San Francisco has rarely looked more unattainably golden than in Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning gentrification parable. Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) once belonged inside the city’s Californian Dream, symbolised for him by the grand Victorian-style house built by his granddad for their black family, only to be repossessed as the city soared out of their reach in the Nineties, a legend that has become his identity’s beating heart. This is Jimmie Fails’ own family story, fictionalised with childhood friend and director Talbot into a film of awkward, homemade, sometimes overweening beauty.It’s a Read more ...

Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I became JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film skims the surface of the sensational literary hoax of the early 2000s, that far-off time before avatars, gender fluidity and fake online identity were part of everyday life.Kristen Stewart, with her own queer identity as a background hum, is a fine, understated match for the role of the androgynous Knoop, who was roped in by her sister-in-law, 40-year-old author Laura Albert (a harsh, one-note Laura Dern) to play LeRoy at literary events and parties. This is Knoop's side of the story, set in San Read more ...

It helps to be of a certain vintage to appreciate the first impact of Tales of the City. Armistead Maupin’s column, begun in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 as a frank and joyous portrayal of gay culture, became a series of half a dozen cult novels. These started appearing in the UK from the mid-1980s. It was a British broadcaster, Channel 4, which began the project of adapting them as dramas in 1993, joined for the second series by Showtime who did the third on their own in 2001.The next three novels, which culminated in the departure from San Francisco of its female protagonist Mary Ann Read more ...

Sun, snow, and some unadorned silliness danced to the music of Björk: no one can accuse San Francisco of casting an insufficiently wide tonal (or climatic) net in this second of four programmes on view from San Francisco Ballet as part of their Sadler's Wells season (continuing to June 8). Having largely thrilled to their all-Shostakovich opener, I found this line-up more of a literally mixed bag. And yet, just when the sobriety of Cathy Marston's take on the American novel Ethan Frome is beginning to pall, along comes the tinsel-infused, take-no-prisoners kitsch of Arthur Pita's Read more ...

Visits from major foreign ballet companies are always news, but a two-week London season by one of America’s “big three” is something to get excited about. San Francisco Ballet doesn’t rest on its laurels. Eight of the 12 pieces offered in the coming Sadler's Wells season were premiered by the company only last year. Helgi Tomasson, its long-serving artistic director, tells theartsdesk what it means to keep pushing the boundaries.JENNY GILBERT: You’ve been at the helm of this company for an astonishing 34 years. That gives you a long view of the art form that’s almost unique.HELGI TOMASSON: Read more ...

Belatedly picking up from where series 2 of The Bletchley Circle left off in 2014, this comeback version has a go at transporting a couple of the original characters to the Californian West Coast, where they embroil themselves in the hunt for that old chestnut, a serial killer. On the evidence of this first of four episodes, it would be difficult to conclude that their journey was really necessary.Sadly, Anna Maxwell Martin hasn’t returned for this one, but it does bring back her co-stars Rachael Stirling as Millie Harcourt and Julie Graham as Jean McBrian. It’s 1956, and the women’s heady Read more ...

Wooden Shjips’ new album was apparently written as a “summer record” and, if that was Ripley Johnson and his psychedelic confederates’ intent, it has been fully achieved. While this may not be immediately apparent to fans of Calvin Harris, David Guetta or George Ezra, V does represent a significant shift away from the frantic motorik monsters such as “Down by the Sea” and “Lazy Bones” that have seen the band take a major role on the US psych scene. Taking on the relaxed sounds of Spacemen 3, Grateful Dead and Neil Young, Wooden Shjips have knitted together laidback psychedelic tunes from a Read more ...

An encounter with Homer Flynn is disconcerting as the extent of his involvement in The Residents is unclear. He acknowledges that he speaks for the eyeball-headed quartet whose identities are unknown. As he talks, it's clear he has intimate knowledge of their creative process, their motivations and what they think. He discusses them as “they”. Occasionally the word “we” is used. But that could be taken as referring to being a part of The Cryptic Corporation, the outward-facing organisation which runs The Residents’ business affairs. Equally, the "we" could be acknowledging that he is one of Read more ...

With the wind behind them, the San Francisco-founded band Deerhoof are one of the greatest live experiences you can have. Two decades since their first album, they still have a relentlessly experimental hunger for sonic surprise, mixing extraordinary virtuosity with an indie/punk directness, love of infectious melody and natural surrealism, which all together makes every moment of their shows full of ideas but also thrilling on an immediate sonic level.It's tough to bottle something so predicated on spontaneity, and given years of studio experience the Deerhoof sound has naturally been Read more ...

Hugh Laurie, in his new role of forensic neuropsychiatrist Eldon Chance, tells us that he works with those who are “mutilated by life”, and we soon see that Chance himself falls into that category. He’s in the midst of a divorce, he only sees his daughter Nicole at weekends, and his work seems to fill him with a kind of morbid weariness.This is Laurie playing the flip side of Dr Gregory House, the brilliant and fearless diagnostician happy to break every rule and offend whomever it may concern in pursuit of the right result. Chance, on the other hand, is timid and full of doubt, and even his Read more ...

As the accompanying music reminded us, it's the time of the season for looking back in languor at the psychedelic daze that descended on America's West Coast in 1967. It was an era when one was enjoined, if going to San Francisco, to "be sure to wear flowers in your hair". "Feed your head," added the Jefferson Airplane, ensconced in their Haight-Ashbury rabbit-hole.However, the scope of this first of two programmes was much wider, and far more interesting, than a mere survey of the rock groups of the day. It went back to the beginning of the 20th century and travelled both east and west as it Read more ...

Debussy: Images, Jeux, La plus que lente San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)Debussy’s tennis-themed Jeux would surely have made a bigger splash had its 1913 premiere not been overshadowed by a certain Stravinsky premiere. This is a real grower of a piece, a tennis-themed ballet given music of supernatural delicacy and subtlety. Jeux is an otherworldly score, one of its mysteries being that it can sound like a new piece on each hearing. I’ve never heard the piece so well performed as it is here, Debussy’s shades and half-lights painted with incredible skill by Michael Read more ...