America
Helen Hawkins
The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and vintage look, tricked out in shades of greige and tan that you see in ageing photos of the 1970s, as if it too was shot then.The setting is leafy Framingham, Massachusetts; the date some time at the start of the 1970s. But it’s a film about the American Sixties as much as anything, a turbulent era that has left a legacy of war, draft-dodging and growing Read more ...
James Saynor
There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for instance, malcontents and killers – better even than a novel or a movie. We’re kidnapped by the voice.Bruce Springsteen seemed to insist on this more than anyone with his rough and unready 1982 album Nebraska – an echoing prairie lament for lost sanity – and ended up kidnapping himself, to judge by this new biopic that painstakingly traces Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I came late to the Old Vic's shimmering production of Mary Page Marlowe, Tracy Letts's Off Broadway play from 2018 which has arrived in London with Andrea Riseborough and Susan Sarandon leading a sizable and uniformly excellent cast. And I hope theatregoers will catch this too-short run while they can. Amidst ongoing chat – sometimes justified – about screen stars not being able to hold their own stage, Matthew Warchus's keenly attuned staging proves that just as often they very much can.Sarandon (pictured below with Hugh Quarshie), the Oscar winner an agelessly commanding 79, has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of this entertaining political drama is always welcome, though its soap-tinged mix of transatlantic politics and volatile personal relationships is beginning to look a little too genteel for our current age of ever-worsening crises.In the real world we have Trump on the rampage, the Middle East liable to blow at any moment and China surreptitiously taking over the world, but somehow The Diplomat is still fussing over the terrorist attack on a British aircraft carrier, HMS Courageous, that happened way back at the beginning of Season One. Delightfully, the show never stops believing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper has previously directed A Star Is Born and Maestro, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as this. It’s a story of New Yorkers in the throes of mid-life crises, as Alex Novak (Will Arnett) separates from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) and finds himself floating in unfamiliar new waters. Their divorce also has a perverse knock-on effect on the lives of their close friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), who both start suffering from copycat syndrome.The joy of the piece (written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell and loosely based on the life of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Film festivals are a bran tub: what you find in them may be unexpected, and not always in a good way. Here are six I pulled out in my first week (minus one of my favourites, The Mastermind, which I will review when it goes on general release next week).Jay Kelly If the indie supremo Noah Baumbach hadn’t popped up in person in his new Netflix-produced film, as the director of a sex scene between the younger version of his protagonist and a lead actress who discreetly farts, I don’t think I would have guessed who made Jay Kelly. He seems at times to be channelling Richard Curtis. There are Read more ...
joe.muggs
The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.Thankfully Catskills Mountains-raised, LA resident soundscaper Emily A. Sprague is a little bit more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Armageddon is here again, as Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years examines the minutes before a nuclear missile hits Chicago from multiple perspectives, finding no hope anywhere.Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is our first witness, clocking on as normal in the White House Situation Room, where a missile launch at a febrile international moment is at first logged as inconsequential. When it sickeningly dips from orbit towards the US, Ferguson’s patrician cool exudes the comforting professionalism you’d wish for at the potential end of the world, till she calls her husband and Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Idris Elba has only just appeared as the British Prime Minister in the action comedy Heads of State (2025) – now he's portraying the American President in Kathryn Bigelow's tense political thriller A House of Dynamite.The White House Situation Room is on red alert, and Elba's President must avert a nuclear escalation. He runs through theoretical emergency scenarios with his staff at hand yet ultimately has to act alone by making the critical decision.That's the setup of Bigelow's film, which plays out like a triptych, with the imminent nuclear strike repeated three times from different Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s truly thrilling to see the Barbican embracing big concept long-form theatre again, seeking out productions that are as conceptually challenging as they are visually exhilarating. Last week, audiences were asked to understand the forces of globalisation that shaped a royal wedding dress in the Théâtre National de Strasbourg’s multimedia tour de force, Lacrima.This week the pioneering Polish director Łukasz Twarkoswki brings his much feted Rohtko (the misspelling is deliberate), to investigate a real-life forgery scandal in which New York gallery, Knoedler & Co, sold almost 40 faked Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.There are certainly quite a lot too many heterosexual men in their 50s opining on her in ways that are a bit off: angry that she’s not Joni Mitchell, or that she’s a bit full of herself, or that her melodies are simple… Angry with a passion they can’t find for any other pop music. And no, sir, this music IS not for you. However, for those of us that do care about pop Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paul Thomas Anderson’s frantic One Battle After Another is a storm warning for a fascist America and both a lament and a rallying call for revolutionary fervour.Unfurling in the early Obama years and the near future, it’s a late ‘60s/early ‘70s West Coast throwback that channels a gutsy female Black Panthers vibe, Bullitt-style car chases, and an Altmanesque gallery of fanatics and smooth operators on either side of the political divide. It might be the best Hollywood film of 2025; ahead of next year’s Midterm Elections, nothing can touch it as the movie of the historical moment.Extrapolated Read more ...