Chicago
Thomas H. Green
Sia, Mo, Adele, Lukas Graham and Coldplay. Those are artist names that speak of a general desire to make their owners accessible to the mainstream. Hieroglyphic Being is not that kind of name and the music he makes is equally abstruse. He’s called this album The Disco’s of Imhotep, which implies it will be danceable and have some conceptual association with mystical healing. It’s certainly danceable, but its edges are not gentle, and it’s also wilfully tricksy in places. Overall, however, for DJs, techno-heads and lovers of tough, crunchy electronica, there’s much to enjoy.Hieroglyphic Being Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's amazing that they've managed to sustain The Good Wife over seven series and 156 episodes which have, by and large, maintained a standard of writing and acting which can stand toe to toe with anything else on TV. Apparently it's now being dubbed "television's last great drama" in some quarters, not just because of its quality but also because it aired not on some boutique cable channel or on-demand subscription service but on the mainstream CBS network. You don't miss 'em until they're gone, and all that.That said, this final series has sometimes felt as though its creators were a little Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Chicago Jazz Festival is a freebie extravaganza, held over the Labor Day holiday weekend, its massive crowds welcomed by the looming chromium jelly bean that is sculptor Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. Onward into Millennium Park, right on the shore of Lake Michigan, there are a pair of long tents for the afternoon sets, with alternating bands ensuring constant musical motion.The evening performances take place on the impressive Jay Pritzker Pavilion stage, designed by Frank Gehry. Completed in 2004, it’s been the jazz festival’s home for the last three years of its 36-year history. It’s as if Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the oldest and most striking venues in London lends itself to immersive theatrical experiences. A few years ago the Victorian interior of Wilton’s Music Hall was infused with pre-show activity to recreate the 1920s of The Great Gatsby. Now a similar flick of the wrist by the same director draws punters into the 1930s and an adaptation of one of cinema’s great con capers.To enter the venue for its first show since a major repair job is pretty thrilling, with jazz singers performing in the bars, actors in costume playing cards, the swell of people and music conjuring the milieu of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It wasn’t quite Ali vs Frazier. But the 1968 debates between William F Buckley, Jr and Gore Vidal were as bruising (nearly literally) as TV had seen, and haunted the protagonists for the rest of their lives. Morgan Neville and Robert Gordan’s documentary claims its aftershocks also damaged TV and America in ways we’re still suffering through.In 1968, Vidal’s ribald, transsexual comic novel Myra Breckinridge, waspish essays puncturing the follies of what he termed the American Empire, and a conviction that “there are two things you don’t turn down: sex and TV,” made him a notorious liberal. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We get the big city views of Chicago, the bright lights and the skyscrapers, a few times in Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, but for the most part we’re planted firmly down at street level, in areas of town probably you wouldn’t want to go to, a fair amount of the time at night. That’s where we first meet the film’s protagonist Brenda Myers-Powell (though I don’t think we ever actually hear her addressed by her surname), who’s cruising the streets, handing out condoms to any prostitute she can find. What she’s really offering, though, is advice – the advice of one who has herself managed to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Wachowskis' sci-fi blockbuster has been getting a kicking from the Stateside critics, but perhaps that's because it's a bit of a shape-shifter with multiple personalities. Part dystopian fantasy, part fairy tale, part cosmic epic, all rolled up in a whole lot of astonishingly vivid special effects, Jupiter Ascending is like spending a day at Alton Towers with your brain marinating in mescaline.Admittedly I was fortunate enough to see this on an IMAX screen in 3D, but I tottered from the exit afterwards with my senses authentically jangled. Two hours of intergalactic travel aboard space Read more ...
Simon Munk
Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected hacking action-adventure offers virtually nothing new.The original Deus Ex in 2000 remains the template for combining dystopian science fiction themes, multi-angled approaches to missions and cyberpunk human augmentation and hacking. This simply attempts to mix that formula with the huge open world and freeroaming chaos of Grand Theft Auto V and Read more ...
Naima Khan
“Consider the donut!” One might have assumed that a significant chunk of Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts would be a heartfelt ode to the fried dessert cake itself. In fact Letts’s play, set in a donut shop nestled in an economically and culturally diverse borough of Chicago, dwells on the personal and political make-up of the shop’s most dedicated staff. All two of them.It’s a look into the ways we can evade life, skip its hardest tests and sink fast without the buoyancy of hope. But while the author of the play and film of August: Osage County gives us a very different sort of script, in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The annual reappearance of The Good Wife is always a cause for celebration. Why they persistently park it in the twilight zone of More4 remains one of the enduring mysteries of our era, since it's one of the best shows on TV, but the only question that need concern us is: will season five be as good as the ones that came before? On the evidence of this opener, yes indeed, so much so that American critics have been hailing it as the best ever,Change is in the air at Chicago's upmarket law firm Lockhart Gardner. Not only does Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) have to be mindful of her new Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Orgasms aside, it was When Harry Met Sally’s edict that sex always gets in the way of male-female friendships that hit home. Drinking Buddies comes to more nuanced conclusions, as we watch Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) steadily drink and comfortably banter during and after work at a Chicago micro-brewery, and wonder just when they’re going to leave their straitlaced partners, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick), pictured below. When a double-date weekend in the woods sees Kate strip off in front of Luke, and Jill dig into her rucksack’s wilderness gear for a Read more ...
David Nice
Arturo Ui, king of the Chicago cabbage trade, is Brecht’s Richard III. Egad, he even speaks in iambic pentameters, with a fair few nods at Shakespeare, though a certain cowlick and moustache locate him firmly at the centre of the 20th century nightmare. The problem for any actor, grateful though he may be for such a role, is that unlike Shakespeare’s Richard, Brecht’s Arturo starts out as an idiotic, malapropist thug, loathed by all: how to transform him credibly into a sleek, terrifying tyrant? For the director, the trick is to negotiate a haunting path between the over-insistent realism of Read more ...