New York
Sebastian Scotney
It was not until October 2017 that The New York Times ran a front page story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey with the title “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harrassment Accusers for Decades.”A few days later, the board of the Weinstein Company, including the crucial vote of his younger brother Bob, ejected him. And from then on, the prosecution started to put together the case against Weinstein, which, after over a hundred women had testified against him, resulted in his conviction and imprisonment in February 2020.But could the tide have turned against him many years earlier? Why didn’t it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.It’s in no way comparable to the classics which Keaton produced and directed in his mid-1920s purple patch, the wordy screenplay cobbled together from a pair of popular stage plays and the film directed in workmanlike fashion by Herbert Blaché, who wasn’t familiar with Keaton. Douglas Fairbanks was originally slated to star, recommending his younger colleague for the part of Bertie Van Alstyne when he found himself unavailable.That Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bankruptcy, rubble, rape and murder: Manhattan in the Seventies could be grim, as multiple New York punk memoirs make clear. The trade-off was the art, steaming and burning in the stinking, crucially cheap degradation. Punk was just one symptomatic part of a crumbling Lower East Side where old Beats, folkies, jazzers, poets, theatre, film and visual artists also lived.The point of Danny Garcia’s Nightclubbing doc is to stake Max’s, Kansas City’s claim as a punk epicentre, and challenge CBGB’s fabled status. Despite a few key interviewees, his low-budget, artless film does no one any favours. Read more ...
Tom Carr
Despite not matching the success of their fellow New York post-punk colleagues, The Strokes, Interpol have nonetheless carved out a respectable path for themselves since their 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights. Occupying the darker edges of indie rock, they are the shadier counterpoint to the eccentricities of Julian Casablancas and co, their albums consistently making the UK Top 10 for the past two decades.Returning after four years with their latest effort, The Other Side of Make-Believe, its origins have a familiar-sounding tale to many recent albums: recording began in 2020, each of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The story is riveting. A nanny living in New York and Chicago spent her spare time wandering the streets taking photographs. She learned to develop and print, but her plan to publish the images as postcards fell through and, as time passed, she stopped bothering even to develop the negatives let alone print them.So most of the 140,000 pictures which she took over a period of 40 years were seen by almost no-one, including herself – until, that is, she failed to pay the rent on the storage unit where they were kept and its contents were auctioned off.That sale was in 2007, and it could have Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Odesa (Sunnyside) is a deeply-felt and wonderfully played solo piano album with a massive emotional and stylistic compass. New York-based composer/pianist Vadim Neselovskyi has made a strong statement in homage to the city by the Black Sea where he was born, and to its unique cultural and musical heritage.Neselovskyi is one of those musicians whose astonishing potential – above all as composer – was spotted ridiculously early. He entered a newly-formed elite composition class in his home city at the age of just eight. By 14 his compositions were being presented abroad by Ukrainian cultural Read more ...
joe.muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Among the plentiful bonus items in this Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Round Midnight, the last one is a surprise. It shows Dexter Gordon in his prime, back in 1969.He’s doing the thing for which, purely as a jazz musician, he’s best known. We see his blistering inventiveness as a bebop improviser. He is playing his own tune “Fried Bananas” with barrelling energy at a club in Copenhagen. In other words, it's nothing whatsoever like the slow, atmospheric playing of Dale Turner, the character played by Dexter Gordon, that we hear throughout Bertrand Tavernier’s moody film.By the time Tavernier Read more ...
Nick Hasted
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves West Side Story as much as its Romeo and Juliet, Tony and María, love each other. The material is part of his childhood, as personal as upcoming semi-memoir The Fabelmans. A film about romantic transcendence that ultimately falls to earth, this is one of his most exuberant and serious works, propelled by Leonard Bernstein’s music, ironised by Stephen Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Fever Syndrome has an ambition that places itself firmly in the tradition of the great American family drama (comparisons with Arthur Miller feel the most appropriate), a piece in which the reassessment of ties of blood is played out against a background of issues that touch on the wider society in which its protagonists exist.In Alexis Zegerman’s new play, receiving its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre (where 15 years ago the British playwright was writer-in-residence), that latter element is compounded by a sense of scale, a conscious attempt to bring in big ideas, ranging across Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Zeros And Ones’ poster alludes to Gerard Butler blockbusters (“The Vatican Has Fallen”), but Abel Ferrara’s name guarantees grungier fare. The sleaze of old Times Square still clings to the director, though he’s now a 70-year-old avant-pulp eminence living in Rome. He has always needed name actors who’ll go all the way, six-time collaborator Willem Dafoe’s devotion keeping his recent career going. Ethan Hawke is the star this time, playing twins – soldier JJ and revolutionary Justin – on apparently opposite sides of a plot to blow up the Vatican.Ferrara envisioned Zeros And Ones’ Rome as a “ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can’t keep a great playwright down. Ron Hutchinson, whose award winning stage plays, such as Rat in the Skull (1984) and Moonlight and Magnolias (2005), are contemporary classics, has been absent from view for a while. But although he has fallen off my radar in recent years, perhaps it is because, as the title of his book on writing for a living says, he’s been “Clinging to the Iceberg”. Which is a neat segue into his newest play, Ghosts of the Titanic, which gets its world premiere in a coproduction between Park Theatre and Brill Productions. But although it’s an intriguing take on a Read more ...