New York
Adam Sweeting
New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head. It’s here that the brilliant puppeteer Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch) has masterminded his children’s TV puppet show Good Day Sunshine, which bears a striking resemblance to such Jim Henson creations as Sesame Street and The Muppets.You might think that Vincent would be happy with his life, since he’s hailed as a genius in his field and Good Morning Sunshine isn’t just a TV Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Begin the mission and the funds will come,” says feisty, tubercular nun Francesca Cabrini (Christiana Dell’Anna; Patrizia in Gomorrah) to Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) in 1889. She specialises in defying expectations, especially when men tell her she should stay where she belongs. She became the first American saint, canonised in 1946.Directed by Christian conservative Alejandro Monteverde, whose Q-Anon-approved movie Sound of Freedom about child sex-trafficking was, disquietingly, a controversial hit last year, this biopic is overlong, sanitised and sepia-toned, awash with angelic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of employability that must make many of his fellow-actors green with envy, Modine has been clocking up a stream of memorable performances for 40 years on both the small and big screens.The title role in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984), where he played opposite a fledgling Nicolas Cage, signalled the shape of things to come. His performance as Private “Joker” Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s often said that contemporary American playwrights are too polite, too afraid of giving offence. But this accusation can’t be levelled at Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose dramas – from Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train in 2002 to The Motherfucker in the Hat in 2011 – are dirty-tongued and often fiercely emotional. Now his Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Between Riverside and Crazy – which opened Off-Broadway in 2014 and has also won other prestigious awards – comes to the Hampstead Theatre in a production directed by Michael Longhurst, and with a cast headed by the excellent Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the West End. Red Pitch, Operation Mincemeat, For Black Boys… have already made their mark, and now this quirky musical for just two performers joins them.It’s been a long journey, starting in Norwich and Northampton and followed by Kilburn, where the show opened last Christmas at the Kiln Theatre. Appropriate timing, since the musical is set in December with one entertaining song about the insistent horrors of the Xmas musical standards, but it works just as sweetly in the Criterion in April.Illusions and reality Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What with the interminable Harry and Meghan saga, the death of the Queen and the recent health scares for Kate and King Chuck, this is just what the Royal Family needed – the exhumation of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis which probed his alarm-bell-jangling relationship with serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. And it doesn’t end there, since looming over the horizon is Amazon Prime’s three-part dramatisation of the same story, A Very Royal Scandal (starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson).Be all that as it may, Netflix got there first, with a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Who you going to call? Five films into the Ghostbusters franchise, every persuadable survivor from the ’84 original, plus the ad hoc, Paul Rudd-led Spengler clan introduced in the series-reviving Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). The low-key, humane, borderline dull result bears little tonal relation to that bombastic founding film.Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire inevitably ups the ante from the slow-burning Afterlife, with the Spenglers relocated from Oklahoma to the old Ghostbusters’ firehouse base, and an early, careening Manhattan ghost-hunt. Old bureaucratic nemesis Walter Peck (William Read more ...
James Saynor
As everyone knows, the two most likeable creatures in the fictional world are the dog and the robot. Who doesn’t love a waggly tail or an aluminium cranium? So putting the two together in an animated movie looks like a Bennifer-perfect match.Robot Dreams pairs them, hand in hand, for walks in the park and rides on the subway in a bright, peppy feature that combines American optimism with mounting European angst. The film by Pablo Berger is a Spanish-French production based on a graphic novel by the American illustrator Sara Varon, and is set in a faithfully drawn New York of the 1980s, full Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it, her output since Sonic Youth (and her marriage) dissolved in 2011 has been prodigious. It’s ranged from new band projects Body/Head and Glitterbust, to film roles, to art exhibitions, and more. But perhaps most dynamic are her solo albums with producer Justin Raisen, of which this is the second. The Collective successfully continues their journey Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Back in 1979, Koko operated as The Music Machine. As such, the Camden Town venue lent its name to the film Music Machine, marketed as the British equivalent of Saturday Night Fever. Buying into this vision of the North London setting as a hot-bed of dance-floor action required a suspension of belief: at the time, the then-grubby Music Machine’s staple bookings were metal, punk, post-punk and the emerging Two-Tone bands. This was no disco.Flash forward to 2024, and the New York-based Say She She are headlining the recently refurbished Koko. With their roots in late Sixties soul, mid-Seventies Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe. Consent was unproblematic for over-16s (unless you were young, gay and male), there was no social media, nor even any camera phones, and Britney was still a decade away from sucking on a lollipop and asking sweating middle-aged men how was she supposed to know on primetime TV. Things have become more complicated since, rightly so, and transgression’s darker side has Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...