America
Matt Wolf
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Throw in footage of film adaptations of their work, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more, and you have a riveting mosaic of two men marginalised by society who came to occupy pride of place in the cultural zeitgeist. It's not only Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens is not only prolific, multi-talented and wide-ranging in his experimentation, but he never fails to make interesting work. He’s undoubtedly one of the giants of American contemporary music. His originality and creative risk-taking have led to him being one of the most underrated artists of his time. His latest album – over two hours of instrumental composition and made during lockdown – is a daring, profound and fiercely personal requiem to his recently-deceased father.Convocations, hot on the heels of Stevens' s previous album The Ascension (2020) is a lengthy suite of both Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read our review of the season finale hereDark family dramas set in unglamorous, unprosperous communities in the north-east of the USA have become a genre unto themselves. One thinks here of the work of writers such as Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone), and maybe Chuck Hogan and The Town for good measure.New from HBO, Mare of Easttown (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a fine addition to this lineage, thanks to a superb and surprising lead performance from Kate Winslet and excellent work from the show’s writer and creator Brad Ingelsby ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There are moments in Straight Shooting (1917), the first feature directed by John (then "Jack") Ford, when its star Harry Carey (1878-1947) exudes a naturalism that the famous Western actors who followed him, most notably John Wayne, strove to emulate.When Carey's character Cheyenne Harry is looking confidingly at the camera, his surly almost-smile is millimetre-perfect in its grudgingness and sense of the ironic. His unsteadiness and glazed expression when drunk convey that bizarre mix of hyper-selfawareness and dimmed comprehension everyone knows when they've had two or three too many. In Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After winning a couple of Baftas, and with five nominations at next week’s Oscars, Promising Young Woman comes surging in on the crest of a wave. Emerald Fennell, already known for acting roles in The Crown and Call the Midwife and for showrunning series two of Killing Eve, hits it out of the park here as writer and first-time director, and she’s the first British female to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. She’s brilliantly supported by Carey Mulligan’s sizzling lead performance.Promising Young Woman isn’t easy to pigeonhole, but that’s part of its tantalising allure. It’s by turns a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the wilderness. “Men will never be my owners again.”The distinctive minor-key arpeggiated riff that punctuates the track was, says Dozier, “originally supposed to be a worship song”. Dozier grew up up in Dothan, Alabama – a city named for the biblical location where Joseph’s brothers threw him into a well before selling him into slavery – in a strict Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I once went to see Motorhead, back in the days when real men didn’t wear earplugs, and afterwards it was if somebody had completely sawn off the top half of my hearing register. Weird and scary, and the band were putting themselves through that every night.Darius Marder’s absorbing and ingenious Sound of Metal takes as his subject a thrash-metal drummer who suffers near-total hearing loss, and is suddenly faced with having to re-evaluate his life, his career and the central relationship with his bandmate, Lou. Marder pitches us head first into a stage performance by Lou and drummer Ruben ( Read more ...
theartsdesk
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes in technology in the years since, "television", as Bordo points out, has become estranged from its material status. “In 2020, ‘television’ is what we watch, not the material object we watch it on.” Combining memoir with social and political history, her book is about our changing relationship with TV and the box's far-reaching consequences for our Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its emotional thread is again pulled tight by mid-20th century, glamorous iconography, and fame and love met with equal, glassy passion.Del Rey has found a new way to be post-modern, decades after the condition became too total to be mentioned. She is authentically artificial, honestly romantic, a self-conscious construct lit with her voice’s sensual Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“David, don’t run,” is the refrain that runs through the first scenes of Lee Isaac Chung’s affecting, autobiographical Minari, acclaimed at Sundance, winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film (it’s mainly in Korean) and nominated for several Academy Awards. David, played by wonderful seven-year-old newcomer Alan Kim, has a heart problem that causes his parents, especially his mother Monica (Yeri Han) to worry about him constantly.They have plenty of other worries too. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun; Sorry to Bother You, Burning, Okja, The Walking Dead) has brought his family from South Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”. All of these apply in some sense to The Things We’ve Seen, the latest novel from Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. The title owes itself to a line by the poet Carlos Oroza; the full version (“It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”) is one of a number of cut-phrases that loop and reverberate at Read more ...
Tom Baily
Like the sun-happy LA of this film’s setting, there’s a hard-to-pinpoint sham quality to Wander Darkly. It feels like too much phoney dialogue crept in to the final script of this “serious” film by writer-director Tara Miele. Sienna Miller is a formidable centrepiece in the drama about a couple forced to review their relationship history after a car crash. But she is held down by a story that feels like it was clipped together in a rush.Adrienne (Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are in an unmarried relationship with a young child, and they’re struggling. Adrienne is in and out of creative jobs Read more ...