America
Heppy Longworth
Even before I stepped into the Royal Opera House, it was clear to see that it had been transformed for the opening performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole. A red carpet outside; the pervasive smell of popcorn within; the stage curtains, usually red, now a gaudy shade of purple: the opera house clearly had a case of All Things American.This exciting atmosphere was upheld throughout the opera, which was unlike anything I had ever seen. Its theme is the life of the world’s first reality TV star, Anna Nicole Smith, whose short life was filled with controversy (marrying a billionaire Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dan Stevens puts Downton behind him to become a CIA-built killing machine laying low in a New Mexico small town, in Adam Wingard’s bonkers new thriller. He looks all the better for it. Aristocratic English charm translates into Southern civility as his character David insinuates himself into a family grieving for a son he served with in Iraq. David’s just here to help. If young Luke (Brendan Meyer) needs to be shown how to quieten down the bullies at school with a few broken bones, Dad (Leland Orser) would have his promotion prospects improved by a nasty accident to a colleague, or Mom ( Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Blue Ruin, the American thriller which won the coveted FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes last year, will amaze. It stars actors you don’t know, made by a director you don’t know yet Blue Ruin is proof of life beyond Hollywood: this is a tremendous independent film. We’re not talking something shot through an iPhone with one location. We’re talking an entertaining, incredibly smart and deftly-made story with heart, a message and memorable characters and scenes. Clue: when the cinematography, script, acting and direction are mesmerizing, you’ve got a winner.Macon Blair is Dwight, a long-haired vagrant Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shared yearning for a place to belong is not a revelatory concept, nor is it given new dimension in this gently saccharine piece, yet although the whistle-stop tour only covers familiar landmarks, the journey is a convivial one. Adam Mathias and Brad Alexander’s pop/rock-cum-contemporary Broadway show meanders through six vignettes – with a loose thematic thread – that take place at American tourist attractions; some are all too brief, others outstay their welcome. Graham Hubbard’s economical staging is mostly effective, bar some cumbersome box moving and the strange decision to keep one Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not quite true to say no one would have heard of JJ Cale without Eric Clapton. Clapton’s cover of “After Midnight”, released in 1970 as the first single on his debut solo album, put Cale on the map as a songwriter and paved for his own inimitable recording career. But Clapton didn’t actually record “Cocaine” until Slowhand in 1977. In between Lynyrd Skynyrd slipped in with their account of “Call Me the Breeze”, the song which lends its name to this Clapton-led tribute a year on from Cale’s death.Cale was a reticent inspiration to more than Clapton. The major singer-songwriters of a Read more ...
David Nice
It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin’s - or rather “The Gershwins’”, as this title frames it, though Ira wasn’t quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy and Bess? An opera? Trevor Nunn made the three-hour-plus score, much cut here, dazzle at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. Michael Tilson Thomas’s Barbican espousal of bleeding chunks alongside Berg’s Lulu, left as a torso in the year of Porgy’s premiere, 1935, even put me in mind of the sheer generous optimism of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. A musical? This threepenny version made me think rather of Carousel, a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Daniel Patrick Carbone is a director who makes his viewers work. That's not meant to sound intimidating at all, because the rewards of his first feature Hide Your Smiling Faces are considerable. But part of its achievement is that by the end we feel that we have assembled the truth, or rather a part of a truth, behind its spare, elliptical story rather in the way the director did in making it.Atmosphere and nuance are far stronger than narrative or dialogue. The atmosphere comes from a rural landscape of woods and a river on the edge of a barely depicted small town community which, given that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The struggle of the migrant journey from Mexico and Central America to el Norte has been much in the news recently, and, coincidentally, it’s a theme that cinema has been following too. After Diego Quemada-Diez's recent The Golden Dream, about teenagers who set out on that difficult route, Marc Silver’s drama-documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal? shows us a similar experience, though through a somewhat different lens.It’s a story that begins, as it were, at the end. In this case the discovery of a dead body in Arizona’s Sonora desert, not far from Tucson – one of the many immigrants who don’t Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Too Late Blues has many individual aspects which, on their own, would make it notable. Released in 1961, it was John Cassavetes’ second film as a director following the ground-breaking Shadows, one of America’s first full-length expressionist art films. As Shadows had, it centres on jazz and depicts a world which was then thriving, showing it from the inside. It stars Bobby Darin, one of America’s most important and multi-faceted musical figures. When taken together, with the added impact of its female star Stella Stevens, its inclusion of black cast members and disabled children, Too Late Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Gordon Green is a director who's certainly not afraid to confound. His CV includes indie gems George Washington, All the Real Girls, comedy smash Pineapple Express and medieval misfire Your Highness. His previous feature Prince Avalanche was made in secret and starred Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as mismatched highway workers; it was sensitively shot, unpredictable and determinedly oddball. With Joe Green manages to harness Nicolas Cage's mad energy and channel it into something spectacular - something only a handful of directors have accomplished (David Lynch, Mike Figgis and Werner Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ruthann Friedman: The Complete Constant Companion SessionsRuthann Friedman’s debut album ought to have clicked. Issued in October 1969, Constant Companion arrived after her composition “Windy” topped the US charts in 1967 when it was recorded by The Association. A consummate songwriter, she should surely have been set to parallel her similarly inclined close contemporaries Carole King or Laura Nyro, both of whose songs were hits for others before they established themselves as successful solo artists.Friedman had support and connections too. She actually lived with The Association – who Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Divine is a lot more than dog poop. The minute you mention Divine – born Glenn Milstead in Baltimore, star of John Waters’ cult classics such as Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble – mention of the famous scene in Pink Flamingos where the performer actually does consume canine faeces is almost obliterated.That almost is the door through which director Jeffrey Schwarz
takes us, using archive stills, footage as well as new interviews with Waters, Mink Stole, Ricki Lake, Tab Hunter and many more. More effective than a DeLorean, we are right back in the day, when Divine was Read more ...