New York
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At the age of 65, you would be forgiven for thinking that punk rock high priestess Patti Smith has every justification for winding down (the odd eccentric covers collection to keep the kids amused aside, of course). Indeed, her actions of the past couple of years - the highly-acclaimed memoir Just Kids, the self-curated musical retrospective Outside Society - bear all the hallmarks of an artist in reflective mode. Banga, Smith’s first new material since 2004’s Tramp, comes full circle in a sense: it was recorded at New York’s Electric Lady studios with many of the same personnel as were Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It's been six years since Regina Spektor released Begin to Hope, a festival-friendly breakthrough album with a poppy sheen that easily loaned itself to mobile phone network marketing campaigns and the like. Six years then since the Moscow-born Bronx-raised artist, a tiny human beatbox with a shock of curls, took the kooky-girl-with-piano shtick into the mainstream. And yet, as this follow-up to 2009's Far makes clear, there's only so much of what makes Regina Spektor, well, Regina that can be major-label sanitised.What We Saw from the Cheap Seats begins simply enough: a poppy, piano-and-vocal Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Is this a sophisticated satire or a dumb, laugh-out-loud, nothing-is-sacred comedy? That is the question which pings around your head Sacha Baron Cohen's latest. The title is presumably a nod to Chaplin's The Great Dictator, but while that is still rated as a classic 72 years years after it was made, somehow you cannot see this piece of lightweight froth, in which Baron Cohen plays strutting but stupid North African potentate Admiral General Aladeen, being held in the same esteem for 72 weeks.Baron Cohen's fourth film marks a move away from the teasing and provoking of real people that made Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Where would America be without its diners? Or for that matter, where would US culture be without them? Now here's another dramatic piece set in America's version of the greasy spoon, a sassily scripted sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King, who created Sex and the City. Whereas SATC was set in Manhattan, 2 Broke Girls is located in New York City's less monied, but nowadays more groovy, borough of Brooklyn.The set-up is very much of our times. Max Black (Kat Dennings) works two jobs to make ends meet: during the daytime, she is nanny to Brangelina, the twins of rich Manhattanites Read more ...
ellin.stein
Unlike the New Seekers, Whit Stillman does not want to teach the world to sing. He does, however, want to teach it to dance, specifically to dance the Sambola (or, to give it its full name, Sambola! The New International Dance Craze). Instructions and a demonstration accompany the final credits of his new film, Damsels in Distress.Social dancing plays a large role in all of Stillman’s work. His breakthrough, Metropolitan (1990) - which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and became a Withnail and I-level cult success with fans still quoting favourite lines years later - is set Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The cultural triumvirate of the Hallé Orchestra, the Royal Exchange Theatre and The Lowry have joined forces for this new production of the 1953 hit musical Wonderful Town. Leonard Bernstein would surely have been a happy man to hear his score, dashed off in a mere five weeks at short notice, played by the 65-strong Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder, who has been nursing the ambition to do the show here since he saw the 2004 Broadway production. Fisher has pizzazz and a gift for comedyOn The Town or West Side Story, written either side of it, it is not, but the rich score has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Everyone wants their own Madonna. Some want the mischievous, tinny, Eighties, New York club chick; some want the sexadelic, Shep Pettibone-produced art-nudie; some want the gently euphoric Ray of Light trance angel; some want the house-tinted fashionista “Vogue” queen, and so on, and so on – but what does Madonna want?I’d hazard a guess she stopped knowing shortly after her last great single, the ABBA-sampling Stuart Price-produced floor-slayer “Hung Up”. Since then she’s been flailing about more than usual, and misfired into R&B with 2008’s Hard Candy album. Finding new producers is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The eminence grise behind Touch is Tim Kring, who also devised Heroes, and it shows. Heroes was about a network of people with paranormal or superhuman powers, and so is Touch. In this case, we find ourselves in a universe which is underpinned by numerical patterns and mathematical probabilities. Only a select handful of humans can discern this astounding cosmic architecture and join the astral dots, one of them being Jacob "Jake" Bohm.Jake is the 11-year-old son of single father Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland), a former ace newspaperman now struggling to bring up a boy who has never spoken a Read more ...
fisun.guner
If you’re the kind of person who appreciates auto-recommendations based on previous purchases, then perhaps I could do worse than begin this review by saying:” If you liked The September Issue, you’ll simply love Bill Cunningham New York.” There are obvious similarities: both are Cinema Verité-style documentary profiles centred around New York and fashion, both present a series of talking heads, and both feature the formidable Anna Wintour, managing editor of American Vogue. Maybe it was The September Issue that gave Richard Press, Bill Cunningham’s director, the inspirational spark to make Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Phone rings, door chimes, in comes Company, this time sporting surround sound and high definition and at a cinema near you. Tonight marks a rare opportunity to see a New York gala - the sort of event that proliferates in Manhattan even as the actual volume of Broadway openings decreases - with an assemblage of names that you could never get to commit for an extended run. All that and Broadway diva Patti LuPone at her most pungently acerbic? Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical has rarely looked or sounded so good as in this showing in UK cinemas of a banner musical theatre event from over the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There was a time when Jackie Mason was the pre-eminent New York Jewish comedian. He had started his career in those postwar Catskills hotels catering to vacationing Jewish families from New York City, which became known as the Borscht Belt. The circuit spawned a list of talents including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers, among many, many more, and it was a phenomenon that prompted the film Dirty Dancing. So due respect to a veteran who has been in the business for several decades and now, at the age of 75, is performing his farewell UK tour, called Fearless.What a shame I can't bid him Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Ever since we moved into an apartment building round the corner from Ground Zero a couple of years ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, soon to be America’s tallest building. Now it’s reached 92 of its eventual 105 floors at the rate of one floor a week, its octagonal steel panels covered in blast-resistant glass soaring skywards, and Condé Nast and J Crew have signed up as some of its future occupants. But although I pass 1 WTC almost every day on the way to Wholefoods or the Gee Whiz diner, the area is cut off by forbidding fencing Read more ...