America
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 ...
Sarah Kent
This must be the first time a black artist has been honoured with a retrospective that fills the main galleries of the Royal Academy. Celebrating Kerry James Marshall’s 70th birthday, The Histories occupies these grand rooms with such joyous ease and aplomb that it makes one forget how rare it is for blackness to be given centre stage.“I’m trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful,” explains Marshall. “What I’m trying to do in my work is establish presence with a capital P.” And boy does he succeed! Gallery after gallery is filled with pictures that Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the great moments of Private Eye magazine’s fustiness in recent years was putting Mariah Carey in Pseud’s Corner, for the quote about how she deals with the ageing process: “I do not acknowledge time.” That quip is of course in no way pseudo-intellectual, and in every way fabulous, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Carey or pop culture would grasp immediately. Of any major star, she is the one who has most comfortably inhabited the diva role in the 21st century, her dry-as-a-bone “I don’t know her” put-down of Jennifer Lopez from 2003 now meme-ified into immortality as the allt Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour. Some of its gags, like the amplifier that goes up to 11 and the stage prop of a miniature Stonehenge, ought to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if the band themselves are seen Read more ...
James Saynor
The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream. After an extended run of successes from Blood Simple (1984) up to but excluding Intolerable Cruelty (2003), intermittent irritation has greeted some of their 21st century offerings, a few Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Americana rocker Josh Ritter can write a beautiful song. He’s one of America’s premier wordsmiths of the form. He’s also written two novels, which is no surprise; many of his best songs have narrative edge. He’s equally capable at the music, which he calls “cosmic country”. At his best, it has qualities that elevate the human spirit.On his latest, his 13th album in a quarter-century career, the music is variable, but the lyricism seldom flags. The album is titled for his muse, which he calls “my honeydew” (yes, overly cutesy), and the songs are in honour of that. Be that as it may, the 10 Read more ...