America
Joseph Walsh
A long shadow looms over Robert Zemeckis’ new take on Roald Dahl’s classic 1980s book The Witches, starring Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway and newcomer Jahzir Bruno. That shadow is cast by Nicholas Roeg’s strange and terrifying 1990 adaptation starring Anjelica Huston, which expertly captured the wicked humour of Dahl’s book. Roeg’s film may have diverted from Dahl’s original plot in some respects, but it shared the author’s peevish delight in terrifying and delighting in equal measure. Zemeckis’ film is a much more bubble-gum affair, made all the worse by an over-zealous Chris Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious. Go to the cinema wanting to be plunged into a fever dream of gothic Americana, replete with glaucous close ups of Elisabeth Moss as a writer wreaking revenge on her unfaithful husband, and you’ll be more than satisfied. But if you’re hoping for a linear narrative that adheres to the actual biography of Shirley Jackson, the artful elliptical editing which blurs elements from her fiction with cherry-picked aspects of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Black people, since the beginning of time, have always made things cool. Jazz, rock ’n’ roll… pick anything from a cultural standpoint and we have always been the arbitrators of cool,” says sports journalist Jamele Hill. “And it was really no different with sneakers.”One Man and his Shoes is not about sneakers, though, so much as the clever marketing campaign that transformed a small American company specialising in running shoes into the global giant, Nike, and the dramatic impact this had on black youth in America.The star of the campaign was basketball super hero, Michael Jordan, except Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a brave film distributor who releases a documentary about an American journalist in the UK at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic, so first salute goes to Eve Gabereau at Modern Films for giving Raise Hell a proper launch. The late Molly Ivins was a hugely popular figure in the US, her witty, acerbic political columns were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, but she’s practically unknown in Britain. It’s impossible to think of an equivalent figure here, unless you imagine The Guardian’s Marina Hyde crossed with Jo Brand.Janice Engel’s highly enjoyable Read more ...
mark.kidel
As he cruises into the autumn of his life, 71 year-old Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, as he's generally known, revisits territory that will sound very familiar to his fans. Perhaps that's what's needed, at this time when those core American values he's sung about with enduring passion seem threatened as never before.There are new songs – like the title track “Letter to You”- that sound quintessential, as if nothing had changed: the trademark twangy guitars, rolling Hammond B Organ and churchy rock’n’roll piano, the romance of Bruce’s sweet desperado voice, wrapped up in a wall of sound that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Towards the end of this new documentary, an account of how he recorded his new album Letter to You at his home studio in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen delivers a eulogy to the E Street Band. “The greatest thrill in my life is standing behind that microphone with you guys behind me,” he tells his gnarled old troupe, as they near the completion of the album (it took them four days, all of them playing live in the studio).Then, over a snowy winter landscape shot from a slow-flying drone in the rich monochrome that’s the movie’s trademark, Bruce adds a kind of valediction to life itself, mulling Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider was a film of rare honesty and beauty. Who would have thought she’d be able to top the power of that majestic docudrama? But with Nomadland she has.To call it a loose adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, isn’t quite right. That book profiled many eccentric characters who have rejected capitalist America and hit the road to live a freer and perhaps more noble way of life. Free from the constraints of modern living they’ve adopted something that echoes the spirit of the first pioneers. In the film, Zhao mixes fact with Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Shot across a period of five years, David Lynch’s creepy debut feature Eraserhead (1977) follows the story of Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, an employee at a print factory in a quiet, unnamed town. Henry arrives home one evening to a missed telephone call from a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house. Once he arrives, Mary’s mother breaks the news that her daughter has given birth to a baby, and Henry is the father.“They’re still not sure it is a baby!” If the premise sounds innocuous enough, Mary’s tortured reply sets the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sometimes in fictional cinema, a character can seem so strong, so righteous, that you begin to doubt the reality of the piece. How can anyone be that good when faced with such hardship? Perhaps these thoughts make us feel better about ourselves, and what we do with our lives. But we can make no excuses with Time, a documentary about a woman so remarkable that it could only be true.In 1997, married couple Fox and Rob Rich had a family and a failing business. In desperation, they attempted armed robbery of a bank. Fox was incarcerated for three and a half years, and her husband was sentenced to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is Emily in Paris “the dumbest thing on Netflix right now?” or a sugar-rush of escapism in the midst of our global pandemic misery? “We need things to make us smile,” commented one Parisian viewer. “In the time of Covid,we don’t need more to stress us out.”The show’s creator, Darren Star, has a genius for tickling the ratings g-spot, having been the mastermind behind Beverley Hills, 90210, Melrose Place and Sex and the City. This time, though, he’s ventured beyond traumatised teens in California and the tortuous lives of career women in New York, to take a look at transcontinental culture Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the historic slaving hotspot of Gabon rang with a steely sense of commitment. Elsewhere, though, the editorial focus was slack and the content rambling, as though the project (on BBC Two) had undergone a last-minute salvage job using whatever was at hand.However often you hear them, the details of the slave trade are stomach-turning – it’s estimated that Read more ...