America
Adam Sweeting
Back for its third series [***], Sally Wainwright's saga of Yorkshire folk continues to tread a precarious line between syrupy soapfulness and a family drama with sharp little teeth. Its excellent cast helps to carry it over the worst of the soggy bits, and its best moments have a way of catching you unawares. You'd have to guess that it also scores strongly by not being crammed with serial killers, paedophiles and corrupt cops.It's a sign of the confidence that healthy ratings bring that they dared to open this new season with Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) sitting at a restaurant Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The recent comedy awards on Channel 4 threw up little in the way of surprises – or, indeed, laughter for that matter. It was, however, notable for the first real-time, on-screen mugging at an awards bash, as Harry Enfield strolled off with the Best Comedy Actor gong, leaving Mathew Baynton looking very much the wronged man. That James Corden wasn’t even nominated was another crime.The sense of outrage (all mine) was directly proportional with how much there was to like in the first series of the pair’s excellent comedy drama, The Wrong Mans, which saw Berkshire County Council employee Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack White (the former John Anthony Gillis) was born in Detroit and now lives in Nashville, a geographical progression you can hear in his music. He loves rude, dirty rock'n'roll but also has a fine instinct for country music, both of which tendencies are splurged all over this consistently inspired album (his second solo venture and the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss). You won't hear any country music played sweeter than "Entitlement" (not that the lyric's particularly sweet, mind), yet White can also create a rockin' wall of chaos like "Three Women", which sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis and Read more ...
Heather Neill
For a Christmas-weary Brit who's already had it up to here with commercial bonhomie and festive schmaltz, there were going to be barriers to overcome. Here is an avowedly sweet American play – actually nine playlets – on the subject of love, set in snowy Maine, in a small town "that doesn't quite exist". In John Cariani's two-handers, lovers most often – although not quite always – overcomes disappointment, misunderstandings or awkwardness to reach mini-happy endings. The piece is phenomenally popular in the States, having replaced A Midsummer Night's Dream as first choice for high school Read more ...
Guy Oddy
We have been told for years by the media, the record industry and “taste-makers” everywhere that popular music is resolutely a young person’s game. Carefree youth is what it’s all about and any sign of ageing, maturity or artistry and most musicians will be shown the door and put out to pasture unless they are revisiting past glories. In 2014, Swans put paid to this myth by releasing To Be Kind, the most impressive album of their 32 year (on-off) existence under the direction of Michael Gira – the band’s 60-year-old vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and band leader.To Be Kind is a Read more ...
David Nice
All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold’s American Shakespeare, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Not all the accents are gold either, though working on them only seems to have made a splendid ensemble underline the meaning of every word all the better – and having come straight from the often slapdash verse-speaking of the RSC’s Henry IV, that comes as all the more of an invigorating surprise.Goold leads his team inexorably from the swank to the skull beneath the skin, a Shakespearean “problem-play” trope well suited to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Some of the best films this year have been the longest. The one most likely to be remembered is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, at a modest enough 165 minutes, followed soon after by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish masterpiece Winter Sleep, at a weightier 196. Now, close to year end, along comes Lisa Cholodenko’s Olive Kitteridge, bringing with it a considerable tinge of regret that outside a single theatrical outing at this year’s Venice Film Festival, this HBO miniseries is coming to us only on the small screen. At 232 minutes, no less.That’s because Cholodenko’s film is a masterpiece of often Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For those who’ve seen one too many Nutcrackers, nothing says Christmas better than a Matthew Bourne production at Sadler’s Wells. A man whose mantelpiece is overflowing with Tony and Olivier awards is a safe bet for entertainrment – even when the production in question looks at first glance unlikely: Bourne’s 2005 danced version of Edward Scissorhands, the 1990 Tim Burton movie which is part Gothic fairy tale, part moral fable, part 1950s soap opera.From the first moments that the small pit orchestra strikes up, amplified to the max through huge banks of speakers and accompanied by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1) – Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966–1985America’s music could be jazz, gospel, blues or rock ’n’ roll. Or all of them. Each has black roots. Then there’s the white-rooted country, which also informed rock ’n’ roll. Taking the simplistic line has its problems and doesn’t allow for blurred boundaries, nuance and the fact that history is never neat, but it is clear that all these musical forms generally and initially proliferated amongst communities that are not native to the American continent. What about the music of native North Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Taking inspiration from classic westerns even as it vigorously sets itself apart, The Homesman combines the taciturn and muscular with a feminist bent, and manages to be stirring and sweeping while also embracing the odd. It's a gorgeous, painfully sad tale of a man who's been nothing but a disappointment to himself and a woman constantly disappointed by others who, together, shepherd three lost souls on a desperately treacherous journey. This is the second directorial effort from actor Tommy Lee Jones who once again shows a keen grasp of the genre (his first film was also a western, The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.The piece opens with a voice-over in a whiny Brooklyn accent, as if we might be in Scorsese land or Sopranos world. It's a jolt to discover that the voice belongs, entirely plausibly, to the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Attenborough’s characteristically soothing narration again described the unceasing struggle for survival in the animal world. In astonishing films from all over the world, we witnessed an enormous variety of tactics for finding homes that not only provided shelter, but protection. In nature, he told us, good homes are all too rare, and we were treated to some not-so-subtle allusions to our own housing crises.This episode, subtitled Home, opened by visiting a bushy glade in the huge Zambian plain where a dozen wild dog pups were guarded by an adult male babysitter, as the other Read more ...