The Straight Story is the slowest of road movies, its elderly protagonist crawling 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin at just five miles per hour. Screenwriters John Roach and Mary Sweeney based their script closely on a true story, that of 73-year-old Alvin Straight, who made his journey riding a lawnmower upon hearing that his estranged brother had suffered a stroke. Sweeney’s then-partner David Lynch was intrigued and took on directorial duties. This is a real outlier in his output, a colleague describing it as “the one Lynch film that isn’t perverse in some way”, the finished product deemed Read more ...

“I was not a bad man. Nowhere near it. But they said I was anyway.”Makenna Goodman’s second novel (her first, The Shame, a brilliant exploration of motherhood, came out in 2020) is, on the surface, an account of a cancellation, though there’s nothing straightforwardly black or white about any of it. In fact Goodman seems to shy away from binary thought, which is refreshing, if sometimes confusing.It’s also about love, class, nature and the way we relate to it. It is structured like a six-act play, with monologues by four rather abstract protagonists: Man, Realtor, Helen and Wife. Its Read more ...

After leaving my headphones elsewhere, I plugged my wired earphones into my laptop and sat cross-legged on my bed. It felt like the universe wanted me to rewind time, back to when 2014 Forest Hills Drive first dropped, a teen in my room, listening to tinny rap through cheap speakers, imagining myself on some apartment rooftop in New York. The Fall Off took me straight back there, safe and familiar, as J. Cole carries that same boom bap spirit into his latest, and possibly last, 24-track album.From the opening moments, the album feels like home. Cole’s voice sounds like countless artists and Read more ...

Sexual abuse and violence, self-harm and sadomasochism, piss and postpartum blood – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water doesn’t flinch from showing the indignities, the messiness, and the trauma-induced choices made by its everywoman protagonist during her rocky journey.A rewarding experimental art house indie adapted from the novelist Lidia Yuknavich’s transgressively visceral non-linear memoir, Stewart's first full-length feature as writer-director is filtered through the stream-of-consciousness of Imogen Poots’s Lidia.The mosaicked narrative moves forward from an unfixed perspective Read more ...

Lionel (Paul Mescal; played as a child by Leo Cocovinis) has perfect pitch and is able to name the note his mother coughs each morning. He can harmonise with the barking of the dog across the field. “Early on I thought everyone could see sound.” Sounds bring shapes, colours, tastes too: “B minor and my mouth turned bitter.”Directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie; Living), The History of Sound, adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story about a gay couple in the 1920s, starts promisingly but its tone is too tasteful and restrained and its faded painterly palette of brown and white, though Read more ...

One of the many dispiriting things about the nine years that span Trumpino’s 2017 inaugural and today is how very few musicians have had the courage to put their heads over the parapet. Certainly not Bob Dylan, perish the thought. Joan Baez has, of course, though she is neither touring nor recording. Steve Earle too, and Jesse Welles, the thirtysomething troubadour whose dusty work boots are planted firmly on the Woody Guthrie road, and Bruce Springsteen, a consistent champion of blue-collar righteousness. And there’s a good deal of that blue-collar righteousness in the work of Lucinda Read more ...

The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...

State of Statelessness is the brainchild of the Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective based in Dharamshala, home to the Dalai Lama and spiritual heart of the Tibetan community in exile. Four short films, each by a different director, address what it means to live in the diaspora without a homeland. And like a short story, each film offers a glimpse into lives spent in perpetual exile.The quartet begins and ends with water. An aerial shot of a ferry crossing the Mekong delta introduces Where the River Ends directed by Tsering Tashi Gyalthang. Waiting for the ferry are Tenzin and his young Read more ...

Such is the USA administration’s overwhelming saturation of the news cycle that, even with the comforting presence of an ocean between, it’s hard not to find Talking Heads’ unforgettable lyric relentlessly buzzing through your brain on repeat – “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?”. It is the mission of The American Vicarious theatre company to “... create art that challenges us to confront the gap between America’s ideals and its lived realities”. Guys, there’s never been a better time.Almost three years on from their electrifying Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley recreated Read more ...

Lawlessness and lack of accountability seem, tragically, on the verge of becoming a new American norm, so what better time to re-consider High Noon, the classic 1952 Western that forefronts issues of moral rectitude. Will Kane, the marshal who stays on in his tight-knit New Mexico community to square off against an outlaw whom he sentenced to hanging five years before, possesses a moral propriety akin to the likes of Atticus Finch. And look how often To Kill A Mockingbird lands on stage. On the face of it, you can see the sense in adapting Fred Zinnemann's four-time Oscar-winner to the Read more ...

As one of the characters tells us: “There are two sides to every story… someone is always lying.” This telly-isation of Alice Feeney’s source novel, created by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by William Oldroyd and Anja Marquardt, picks up that idea and runs with it energetically. It pitches us into a vision of an American rural south which is plagued with deceit, guilt, simmering resentment and murderous intent dating back decades. No-one is entirely innocent, and at least one person is incredibly guilty.The plot orbits around a group of female classmates who grew up in the small Read more ...

Lyle Kessler’s 1983 three-hander has embedded itself in the American repertory, attracting a Tony nomination and star casting. Here it was graced with an award-winning turn onstage from Albert Finney, who later starred in a film version. But is it more than an actors’ play?The little Jermyn Street stage brings its simmering tensions straight to your seat, as brothers Treat (Chris Walley) and Philip (Fred Woodley Evans) clash at their Philadelphia row-house. Treat, a self-styled tough guy, is a petty thief who preys on hapless pedestrians, bringing home his booty – watches, cash, jewellery – Read more ...