America
Javi Fedrick
Across their 17-year career, Liars have become renowned for both their genre-jumping and for making good music wherever their stylistic tent is pitched. With founding member Aaron Hemphill leaving the Los Angeles band on amicable terms earlier this year, sole Liar Angus Andrew was left with the task of maintaining their momentum, and with TFCF, he’s made a uniquely strange album that encompasses this stripped-down band in both its music and its production.Making almost unprecedented use of the acoustic guitar throughout, TFCF feels rawer and more intimate than their previous album, the dance- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary Oscar 10 years ago, the film’s success marked two significant events: a positive turning point in the campaign to avert environmental catastrophe; and the resurrection of the public career of Al Gore, after his presidential defeat at the hands of George W Bush. It also happened to be a very good documentary.That first film galvanised both debate and action related to climate change. The aim of the cutely titled second has a textbook campaigning duality: to trumpet the efforts and successes of the past decade, while reminding Gore’s growing Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Christopher Rainey, aka "Quest" – his hip-hop name – lives with his wife Christine’a and their young daughter PJ in north Philadelphia. Jonathan Olshefski’s restrained, absorbing documentary follows this African-American family over almost a decade during the Obama years, starting with the 2008 election and ending with Trump’s 2016 campaign, punctuated by Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown school shootings.Quest and Ma Quest, as she’s known, have plenty of back stories and grown children from other relationships, but "tired of the bullshit, the crap and people doing each other wrong" they’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
There are lots of ideas bubbling away under the surface of The 5000 Fingers of Dr T. There would have been even more had the studio not panicked after a disastrous preview screening. Half the musical numbers were scrapped, subplots ditched and a new prologue and epilogue inserted. What remains of Roy Rowlands’s 1953 fantasy is described by singer Michael Feinstein in an extra on this release as “a mangled masterpiece”. The excised songs have been located, but the missing footage still hasn’t been found.The film's component parts are promising: the screenplay was co-authored by Dr Seuss, and Read more ...
David Nice
Only one thing could equal the "wow!" factor of seeing and hearing a youngish Hugh Jackman launch into “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’“ at the start of the National Theatre’s 1998 staging of Oklahoma!: John Wilson and his orchestra trilling and swooning their perfectly-balanced way through the Overture at the Proms. Three and a quarter hours later, you might have felt you'd heard some of those tunes at least twice too often, and you might also have questioned, despite excellent work from nearly all concerned, whether it was such a beautiful mornin’ after all. When you get all the original Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A Ghost Story must be the first film with a sheet – a very expressive one – in the leading role. Beneath it is C (Casey Affleck), with two holes for eyes. It’s funny at first, but the Halloween cliché is rapidly transcended. C, a musician, haunts the faded ranch house in Texas where he lived with his wife M (Rooney Mara) before his death in a car crash nearby. A simple plot line, but this, David Lowery’s fourth feature (St Nick, Pete’s Dragon, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which also starred Affleck and Mara) is a complex and beautiful movie about time, loss and impermanence. After seeing it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Gaiman understood the country where he’d landed as an immigrant in the Nineties by writing American Gods. His first substantial novel after his crowning comics achievement, The Sandman, mined an idea of infinite plenitude: if every immigrant since the Vikings took their gods with them to America, what happened when the worshippers assimilated, and forgot?This first season of Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s Gaiman-overseen adaptation answers with an increasingly discursive road-trip taken by Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane as a genial but ruthless con-man, the twinkle in his eyes sometimes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.As this life involves marriage to Jennifer Garner, who has given him two gorgeous twin daughters, this looks like senseless squandering of a winning hand. But as Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
“This is a true story. This is a story…” The self-referential nature of Noah Hawley’s baroque narrative arc was one of the great joys of the third season of Fargo. Over the past 10 weeks its constant invention, cinematic tricks and award-worthy performances have come together to produce the best drama of the year (so far).The story it tells is an old one: Cain slays Abel. Or rather Emmit kills Ray (Ewan McGregor in both roles). As someone who shall be nameless sang a long time ago: “Two little boys had two little toys”. In this case a stamp collection and a cherry-red Corvette. The Stussy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Come awards time, it’s inevitable that Elisabeth Moss will be collecting a few for her portrayal of Offred, the endlessly-suffering lead character in The Handmaid’s Tale (her real name is June). But I reckon the real stars of the show are cinematographer Colin Watkinson plus the production design and art direction teams. What made Handmaid grip from the start was its photography and its balefully beautiful colour palette.There were those post-Puritan white and maroon outfits worn by Offred and her fellow-handmaids, often choreographed en masse in muted, wintry New England landscapes, and Read more ...
bella.todd
Plays with songs in, or more precisely plays with famous songs in, can feel like the uncanny valley of theatre. They’re not quite musicals and not quite tribute shows. They deliver on familiar tunes and disconcert with fresh narrative. You’re constantly wrongfooted by the rush of recognition.Lazarus was good-weird – a mash-up of David Bowie and Enda Walsh with a vision so unique and uncompromising it didn’t matter if anyone else could quite see it. Girl from the North Country, the new play by Conor McPherson for the Old Vic with songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, is also very weird. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Big Sick is an enchanting film from the Judd Apatow comedy production line. Don’t be put off by the terrible title. There are two forms of sickness on display in the story of Kumail Nanjiani, a Pakistani American who plays himself in his own autobiographical romantic comedy.The overt sickness is the one which afflicts Emily (Zoe Kazan). She and Kumail, a stand-up comedian/Uber driver, start dating after she heckles him at a gig. She spends half the movie in a coma, flirting with death, while Kumail loiters around the hospital, willing her to recover even though they have in fact broken up Read more ...