Is this the real Homeland, or a different series with the same name? The original, and fascinating, hook for the show was the question of whether Marine Sergeant Brody had been brainwashed into becoming a fanatical jihadist during his years in captivity. Then came the story of Congressman Brody, a lethal sleeper agent at the very heart of the US administration.Both of these angles have now been dumped into the shredder of history (along with many of the original cast, all blown up at the end of series two), and there's a lingering sense that neither was explored as fully as it might have been Read more ...

No brilliant new ideas? Well then, let's just boil up a compilation of a few old ones. Result? The Blacklist, a slick and surprisingly brutal spies-and-black-ops drama from NBC that speeds along blithely without an original thought in its head.A chubby-looking James Spader plays Raymond "Red" Reddington, the so-called "Concierge of Crime" who has been in heavy rotation on the FBI's Most Wanted charts for years. He turned to the Dark Side after once being a darling of the US defence establishment, where at one stage he was even being groomed to become an admiral.These days he brokers megabucks Read more ...

What would you do if your six-year-old daughter vanished in broad daylight, and the man you’re sure took her is walking free? The answer for Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman, pictured bottom left) is as plain as the paranoid survivalist’s stockpiles that fill his basement. But his direct action against Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the apparently child-like man he’s sure is a monster, ripples against multiple traumas and secrets in this crime film of novelistic breadth.The most interesting character in Prisoners’ superbly cast assembly of victims and victim-predators isn’t Jackman’s shattered vigilante, Read more ...

In this refreshingly rowdy, distinctly feminist film from debut writer-director Maggie Carey an inexperienced, tirelessly sensible teenage girl prepares herself for college life by taking charge of her own sexual awakening. She does so in a way that's hilariously overly administrative, with her plans taking the form of the title's tawdry, quite literal "to do list".Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza is gifted the role of Brandy Klark, school valedictorian and virgin. As the film opens, the year is 1993 and Brandy's sights are set on college and little else. That changes when she's conned Read more ...

They called Rita Moreno the triple threat – she could dance, act and sing. But even her spirited performance as Anita in West Side Story could not satisfy United Artists: the doomy low notes of "A Boy Like That" were considered out of her range, and the number was ghosted by Betty Wand, one of the scores of unknown singers who rescued on-stage stars from ignominy.Fifty years on, Moreno, interviewed in Secret Voices of Hollywood, is still unhappy about this. She thinks Wand’s rounder notes lack the passion that Moreno had invested in furious Anita. But at least Moreno did not turn up at the Read more ...

Justin Timberlake continues his global charm assault with the second in his 20/20 Experience project. Teaming with long-term collaborator Timbaland, the duo turn the taut funk and chart-busting hits of the first instalment in the series on their head. Where The 20/20 Experience was in turns sensual and muted, The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is more in the vein of the more familiar futuristic synth-led sound that created Timbaland’s name in the Nineties, producing for artists such as Aaliyah and Missy Elliot.   No one has shaped and directed Timberlake’s sound more than Read more ...

The American repertoire has featured big-time on the London stage this year but perhaps nowhere more oddly than courtesy the ever-adventurous Orange Tree's staging of a World War Two play from Susan Glaspell, here receiving its world premiere. Long (nearly three hours), defiantly peculiar and yet possessed of an intriguing (and relevant) moral debate, Sam Walters' production marks the start of this sterling artistic director's final season with a slice of the dramatic canon best thought of as one for collectors of curiosities - and at a venue that has made something of a house dramatist of Read more ...

It’s raining Bunyans, and since Britten’s early American operetta with its sights originally set on Broadway teems with song and invention that can’t be a bad thing. A fortnight after Welsh National Youth Opera commandeered Stephen Fry to voice-over the giant American folk hero of the title, their counterparts in BYO are offering London its first production for 15 years. There were singers at the starts of their careers in that Royal Opera special – remember Susan Gritton and Mark Padmore, anyone? – but not enough: it ought to be a paradise for the young, and here it truly was.In my books, Read more ...

Mark Lanegan is a forbidding figure, which makes him appealing. In interviews he’s often taciturn and not very likeable, as if he cannot be bothered with the presentation of his art to the media. Good on him. There are now a billion bum-suckers out there who’d fuck a chicken on YouTube if they thought it would draw attention to whatever paltry excuse for music they were pushing at the time.Lanegan, on the other hand, is a dark horse, a 48-year-old ex-junkie from Seattle who was making grunge before that term existed, and who’s gone on to become a grizzled Americana vocalist-for-hire, from his Read more ...

The last time Mr E toured these shores he looked as if he might be heralding the end of the world. Dressed all in white with a Moses beard and gangsta bandana, his songs were about inner struggle and personal redemption. Between songs he remained mute and mysterious. How things have changed. This year the band is touring the much fuzzier Wonderful, Glorious and last night Mark Everett hardly shut up.The change in mood was evident even before the band had taken to the stage. As I arrived “The Candy Man” from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was playing over the PA and there was a jolly Read more ...

The question of what makes a romance click on screen – what combination of elements goes into creating that indefinable spark between two projected faces – is one of the most eternal for filmmakers. David Lowery’s wistful, lyrical neo-Western has just over 10 minutes to make you invest in doomed lovers Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) before fate and justice do them part, and succeeds with breathtaking ease.Their snatched moments together, like most of Lowery’s film, settle over you like half-remembered dreams, images that burrow deep into your subconscious and re-emerge Read more ...

Janelle Monáe’s much-awaited second album doesn’t disappoint. She navigates the ever-renewing waters of African-American pop invention, drawing on R & B, funk, gospel, rock and dinner jazz, with a sense of fun and a great deal of talent. She is a master of eccentric chic, sophisticated, with a hint of the (tastefully) bizarre.Questions of identity have both haunted and inspired black culture in the USA. Monáe, with her cyborg and extra-terrestrial alter egos, mines a vein of fantasy that the likes of George Clinton and Sun Ra have explored before her: the space-man or woman as avatar of a Read more ...