Hollywood
Matt Wolf
Don't be deceived by Kit Harington's matted, slicked-back hair that is immediately visible the minute the audience enters the boisterous West End revival of True West. By the time the director Matthew Dunster's production has roared to a close two hours later, pretty much nothing is still intact, its leading man's locks included. That's as it should be with Sam Shepard's now-iconic 1980 play that I actually saw somewhat by chance during its world premiere engagement in San Francisco in 1980 and have returned to many times since. Now marking its commercial London debut (previous local Read more ...
David Nice
Getting the look right is half the battle: in that, Peter Groom's one-time-Captain Marlene Dietrich is a winner from the start. The looks at the audience nail it too, heavy-lidded and lashed but transfixing, charismatic, winning instant complicity. As with all the best one-(wo)man cabaret-style shows, though, this is no mere impersonation. Groom has the mannerisms and the mostly soft-grained delivery, but he delivers the familiar songs in his own register, with a special intensity that helps to make this selective light shone on a great 20th-century figure ultimately elegiac.It isn't Groom's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s long been a fascination with the death of busty, blonde, Marilyn-alike Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield. The fact that it supposedly resulted from a curse by the occult showman and head of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, builds in an element of preposterousness that’s proved irresistible to generations of conspiracy theorists. The first thing to note, then, for connoisseurs of golden age high trash, is that Mansfield 66/67 in no way gives definitive answers, selling itself as “A true story based on rumour and hearsay”. It does, however, prove an entertaining gumbo of fact, supposition Read more ...
David Kettle
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’ sometimes vague musical notions to sonic reality. All of which gets raced through in this jam-packed documentary by first-time director Matt Schrader, a somewhat frenetic, 93-minute dash through the subject.Schrader has clearly put in a massive amount of work, and Score is very much a labour of love. He’s amassed dozens of interviews, with remarkable Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s impossible to view The Last Jedi independently from its predecessors. It’s the second instalment of the third trilogy of cinema’s greatest space opera. And it’s very much a product of what came before, but not in the way you might expect.After the ambitious but deeply flawed prequels, The Force Awakens traded originality for nostalgia; a plot driven by coincidence and luck, all to serve reassured thrills. With the franchise safely re-established, Disney has now turned to indie auteur Rian Johnson (director of Looper and Brick) to shake things up.Unusually for a Star Wars film, we pick Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
At first glance, the meetings between heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) and a 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), lead one to fear the worst for the kid. Their stilted exchanges in public places, during which the man gives the teen expensive gifts, don’t suggest a family connection, or a mentor-student relationship, but a secret intimacy that can only be, in some way, dreadfully wrong.But then Murphy takes the boy home to meet his ophthalmologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children. And before long the earlier assumption is turned on its head. In fact, Martin Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s Hollywood horror film is casually stripped here of what seemed fathomless mystery back in 2001. Former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse kicks off a packed extras disc by using Lynch’s 10 clues on the original DVD case to easily decode its otherwise utterly disorienting last 30 minutes. The relationship between Betty (Naomi Watts), a perkily indomitable blonde actress from Deep River, Ontario, statuesque brunette amnesiac Rita (Laura Harring) and their seedier inversions of those characters in the final reel becomes almost mundane, when viewed through Jousse’s prism. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco. A mecca for refugees from Europe seeking transit papers that will enable them to fly to neutral Lisbon and thence sail for America, the café is a hotbed of shady deals to which Rick, cynical and aloof, turns a blind eye.He Read more ...
Jasper Rees
La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years. Unless you have a heart of reinforced teak, its silk-and-honey songbook will seep into your consciousness and stay there, from the rapturous overture “Another Day of Sun” via Mia’s beautiful song “Audition” and the perky love duet “Lovely Night” all the way through to Mia and Sebastian’s bitter-sweet theme tune.The film is the college dream of director Damien Chazelle and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance. That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same Read more ...
David Nice
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white photos in the middle; what we get in the text is undoubtedly erudite but also racy, gossipy, anecdotal, list-inclined, sometimes camp and a tad hit and miss.The proviso that this is an ideal seasonal read comes with the knowledge that you can have fun searching YouTube for some of the more arcane musicals in question and find out exactly what Mordden Read more ...
David Nice
An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter. But then nothing needs overegging in this piece of perfectly-executed seasonal froth. Two Read more ...