America
Albums of the Year 2024: Kenny Barron - Beyond This PlaceMonday, 16 December 2024Kenny Barron’s Beyond This Place is glorious. Whereas I’ve found some of the more talked-about albums of 2024 either been uneven or unfocused – as if attracting debate is more important than just setting out to make a great album –... Read more... |
Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes review - a Hollywood legend, warts and allSaturday, 14 December 2024It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here... Read more... |
The Little Foxes, Young Vic review - timeshifted production blurs the play's focusSaturday, 14 December 2024The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this piece today?The key themes of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play look promising on paper: a strong-willed woman battling her brothers for an... Read more... |
The Devil Wears Prada, Dominion Theatre review - efficient but rarely inspiredWednesday, 11 December 2024It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.Refitted with a... Read more... |
Nightbitch review - Mother's life as a dogFriday, 06 December 2024Rachel Yoder says she wrote her debut novel Nightbitch as a reaction to Donald Trump’s first term as President, with what she saw as its consequent mood-shift in America towards “traditional values and women staying home, taking care of the kids.”It... Read more... |
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting showMonday, 02 December 2024Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI,... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Black TuesdaySunday, 01 December 2024The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major film noir and has just been released on a Masters of Cinema Blu-ray.Written by the former newspaperman Sydney Boehm... Read more... |
King James, Hampstead Theatre review - UK premiere drains a three-pointerSaturday, 23 November 2024Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not really on the way to anywhere, but not a destination either and obsessed with popular music and sports, it's very... Read more... |
ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetimeSaturday, 16 November 2024Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical... Read more... |
Album: Jon Batiste - Beethoven BluesFriday, 15 November 2024Beethoven’s renown in his own day was not just as a composer but also as an improvising pianist. He wrote in a letter in July 1819 that “freedom, and to move forward is the purpose of the world of art, as it is of the whole of creation.’So it is a... Read more... |
Album: Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens - American RailroadThursday, 14 November 2024Conceived in 1998 by the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma to remind the world of the benefits of globalisation in bringing people together, Silkroad is a non-profit organisation with a mission to create “music that engages difference, sparking radical... Read more... |
Interview: Roy Haynes, Jazz Drumming Giant (1925-2024)Wednesday, 13 November 2024Roy Haynes, who had begun to seem immortal, has died aged 99. In this extensive Arts Desk interview from 2011, one of the greatest jazz drummers ranges across his remarkable life with sharp intelligence and generous feeling.The man who played with... Read more... |
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