America
David Nice
Southwark's golden triangle – the Menier, the Playhouse and the Union – has given us so many "lost" musicals which only a decade or so ago would have been lucky to get in-concert airings. Chief gap-fillers in the Rodgers & Hammerstein oeuvre have been the Union Theatre's charming shot at Pipe Dream, which had quirky subject matter – Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday – and a few good songs, and now the Southwark Playhouse's "European professional premiere" of Allegro, which has a half-interesting, home-grown plot and not a single vintage R&H number. No amount of heart Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema has waited a long time for a film about Miles Davis. It hasn’t been for want of trying by Don Cheadle, who stars in, directs, produces and takes a co-writing credit on Miles Ahead. Despite the support of Davis’s son, daughter, nephew and first wife Frances Taylor, the film was trapped in a pipeline for aeons. While he waited, Cheadle had plenty of time to turn himself into a trumpeter good enough to perform onstage in the film’s coda with Davis collaborators Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.The wait was so long that it easily outstrips Davis’s five-year fallow period in the 1970s when Read more ...
joe.muggs
The duo of Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi – aka 21- and 23-year-old Tupelo Mississippi brothers Khalif and Aaquil Brown – are the epitome of everything that is baffling to ageing hip hop fans. Whisked from obscurity as teenagers by superstar producer Mike Will Made It, they became the breakthrough rap success of 2014, with what appeared to be little more than leaping around shirtless barking a bunch of half-nonsensical slogans and in-jokes about how much weed, money and sex they are surrounded by. There's nothing overtly conscious or “woke” about them, no reverence for hip hop's history, just Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Coinciding with both Pokémon Go madness and a developing backlash against the insidious modern plague of mobile gadgets, Nerve is a moral fable for the social media era, and a Cinderella story that turns into The Hunger Games. Luckily, it's much more fun than that makes it sound.The movie's title is also the name of an online game in which players undertake increasingly risky dares while being egged on (via a mobile phone app) by unseen controllers. These have access to all the participants' various sources of online information (Facebook, Instagram, whatever), which they use to exploit the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A two-bar flurry of guitar lays the table for a skip-along beat, handclaps, and an arrangement and melody akin to Martha and the Vandellas’ March 1964 single “In my Lonely Room”. This though was not a Motown production and did not tell the story of a girl so distraught at her boyfriend’s dalliances that all she could do was take to her lonely room and cry. On “The 81”, Candy & the Kisses sang of a dance craze for anyone “tired of doing the monkey, tired of doing the swing.”Despite being a knock-off of the Detroit sound, the irresistible “The 81” did not sound like a Motown record. It Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Jazz,” said Keith Jarrett once, “is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple." For an audience, it produces a never-to-be repeated event: yes, you were there, and you didn’t miss it. One of the pleasures of seeing a group at the peak of contemporary jazz like The Impossible Gentlemen is to witness that joyous, open-minded and defiant spirit. In six years of existence, and now presenting their third album, the trust between the members of the group has visibly deepened. There is also a sense they are evolving, that they can and will go still further.The rhythmic Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The American northwest is gorgeous: endless lakes, limitless ocean, mountains, forests, overwhelming blue skies in deepest summer, mists and of course rain, in one of the wettest places on earth – 4 metres of rain annually. Here were hundreds of islands too, archipelagos in a land almost infinitely rich in resources, from the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia south to Washington State.We were on an extended visit, on foot, canoe, kayak, speedboat and car, guided by the enthusiastically knowledgable Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum. The landscape was punctuated by visiting Read more ...
joe.muggs
Detroit techno music is important. Any student of the club music of the modern age knows this. The sound that fermented among the majority black population of the decaying industrial city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as disco's last remnants fused with the avant-garde experiments of Europeans who were first getting their hands on synthesisers and drum machines, went on to change the world. It seeded the UK's rave explosion, jungle, drum'n'bass and all the electronic experiments that came after. It created a futurist aesthetic, which managed to be somehow both optimistic and dystopian, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
New England in the 17th century is the primordial soup of American horror: where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hettie Prynne received her Scarlet Letter, the vampire nest in Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot was seeded, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible tested original, hysterical sins. There is a small, parallel English strand including some of its cinema’s most affecting horrors, too – Matthew Hopkins’ Civil War rampage in Witchfinder General, A Field in England, and The Blood On Satan’s Claw’s slightly later, sexually raw tale of a possessed village. The Witch, Robert Eggers’ debut as writer-director Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Neil LaBute’s exercise in self-flagellation, first seen in 2005 and adapted for film in 2013, offers his familiar misanthropic take on the battle of the sexes. This one concerns Guy (Charles Dorfman), engaged to be married and embarking on a tour of ex-girlfriends across America – ostensibly to right wrongs, but murkier motives soon emerge.It’s inescapably formulaic and repetitive, with Guy visiting a series of women in a series of hotels, each exchange following a similar pattern: defensiveness, rekindled intimacy, revelation and recrimination. Gary Condes’s production differentiates the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The midlife crisis, the one-night stand in another city, the younger woman and the honeyed words that turn to dust – they happen all the time, in life and therefore in stories. In Anomalisa they are seen miraculously afresh thanks to Charlie Kaufman, that tireless cinematic frontiersman, and his co-director, animator Duke Johnson.The novelty of Anomalisa is that stop-motion figurines play out the life of Michael Stone, an inspirational self-help guru who can inspire everyone but himself. As he lands in Cincinnati to give a talk, his marriage has turned to dust, he is tempted by the siren lure Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A neon sign over the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance reads Scandinavian Pain. Following its victory over us in Euro 16, it seems that Iceland is now drenching us with its special brand of melancholy. Things are not that simple, of course. In his work, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson indulges his penchant for sorrow with such bitter sweetness that, with many a gentle sigh, emotional pain morphs into something more akin to pleasure.In any case, he is hard pressed to distinguish real emotion from its ersatz other, since he was born into an acting dynasty and, as a child, spent many hours Read more ...