New York
Matt Wolf
A New York blizzard so intense that people can't get out the front door traps a random couple who have hooked up online into a rather longer mating dance than they had anticipated. That's the essence of Two Night Stand, the debut film from director Max Nichols (son of the late, great Mike, who died in November) that prolongs a wearyingly cute premise well past breaking-point.That one sticks with the goings-on at all pays credit to the cast of what is essentially a two-hander: the large-eyed Analeigh Tipton and the ever-remarkable Miles Teller, the Whiplash star here cast as a horndog Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of harsh words have been and will continue to be written about the new movie musical remake of Annie, the Broadway mainstay about the Depression-era tyke who exists to teach her elders a few life lessons on the way to a sun-drenched "Tomorrow" (to co-opt the title of the show's best-known song). But from where I'm sitting, a disproportionate share of the film's self-evident faults are swept away by its impossibly irresistible young star, Quvenzhané Wallis. As long as Wallis is onscreen, it's damn hard not to smile in return and save one's gripes for later. Now all of 11 years old, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s never a good start when the performers have more to gain than the audience. The album Cheek to Cheek, of which this was a televised performance, came out in September to a respectfully reserved reception in UK, while American critics, seemingly more demanding of originality, gave it a vigorous pasting. Musically, it has as much substance, and as many holes, as one of Gaga’s dresses, but the novelty of the concept, if not the interpretations, is just sufficient to see the hour’s show out.Waggish critics have suggested that the old trick of yoking of one stale, flagging career to another Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This newly-restored version of one of MGM's most hallowed musicals is making the seasonal rounds with a run at the BFI and selected cinemas around the country. Directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1955, the piece drips with period charm, while its pairing of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra is still capable of generating a box office buzz 60 years later. But (I'll just whisper this) it may seem like a bit of a slog for modern audiences.It's not just the 150-minute duration that sometimes makes time feel like it's been nailed to the floorboards, or the jarring quaintness of the Damon Runyon- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past. We see a lot of septuagenarians and octogenarians, as well as film clips and photographs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.The piece opens with a voice-over in a whiny Brooklyn accent, as if we might be in Scorsese land or Sopranos world. It's a jolt to discover that the voice belongs, entirely plausibly, to the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There's a "foreword" which accompanies the new Taylor Swift album – because it's not enough for the one-time Nashville starlet gone full New York pop star merely to create physical objects for the digital age: she also has to give them forewords – which says that these songs that were "once about my life" are "now about yours". It's for this reason that those articles that list the romantic encounters claimed to have inspired every song Swift has written since 2010's "Dear John" onwards do her an incredible disservice: the gossip column inches are irrelevant. That Swift can use vivid Read more ...
fisun.guner
That there is something of the Sherlock Holmes about Dr John Thackery – the Shakespeare-quoting, opium and cocaine-addicted surgeon in this Steve Soderbergh-directed 10-part drama set in a New York hospital in 1900 – hasn’t gone unnoted. But although Thackery, played with a certain gruff charm by Brit actor Clive Owen, is clearly a maverick with a clandestine habit, a happy outcome for his patients is rarely on the cards.Surgical techniques being fairly primitive, and a modern and safe anaesthetic procedure also some way off – and what with the electricity short-circuiting and setting Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
When Alan Gilbert’s Nielsen Project with the New York Phil and Danish label Dacapo is completed next year, it will total four CDs including the six symphonies, three concertos (flute, violin, clarinet) and two bonus overtures. The latest instalment (Symphonies 1 and 4) has just been released, while earlier this month the orchestra performed the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Maskarade Overture in three concerts which were recorded for release in January 2015. On the morning after the first of those concerts, Alan Gilbert talked about his love for Nielsen, why he’s jumping at the opportunity Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Britain has entered a “post-Christian” era, declared former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams earlier this year: we acknowledge its cultural presence, but Christianity is no longer an habitual practice for the majority of the population. If that’s accurate, viewers of the 2009 American work Next Fall will most likely sympathise with Charlie Condou’s sceptic Adam, who simply cannot comprehend his partner Luke’s (Martin Delaney) certain belief in Heaven, Hell and an inevitable Rapture, nor how such convictions are reconcilable with their life as a committed homosexual couple.This Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of this dense and rewarding odyssey of Prohibition and American gangsterism are doubtless still reeling from the news that its fifth series will be the last, despite the riotous applause which greeted series four. This unwelcome state of affairs perhaps accounted for the vaguely dissociated and dream-like quality of this season opener, which was as much concerned with filling in some of Nucky Thompson's early history as with driving the plot forward into the 1930s.An opening sequence set in 1884, of young boys diving into the sea to catch gold coins flung from the Atlantic City pier by Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If Chiltern Firehouse is any indication, power in our society lies not in bank balance, postcode or job title, but in being seen nibbling crab doughnuts at the hottest restaurant in town. Becky Mode’s merciless skewering of that particular ego trip first delighted the discerning palates of Menier Chocolate Factory audiences in 2004 and makes a welcome return for the theatre’s 10th anniversary, now directed by original star and creative collaborator Mark Setlock. He and Mode both did time in pretentious Big Apple eateries, Setlock answering phones and Mode waiting tables – hellish experiences Read more ...