America
Katherine Waters
On their return home from Ohio to New York, young couple Jenny and Elias (Anneika Rose and Tom Mothersdale, main picture) make a detour to Gettysburg for a few days’ sightseeing. Elias has been fascinated by the town and its bloody history since he was a young boy; Jenny is ambivalent, and in the throes of an incapacitatingly painful period. The outline is simple, but this is Annie Baker’s John and nothing is quite as it seems. (The same writer's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick played this same address in 2016.) Their B&B is run by Mertis (Marylouise Burke, pictured below), a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Michael Portillo has barely been off a train since leaving politics, taking journeys blending scenery and history: it must be a relief receiving plaudits for edutainment instead of the abuse habitually heaped on politicians.Herewith the third American series, around the East Coast, its history perhaps intentionally a subtle rebuke to Trumpian values. Ten hours of film divided into 20 programmes detail an 1,100 mile journey from Boston to Toronto. Long-distance American railroad journeys in the 21st century are an odd enterprise: once a country where great fortunes were made by the railway Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
"The Times They Are A-Changin'" has never sounded so menacing. The Brothers & Sisters’ gospel version accompanies the end credits of The Final Year documentary as we watch the stunned UN ambassador Samantha Power unpinning her son’s drawings from her office wall and moving out of the White House on the day before Trump’s inauguration.It’s only towards this grisly end that director Greg Barker’s film gathers momentum. It starts with a promise of intimacy – Power getting her bouncy kids ready for school, secretary of state John Kerry forgetting his cell phone before he’s driven off in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It beggars belief that, from the moment Steven Spielberg took delivery of the script by first-timer Liz Hannah, it took a mere 10 months to get The Post in the can. Its subject being the race to publish, that's a fitting rate of production. Introducing the film at its London premiere, Spielberg stressed the urgency of a story about the media under renewed attack. For Richard Nixon, who tried to suppress the bad news about Vietnam, read Donald Trump’s confected concept of fake news.The Post has since acquired an extra timeliness. There’s an indelible image towards the end of Katharine "Kay" Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The rolling stone is now at home in the West End, as Conor McPherson’s inimitable dramatic take on Bob Dylan transfers from the Old Vic, where it premiered last summer. Described as “a play with songs”, it’s the distinct harmony of two art forms, rather than straining one to incorporate the other in the usual jukebox musical fashion – and the resulting soulful tapestry allows form to articulately reflect its iconic inspiration.Set in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, in the Depression-era 1930s, writer/director McPherson gathers a desolate gaggle of folks in a rundown guesthouse: owner Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It probably won’t take long for the title to be sawn in half. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will become casually known as Three Billboards and its specific location will drift into a vaguely remembered background. The place name is of a piece with Martin McDonagh’s previous visits to half-mythical places: Inishmore, Inishmaan, Leenane. Ebbing is everywhere and nowhere, a no-account small town in the faceless epicentre of the Midwest where a teenage girl can be raped and murdered and nothing much will be done about it.The eponymous billboards are stationed on the quiet country road Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“With that film I became a filmmaker,” Wim Wenders remembers in one of the extras accompanying this new release of his 1974 Alice in the Cities. More importantly, it’s the one that convinced him that he wanted to be one. His third film after graduating from film school in Munich, it followed an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter which very nearly put him off cinema for good.He recalls here how the only thing that he enjoyed directing in that one was a single half-hour scene between Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer, whose central pairing is at the heart of Alice ( Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Detroiters razed sections of their own city as surely as Rome did Carthage, during five summer days in 1967. It took, amongst others, the 101st Airborne – victors at the Battle of the Bulge, then just back from Vietnam – to crush America's worst race riot of the decade. Forty-three people were killed, and empty lots scarred the still devastated city a half-century later, when Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow made the week’s worst atrocity her subject.Though Bigelow has gained her greatest acclaim for claustrophobically sombre work torn from the headlines in The Hurt Locker and Zero Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The last time we saw Christian Bale in a western, he was playing the downtrodden rancher Dan Evans in James Mangold’s punchy remake of 3.10 to Yuma. No doubt it was valuable experience for his role in Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s smouldering flashback to the last days of the Frontier, where Bale plays veteran US Cavalry captain Joseph Blocker.Bale also has previous with Cooper, having starred in his blue collar drama Out of the Furnace, where (as in Yuma) the actor played a fundamentally decent man being ground down by a pitiless fate. In Hostiles, his character isn’t quite so clear-cut. We learn Read more ...
theartsdesk
It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight. This was a sweet moment for the considerable choir behind the backlash against Damien Chazelle's film. There's room for both, and plenty more, in theartsdesk film writers' picks of their favourite films. We also nominate a few stinkers because bad films deserve to be called out, too. Feel free to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One of the much-hyped jewels in the crown of the family-friendly BBC holiday season is this new three-episode adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much loved novel by Heidi Thomas, the writer of Call the Midwife. We started in the New England winter – a simulacrum of Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott lived with her three sisters, in circumstances of genteel poverty that she lightly fictionalised in her best-selling novel.An American classic since its publication, and never out of print, Little Women has already made it into half a dozen films, several television adaptations, a piece of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After her brittle and unloveable turn in John Madden’s Washington-lobbyist drama Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain gets the chance to do it again, properly. This is thanks to Aaron Sorkin, whose directing debut Molly’s Game is. More to the point, his screenwriting is back at full blast, so while the verbiage is typically plentiful, it’s also barbed, speedy and pointed enough to cause nosebleeds and razor-cuts.Sorkin has adapted the true-life confessions of the real Molly Bloom and her wild ride running high-stakes underground poker games (“From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Read more ...