed not long before his death in 1985. “It’s no way to spend a life.” His 1962 film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was his penultimate full-scale completed feature, only 1965’s Chimes at Midnight similarly allowing him a regular director’s resources during his last quarter-century (the fraudulent documentary F for Fake from 1973 was later conjured from scraps with filmic legerdemain).Kafka’s paranoid tale, written as World War One began, and predictive of the totalitarian mindset which would murder his own family in the Holocaust, sees Read more ...