drugs
Karen Krizanovich
Director Ira Sach's autobiographical tale of Erick and Paul's 10-year relationship shows the passion and destruction that can occur in any relationship. Here, we follow the decade of ups and downs that happen between documentary filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and his attorney boyfriend Paul (Zachary Booth) as drug addiction takes its toll.Shot in crowded city spaces and cafes, the drama closely follows Sachs' own relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg (whose memoir was published last year). What may shock is how lives can be changed by a chance meeting on the way to the subway. Sachs, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Quite reasonably, many of 2012’s year-end reviews focused on the triple celebrations of the Jubilee, Olympics, and Royal pregnancy. For many, the year was quite different. In February, on Blues Funeral, Mark Lanegan’s end-of-the-world vocals presaged apocalyptic weather, war and death. It felt like an Old Testament prophecy being filtered through a Seattle drug addict. Which it virtually was.This was the Mark Lanegan Band’s first album in eight years. After 2004’s Bubblegum, Lanegan had concentrated on a series of collaborations, most notably with yang-to-his-ying, Isobel Campbell. With Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Such is the warts and all nature of the rock star biography that something as personal as the addiction memoir has become almost passé. Lucky then that Mike Doughty – one-time frontman of cult 90s alt-rockers Soul Coughing turned eclectic solo artist – didn't write an ordinary addiction memoir.The Book of Drugs couldn't have been titled more starkly if Doughty had tried. It is blunt, honest and incredibly funny story of a life in which, in the words of the author, everything has either involved drugs - their presence, or absence - or been shadowed by them. At his lowest, Doughty was scraping Read more ...
joe.muggs
End of year lists are, of course, wildly arbitrary – based on what raddled writers can scrape from their memory-barrels come deadline day, with half an eye on what we think our colleagues are going to pick so our choices will end up in aggregated lists too.I could easily find a way to argue that the rarefied ambience of Santiago Latorre was my record of the year, or sing the praises of Message To Bears's chamber music all day long. I could honestly say that I'd been playing the Jessie Ware and Norah Jones albums on repeat, or loving the off-centre electronic squonk of Mouse On Mars, just to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the subtitle - The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel - didn't make it clear enough, Hit So Hard was never going to be your average "rockumentary". At about eight minutes in, before the titular drummer properly establishes us in the 1990s US grunge scene that forms much of the backdrop to her story, Schemel is already speaking openly and frankly about the addictions to alcohol and drugs that cost the lives of friends, her role in a platinum-selling rock band and very nearly her own life.To get the obvious out of the way first: Patty Schemel is, almost probably, the greatest rock'n' Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There must be a way out of their Hackney council estate life for brothers Rashid (James Floyd, very sharp on screen here) and Mo (non-professional Fady Elsayed), whose claustrophic home life lived (more or less) to traditional parental rules, contrasts with the energy of the streets outside, where drug-dealing is the most lucrative occupation and there’s always a hint of violence in the air.One of the many achievements of Sally El Hosaini’s debut feature, winner of a clutch of festival prizes, most recently Best British Newcomer at the London Film Festival, is to nicely confound our Read more ...
howard.male
Because Brand has become something of a brand – the hair, the clothes, the pantomime gait, the post-Carry On banter – he can be hard to take seriously. Nevertheless, I’ve been an admirer since his jaw-droppingly risqué appearances on Big Brother’s Big Mouth in the mid-Noughties. It was obvious that this man loved the English language and had a ribald wit that wasn’t going to be contained by Big Brother’s sister show for long. So it’s gratifying to see that this engaging documentary has Brand at least partially escaping a character he’s now also thoroughly milked in Hollywood, in order to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Comedic curio Casa de mi Padre features Will Ferrell in his most surprising role yet – that of a Mexican rancher who “no habla inglés”. This Spanish-language film is a tongue-in-cheek thriller featuring Ferrell alongside Mexican stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. It’s Acorn Antiques meets El Topo: frequently batty, wilfully inept and performed with aplomb by a sporting cast. Directed by Saturday Night Live scribe Matt Piedmont and written by the aforementioned’s Andrew Steele, its knowing nostalgia and elegiac violence means this retro rib-tickler would play well alongside the 2007 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’ve seen a few American film and TV actresses grace the West End stage with surprising potency, but no one surely will surpass Laurie Metcalf for profound emotional truth-telling in Eugene O’Neill’s shattering family drama, given an unbeatably cast new production in London’s West End. Metcalf's by no means famous over here now, so long after her brilliant stint in Roseanne Barr's Nineties sitcom, but this is one of those performances you won't forget, up there in the Vanessa Redgrave class.The play, set exactly a century ago, famously portrays O’Neill’s own family, so much so that he would Read more ...
Tim Cumming
He has been called “America’s sharpest musical storyteller” by Rolling Stone, and has enough talent to give Bob Dylan’s talking blues a run for their money. The East Nashville-based singer-songwriter, guitarist, yarn-spinner, troubadour and amiably agnostic stoner has 10 new stories on his 14th album, the title of which acts as a pretty accurate calling card for the Snider experience: Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables. He’s also got a raw new band behind him, at the same time as strapping on an electric guitar, blowing a mean, distorted harp through a handheld mic, and delivering some of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Olympics will be upon us all any minute now, but for the residents of East London they have been physically sprouting at the end of the road in the shape of a futuristic stadium for years. It takes the role of a shy walk-on in Wild Bill, a looming symbol of a local regeneration which was touted as integral to the hosting bid. It’s safe to say that the London seen here will not earn the grateful rubberstamp of the Cultural Olympiad. If you could get onto a podium for knifing, gashing, stabbing, thumping and thrashing, the characters we meet here could have been contenders. They’d probably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always used to avoid any film that had Mark Wahlberg in it, because he seemed to have the acting skills of a park bench. Then I saw The Departed - because you have to see Marty's movies - and thought he was brilliant as the astonishingly foul-mouthed Sergeant Dignam. Now I've seen Contraband and regrettably, it may be time to revert to Plan A.Contraband is an over-long and laborious heist thriller, a remake of the Icelandic flick Reykjavik-Rotterdam but transplanted to New Orleans. The atmospheric hook is supposed to be its evocation of a grungy Louisiana low-life operating in the Read more ...