America
Markie Robson-Scott
“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women ended the Peloponnesian war by withholding sex, Lee’s advice is for the ladies of the ‘hood to do the same until their men Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A welcome antidote to the mood of a time which seems hell-bent on closing borders and building walls, The Music of Strangers is about a unique musical collective that breaks through division and reaffirms the potential of culture to unite. Subtitled “Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”, Morgan Neville’s film is about the band that came into being at the beginning of the millennium on the initiative of the great Chinese-American cellist, giving us snapshots from its history, as well as the stories of some of its many and varied members.It focuses on the lives of these individuals of diverse Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.Rylance the writer has given Rylance the actor a typically Rylance part: charmingly guileless and gormless Ron, the loquacious and gently dotty companion of serious fisherman Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), whose suffering of this irksome presence Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Harry Belafonte initiated the project for his production company and hired the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to adapt the novel by William P. McGivern (author, too, of The Big Heat). The loot Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Back in the 1980s Jim Jarmusch was a breath of fresh air. He made quiet, quirky films about young urban Americans that dispensed with the prevailing neon-bright high school romances, jocks and suburbia. He was about as far removed from the John Hughes/John Landis/Porky hit machines as you could get. Jarmusch was saturated in obscure B-movies, modern poetry and played in a band. His breakout feature, Stranger than Paradise, starred the then unknown John Lurie, who over the course of the film drifted from a cold New York to a frozen Cleveland and emerged blinking in the stale sunshine of Read more ...
David Nice
Has there ever been a more pertinent time to revive the poetic mythologies of Brecht and Weill? The writer said that the good-life-for-dollars city of Mahagonny was not exclusively an American state of mind and should be set in any country where it's performed. But the inverted morality tale of The Seven Deadly Sins explicitly references seven American cities. And with lines like (in the Auden/Kallman translation) "If you show your offence at injustice, Mr Big will show he's offended", it's very much of the moment. Add a performer of colossal magnetism like Storm Large, the slickest Weillian Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Way back in 1996 Robert Earl Keen issued an unexpected career bestseller in No 2 Live Dinner, and this new double live set marks a joyous, star-stacked return to John T Floore’s place, 20 years later, drawing on three decades of songcraft, alongside live cuts from his most recent studio set, 2015’s Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions.Floores Country Store in Helotes, Texas, is a honky-tonk, barbecue café and bar dating from the 1940s, set on the Old Bandera Road up in the hill country north of San Antonio. As such, a line of cold beers, a quart of chili and a Saturday night crowd would be Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As the United States – and the world – agonises over the coming of Donald Trump, it seems to many of us that all hope is almost irretrievably lost. How timely, then, is the publication of a collection of essays which chronicle and celebrate a decade when hope abounded, when it seemed (despite manifold horrors) there was still all to play for.That’s not to say it was all peace and love. Far from it. At home, Americans fought a bloody battle for the most basic civil rights and abroad a costly and futile war in Vietnam. Khrushchev decided to park nuclear missiles on Cuba and for 13 days the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jim Jarmusch has made a memorial to the Stooges, more than a celebration of their brutal prime. His Zen rhythms, which roll so movingly through the upcoming Paterson, aren’t entirely equipped for the blunt trauma of Ron Asheton’s guitar, or Iggy Pop’s penchant for sultry chaos. He’s barely adequate journalistically on the band’s early years, but is on hand for their death, as hard living leaves almost no Stooge standing. This makes his documentary a proud headstone for punk’s founding fathers, and one of America’s greatest groups. Ron Asheton died in 2009, before Jarmusch began filming, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When's the last time you heard an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical described as a gas, a hoot, an unpretentious delight? All those qualities, and more, are there for the savouring in School of Rock, which has reached the West End a year on from its Broadway debut and is going to make a lot of children (and their parents) happy for some time to come. And I don't just mean the wildly talented tykes who are in the cast. Lloyd Webber has always contained within him the would-be rock god, as evidenced across a diverse output that ranges from Jesus Christ Superstar (whose summer revival in Regent's Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Paul Schrader is one of those filmmakers who critics really want to love. Not only is he responsible as a writer for at least two masterpieces – Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – he’s also the director of such great films as Mishima, American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. But what really makes people who write about movies watch out for each new Schrader film is that he started off as a critic himself, and it still shows in his deep knowledge of cinema and insatiable desire to find new ways to tell stories through clashing images, abrasive dialogue and discordant music.It’s a shame therefore when the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to buy CDs, and a time when it was still possible for bands to sustain slow-growing careers which built steadily from the ground upwards. Having been one of the trailblazers of America's mid-Eighties alternative rock movement, growing a faithful following through college radio and endless touring, REM had had it moderately large with their Read more ...