Chicago
Sarah Kent
This must be the first time a black artist has been honoured with a retrospective that fills the main galleries of the Royal Academy. Celebrating Kerry James Marshall’s 70th birthday, The Histories occupies these grand rooms with such joyous ease and aplomb that it makes one forget how rare it is for blackness to be given centre stage.“I’m trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful,” explains Marshall. “What I’m trying to do in my work is establish presence with a capital P.” And boy does he succeed! Gallery after gallery is filled with pictures that Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ricochet is Chicago punk veterans Rise Against’s 10th album and, unfortunately, one which suggests that despite a four-year break since Nowhere Generation, that they have hit that point where they are seriously struggling to maintain relevance. In fact, they would seem to be both short of anything special to say and for tunes to carry their message, such as it is.A quarter of a century ago, when Rise Against first appeared, they were a melodic hardcore punk band, mining much the same territory as Bad Religion and Green Day. Political, compassionate and speedy, but with catchy tunes that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent’s new production of House of Games – the casting, the staging, the direction. But the flaw it can’t overcome is that the 1987 David Mamet screenplay on which Richard Bean based this stage version in 2010 has been transformed from a vicious psychologically tough caper-movie into an almost jaunty puzzle-play, its sharp teeth removed.The setting is still Mamet’s regular beat, Chicago, slightly modernised: there are mobile phones here, though they don’t play a strategic part in moving the plot along. There are fleeting references to the senator Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also a cultural goldmine. So powerful is its depiction of the postwar African-American experience that it has inspired at least two other recent dramatic responses: Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place (2013).Watching A Raisin in the Sun’s current staging, directed by Tinuke Craig for Headlong and visiting the Lyric Hammersmith as part of a national tour, it also resonates with other recent 1950s revivals: A Taste of Honey Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.There’s plenty to like about this eight-episode reincarnation, which casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who seems to have enough on his plate coping with the poisonous internal politics of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, even before he has to undergo the ordeal of being tried for an Read more ...
mark.kidel
Lizz Wright has established herself, over a number of steadfastly excellent albums, as one of the very best vocalists of her generation. Not so long after a gripping live album recorded in Berlin Holding Space (2022), her latest offering shines with all the brilliance and originality she brings to her own cross-genre mix of jazz, soul, gospel, country and folk.What holds it together is her deep contralto voice, as distinctive in its own way as the sound of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, or Aretha Franklin. There’s a combination of delicacy and force, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brannigan begins in arresting fashion, Dominic Frontiere’s funky theme playing over leery close ups of the titular hero’s Colt revolver. Directed by Douglas Hickox and released in 1973, this was the only film starring John Wayne which wasn’t shot in the US.A brief prologue sets up the plot, with ageing maverick Lieutenant Jim Brannigan flying from Chicago to London to extradite gangster Ben Larkin (John Vernon), currently in the care of the Met. But the presence of Mel Ferrer’s slippery lawyer suggests that things won’t go to plan, and Larkin is subsequently kidnapped and held to ransom Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ratboys have been around since 2010, knocking out their guitar-powered indie fare over three albums in their home city of Chicago. However, with album number four, they have decided to branch out and pay homage to the US alt-rock scene of the early 90s with a grunge-pop-athon that wears its influences heavily.The ghosts of Veruca Salt, the Breeders, the Stooges and Neil Young and Crazy Horse all stalk the grooves of The Window. There’s even an occasional sniff of 4 Non-Blondes’ pop sensibilities on the more commercial tunes, like “It’s Alive!”. In fact, this album is an indication of how Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy James Graham, and he conjoins the two to riveting effect in Best of Enemies.Telling of the televised 1968 debates between William F Buckley and Gore Vidal during that year's presidential race, Graham's hurtling drama is now in the West End after its Young Vic debut nearly a year ago; Broadway, presumably, is the next destination, not least given his play's American setting. We've been down this road before in varying ways, via Frost/Nixon on the one hand and Graham's own Ink, which posited two male 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 ...
Nick Hasted
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the serial killer as protagonist, minus Hopkins' later suave intellect as Lecter, or Dexter’s benign foibles.Debutant director John McNaughton begins with a close-up of a beautiful woman’s face, then pulls back to contemplate her body in blood-splashed grass, one of several aestheticized tableaus showing a slaughter pandemic. The sound design’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Kranky, run in Chicago for very nearly 30 years now, is one of the most remarkably consistent record labels around. They helped define “post-rock” in the Nineties with key releases from the likes of Labradford and God Speed You! Black Emperor, and they’ve put out all manner of way out-there postpunk, psychedelic rock and electronica freakery, all well retaining a unifying aesthetic identity. And while doing all that, they have also quietly (how else?) become one of the most important platforms for ambient music in the world. With the likes of Loscil, Ethernet and Steve Hauschild they Read more ...