America
Thomas H. Green
The latest album from blues veteran Buddy Guy is a must for air guitarists. At 77 years of age he fires out a double CD set, one’s Rhythm, the other Blues. Both sound similar in that the main feature is Guy’s extended solos and background fret-widdling over a boogie-rockin’, piano-tinklin’, good-time jam. It’s a retro and very American sound - in excelsis - performed by a long term expert who doesn’t need to break a sweat to nail it.Guy made his name in the late Fifties and early Sixties as the man who joined the dots between rock’n’roll and the blues. At live shows as early as 1958, despite Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The basic set-up for The Heat is familiar – two mismatched cops are thrown together on a case and have to find a way of working together despite their differences in social background and methods – only in this case the officers are female. Add to the mix that the two actresses playing the roles are playing to type - loudmouth Boston street cop Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy, almost reprising her Bridesmaids role) and prissy, super-bright but socially inept FBI agent Sarah Ashburn, as essayed by Sandra Bullock in any number of her films.The Heat, written by Katie Dippold (who writes on Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Influencing Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, director Andrei Konchalovsky’s underrated marvel Runaway Train is finally available on crisp Blu-ray: think masculine philosophy meets Alaskan wilderness in an existential thriller as exciting today as it was in 1985.Two convicts – Oscar “Manny” Manheim (Voight in an Oscar-nominated role) and the beautiful, irritating Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts, also nominated for an Oscar) – flee an Alaskan high security prison. Only moments ahead of vindictive warden Ranken (John P Ryan), Manny chooses an ominous locomative (the forboding, box-like powerhouse EMD GP7, a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“JJ Cale will be onstage in three minutes.” With the house lights still full on, an old cove with tatty, silvering hair and an open untucked-in puce shirt shuffled about onstage, tinkering with equipment, before picking up a guitar and leaning into a flavoursome sliver of Okie-smoked boogie. Either JJ Cale didn’t give two hoots for the convention of the big entry, or he was enjoying a joke about his anonymity. Probably both.The musician whose calling card was writing songs for others has died at the age of 74. The reality is that it was a mere three songs which made Cale’s name and fortune: Read more ...
James Williams
Just how loyal is the average hip hop fan? This was the question on many lips after the fiasco that the previous Wu-Tang tour in 2011 turned out to be. Their last sojourn on these shores was marred by members dropping out at the last minute and a general lack of organisation. There was pressure this time for the band to deliver.Entitled “The Twentieth Anniversary Tour” – it has been two decades since the release of their career-defining debut Enter the Thirty-Six Chambers – there was an air of jubilance at the Brixton Academy as everyone’s favourite warm-up DJ, the ubiquitous DJ Semtex, ran Read more ...
Matt Parker
In both a personal and literary sense, Grant Hart has been to hell and back. While the 52-year-old Minnesotan is still best known as the drummer and songwriting contributor behind legendary US punk band Hüsker Dü, his fourth solo album, The Argument, is a bold adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost that could finally see him recognised as an artist in his own right. And it's about time.For better or worse, Hart has spent three decades being cast as the yin to Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould's yang. In contrast to Mould's direct, hardcore-influenced compositions, it was Hart that brought Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Youth orchestras do well at the Proms. Built to the same sprawling scale as the Royal Albert Hall, their energy is also a natural fit for the relentlessly enthusiastic Proms audience. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the Aldeburgh World Youth Orchestra, our own National Youth Orchestra – year after year we marvel at the skills of these young musicians and come away with new demands to make of our professional ensembles. But last night the newly formed National Youth Orchestra of America showed their inexperience. Rarely has a youth orchestra sounded so Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"I'm so embarrassed, I'm not a real person yet," Frances apologetically tells her date after she's forced to make a calamitous cashpoint dash when they're asked to settle their restaurant bill. This is the seventh film from writer-director - and sometime Wes Anderson collaborator - Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale). This time he co-writes with luminous star and indie-darling Greta Gerwig and it's a terrifically fruitful collaboration. Frances Ha is a film about female friendship, artistic expression and getting your shit together in your twenties, whose monochrome elegance Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Frozen Ground, the debut feature of New Zealand director Scott Walker, takes place in Alaska in the 1980s. Based on a true story, it tells of cop Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage), who teams up with prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) to try and stop Jack Hansen (John Cusack) from killing again.Although mostly a standard issue police thriller, The Frozen Ground has some nicely balanced performances. Cage is allowed the weight and concern that his character, the dogged cop, requires. Hudgens tries a bit too hard in her role as the young mouthy prostitute, while Cusack is a little too Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At the risk of coming over a bit Daily Mail, my, hasn’t she grown up? I refer not to the career management decisions that have seen the former Disney Channel star turned head Belieber handed dubious photoshoots and sexed-up roles in Harmony Korine films, but rather to the fact that on Stars Dance the just-shy-of-21-year-old sounds about 35.It’s a well-established pattern, so it’s hard not to be cynical: child star reborn with raunchy new image; a first video (featured below) replete with writhing, heavy breathing and lyrics with a suitably subjugated message despite the appearance of sexual Read more ...
David Nice
How do you solve a problem like The Birth of a Nation? Do you admire the first part and turn away from the second (after all, the Germans screened The Sound of Music for years in a Nazi-free version ending with the marriage of Maria and Captain von Trapp)? Can you balance social, historical and aesthetic responses?My own were to admire every technique D W Griffith throws at the story-telling of the American Civil War as a fine, at times Tolstoyan interweaving of truth with the fiction of two families from north and south, only to throw in the towel at the flabbergasting rewritten history of Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“I hate these kids. Hate ‘em,” says Tanner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a handsome, mature commando who wants to help a bunch of high school football players save America from, yes, a North Korean invasion in the 2012 remake of John Milius’ and Kevin Reynolds’ 1984 right-wing fightfest Red Dawn. Competently directed by second unit/experienced stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, Red Dawn was shot then shelved before being recut by the studio marketers. This means Red Dawn never had a chance to shine. Hence, it has little to recommend it in any department – not music, direction, makeup, production design Read more ...