America
Jill Chuah Masters
Just Mercy, the latest film from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), is based on a New York Times bestseller. It has a star-studded cast. It’s emotionally moving as well as intellectually accessible. But it’s no easy film to watch. “They can call it what they want – it’s just another way to lynch a black man.” Just Mercy is about death row in the American South, and it is a bruising and beautiful film. It lights a fire under you.Just Mercy is based on a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, an American civil rights attorney who has spent his life working with adults and children condemned to die in Read more ...
Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle, BBC Four review - meticulous account of a haunting American tragedy
Adam Sweeting
It happened 42 years ago, but the mass suicide of 900 people at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana is still an event that freezes the blood. They were members of the Peoples Temple, the semi-totalitarian cult founded by Jim Jones, who began as a mere egomaniac but morphed into a bullying dictator convinced of his own God-like powers.This was the first of two 80-minute Storyville films (on BBC Four) but the length paid off, allowing director Shan Nicholson to assemble a meticulously detailed portrait of the way Jones built up his “Temple” and persuaded ostensibly rational people to follow him Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The dinosaur credentials of disgraced cop Frank Penny (Aaron Eckhart) litter his flat, from his battered old TV to his binning of his daily newspaper, bar the sports section. As he begins his beat, vlogger Ava Brooks (Courtney Eaton, pictured below) is blathering wokely about the mainstream media. The appearance of a pair of ruthless but remarkably stupid kidnappers results in Penny’s jaw-dropping decision to let her live-stream his hunt for the kidnap victim, due to drown in 63 minutes in an undisclosed location.The film’s real-time rampage through those minutes is screamingly unconvincing, Read more ...
howard.male
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had every intention of making Songs Of Our Native Daughters featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah my Album of the year. It’s a solid work of great beauty, elegance and substance. But you can read my thoughts on it elsewhere on The Arts Desk. And the album is number eight in Rolling Stone’s Top 40 of the year, as well as being Iggy Pop’s personal album of the year, so more waffle on it from me is neither here nor there. Whereas the still relatively unknown Louisiana pop group Seratones may still be new enough to this game Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The acclaim of being the first to represent the mid-1980s AIDS pandemic in cultural form was a plaudit that none of those concerned would ever have wished for. With New York as its epicentre, and almost nothing known about the disease that was hitting at the heart of the city’s gay community, such early attempts were tentative, the boundaries between personal and political still rough. Strictly, theatre came first, with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart premiering in 1985.Dating from the same year, Arthur J Bressan Jr’s Buddies was certainly the screen pioneer, a piece of urgently made Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapped-out buildings like lost souls. This poignant collaboration between playwright Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan – himself born in Duluth in 1941, seven years after this play begins – takes us into a community in which music provides a rare release for individuals scavenging for reasons to stay alive. It was something of a surprise for McPherson to be approached by Dylan to create a theatrical vehicle for his music; when asked why he thought he had been Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who knew? This West End premiere of the 2007 Broadway entry from the legendary songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret) secured a prime holiday-season slot at the last minute when this playhouse's previous entry, The Man in the White Suit, closed prematurely. And the happy if unexpected news is that Paul Foster’s touring production – Wyndham's, unusually, is another stop on the road – is a pure delight. Curtains may not be the subtlest or most nuanced musical you’ll ever see, but it’s without a doubt one of this year’s most thoroughly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If good intentions were everything, Teenage Dick would be the play of the year. As it is, this British premiere at the Donmar of an Off Broadway entry from summer 2018 grants centre-stage, and not before time, to two disabled actors, one of whom – the mesmerically fearless Daniel Monks – plays the Shakespeare-inspired figure of the title. But viewed purely in terms of text, author Mike Lew's nod towards the Bard's most charismatically demonic anti-hero feels some way still from finished and is so busy changing gears that even Michael Longhurst, the director, has to struggle to make Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview comes to the Young Vic with the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama under its belt, and a reputation for putting audiences on their mettle through a build-up of theatrical surprises that culminate in a denouement about which the playwright has urged all who have seen the play to keep silent. It certainly delivers a final act that places viewers in a theatrical position that they have probably never experienced before, one that will prompt reflection long after the impassioned note on which the play's frenetic 90 minutes conclude.The result is ingenious in every way Read more ...
Tom Baily
Blue periods can lead to golden streaks. Such is almost the case with Honey Boy, which Shia LaBeouf wrote during a court-ordered stay in a rehab clinic for the treatment of PTSD symptoms. Based on LaBeouf’s upbringing and childhood acting years, the film focuses on the troubled relationship between Otis (Noah Jupe) and his dad James (Shia LaBeouf), switching occasionally to a young adult Otis (Lucas Hedges) undergoing rehabilitation.Director Alma Har’el turns LaBeouf’s script into an aesthetic vision of L.A. neorealism with a dab of the surreal. The main ingredients in the broth are dialogue Read more ...
graham.rickson
Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with director Wes Anderson’s familiar tropes. Elaborate sets, artfully designed props and Bill Murray all feature, the usual eccentricities tempered by genuine affection for the film’s young heroes. Anderson’s eighth feature film, released in 2012, is about many things: youthful love, isolated rural life and family dysfunction among them. Bob Balaban’s twinkly Narrator, sporting typically Andersonian attire, sets the scene: we’re on the New England island of New Penzance in 1965, three days before a devastating storm is due to hit.Twelve-year-old Sam Shakusky (a Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of telling understatements. Olive, Again follows ten years on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel in stories” Olive Kitteridge, which painted a resonant, emotionally complex portrait of a community in fictional Crosby, a small coastal town in Strout’s native Maine. Via 13 interlinking short stories, Strout refracts glimpses of her eponymous character Olive, a retired maths Read more ...