America
Matt Wolf
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.But step back from designer Tom Rogers' cunning scrap heap of a set, and you'll find that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Look what they make you give," as Clive Owen's dying assassin puts it in The Bourne Identity, and the way that success is as much a matter of taking the blows and dragging yourself to your feet again as it is about inspiration or even perspiration is part of the message of Joy. It's based on the real-life story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop, and not the least of the film's accomplishments is the way it manages to turn the QVC shopping channel into a cockpit of high drama.Whether the real Ms Mangano is able to radiate the same aura of self-belief, tolerance, Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's hard to disagree with Matthew Wright, in his brisk analysis of the shortcomings of British crime drama (see below). He notes how flashes of inspiration are smothered by skimpy budgets and the timidity of commissioning editors. The disastrous anti-climax of London Spy was a classic example. A British Sopranos seems further away than ever.But all is not lost, and as our picks of the year show, there has still been plenty of great stuff to watch, from the finely-woven historical drama of Wolf Hall to the dark and daring Jessica Jones or the comic touch of Mackenzie Crook and Peter Kay. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A host of pictorially arresting, even painterly images can't make a satisfying whole out of In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard's film that doesn't dig very deep, its penetrating title notwitstanding. Howard has always been drawn to unusual realms, whether they be the intellect in A Beautiful Mind or space in Apollo 13 but his would-be literary-historical voyage into the world of squalls at sea has too many passages that are simply wet. Bring back Master and Commander. At heart a sort of Into the Storm with English Lit 101 bells on, the film posits a look at how Herman Melville's 1851 Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It stands to reason that the contents of a prequel can never be entirely surprising. Some details have to be constants, some plot twists left unturned. As soon as it became clear that the second series of Noah Hawley’s Fargo predated the events of the first by some 25 years, we knew that state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) would be left standing at the end of it. But of all the things to have as a constant, Wilson’s sympathetic portrayal of the steadfast cop was as secure a tether as they come.The universe of Fargo is one in which anything can happen, and frequently does – we’re Read more ...
aleks.sierz
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West – and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a landscape of food shortages and human-rights abuses. Yet its regime calls this dismal place the "Best Nation in the World". To us, it’s a secret world, a strange culture difficult to comprehend, easy to fear. Small wonder that, in American playwright Mia Chung’s 2012 play, two hungry sisters fantasise about leaving it for good.In the first scene the older sister, Minhee, and her sibling Junhee are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How many live versions of “Heroin” are necessary? The new four CD set The Complete Matrix Tapes includes, yes, four. One per disc. If that seems excessive, consider this: one version previously appeared, in the same mix, on last year’s reissue of the third Velvet Underground album; a second and third were included, in different mixes, on differing configurations of the 1969: The Velvet Underground Live album; an audience recording of a fourth was issued on 2001's The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes. All four versions are previously released.Overall, of The Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales Theatre but by then she was pretty much phoning in her performance, and only the thrill of that voice (smaller than one expected but laser-intense) carried her through. It's quite the reverse with the very talented Sheridan Smith, who is a funny girl and probably closer in spirit to the real Fanny Brice than Streisand could ever be. And with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Most three-act movies include a scene in which the protagonist and his or her intimates are at their happiest – a state of affairs that can’t last. Oren Moverman and Michael A Lerner, the writers of the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, lit upon an organic – in fact, magical – way of encapsulating the effect of Wilson’s genius on the other Beach Boys.It comes when the 24-year-old Wilson (Paul Dano) steers his bandmates into finding the exact blend of harmonies needed for “Good Vibrations” one day in 1966. Even the song’s lyricist Mike Love (Jake Abel), a surf pop conservative who’d Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We can keep blaming Frank Capra for the lingering notion that Yuletide has magical powers which can turn Scrooges into yo-ho-hoing Santas and convert blood-spattered family feuds into tearful hug-ins by a roaring log fire. To prove it, this would-be seasonal sackful of joy from director Jessie Nelson doesn't shrink from quoting It's a Wonderful Life, both visually and verbally. It's more like an SOS than a homage, though.Prematurely doomed by the concrete overcoat of Steven Rogers's screenplay ("I keep hearing myself trying so hard to be funny," says Olivia Wilde's Eleanor – a struggling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole other theatre of war in which the idea of negotiating with the enemy is unthinkable. The Soviets may have been abominable commie bastards but, hey, our guys could still clink a glass with them. So Steven Spielberg is able to visit the Cold War in something like a spirit of levity.Bridge of Spies is much more overtly an entertainment than Schindler’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The city of Boston has been creeping up the charts as a hotbed of cinematic criminality in the last decade. First came Martin Scorsese's Oscar-scooping epic The Departed, then Ben Affleck chipped in with The Town, both movies driven by their portrayal of tightly-knit groups of characters immovably rooted in their native Bostonian soil.You could almost see Scott Cooper's Black Mass as completing a trilogy. Indeed, its two leading characters, Irish mobster James "Whitey" Bulger and FBI agent John Connolly, are the real-life versions of the Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon roles in The Read more ...