America
Rob Copsey
Those who have seen the music video that accompanies NKOTB’s new single “Remix (I Like The)” may be shocked to learn they own a wicked sense of humour. The clip itself sees an unassuming fan - played by “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” actress Artemis Pebdani - strutting her stuff a little too exuberantly at a pool party. While it’s a brilliantly self-aware nod to the now mature groupies they’ve no doubt encountered on their recent world tour with the Backstreet Boys, the song itself is a perky slice of dance-pop that sounds - whisper it - surprisingly fresh.Unfortunately, it’s also a Read more ...
Simon Munk
We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.The result is both hugely satisfying to play from a hind-brain, hand-eye coordination point-of-view, but Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“My honest instinct,” says Jim, the hero of Bruce Norris’s The Low Road, “is one of resentment.” And while this contemporary fable of industrious bees, aka capitalist speculators, is set in the past, and is full of good jokes, it is also laced with emotions that are a tougher sell. Here a humorous tale of a life of entrepreneurship comes hand-in-hand with some satire that is bitter as well as being funny.Beginning, like so many 18th-century English novels, with the finding of a foundling child, the play starts with a snapshot of Massachusetts in 1759. The parentless baby (sired by one G Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In his 1970 television documentary for Granada, I Was a Soldier, British filmmaker Michael Grigsby was one of the first to look into the experience of US soldiers returning home from Vietnam. “Vietnam syndrome” may have been a few years away from any formal diagnosis, but Grigsby caught the mood of three young Texans – David, Dennis and Lamar – back from the conflict and struggling to re-engage with a society that has become alien to them.Grigsby returned to the town of Brady and its Texas environs 40 years later, and the result is his new film We Went to War (co-directed with Rebeka Read more ...
Heather Neill
Mathematicians are a breed apart, bandying numbers about in a way that few outside their magic circle can fully understand. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play uses this exclusiveness to investigate the complex relationship between a father and daughter.Robert, a brilliant academic whose ground-breaking research inspired a generation of devoted students before he became mentally ill, has recently died. His daughter Catherine (Mariah Gale, pictured below right with Matthew Marsh as Robert), now 25, has spent years caring for him in their dilapidated Chicago home, curtailing her own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the NASA space shuttle Challenger fell out of the Florida sky on the morning of 28 January 1986 after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was the only independent scientist appointed to the investigating panel. He duly made a nuisance of himself, asking awkward questions, ignoring protocols, disobeying instructions and generally making damn sure the appliance of science would dig up the truth protected by vested interests. Feynman has been portrayed onstage by Alan Alda, and on the radio by Alfred Molina, but when you want Read more ...
emma.simmonds
You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical. A tawdrily entertaining tale, shot through with youthful lust and romantic delusion, The Paperboy might not deserve to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand!" as they sang in the title song of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! Singer-songwriter John Fullbright is no less enthusiastic about his home state, but he views it more from the direction of hobo balladeer Woody Guthrie than from the tradition of the Broadway musical.The 24-year-old Fullbright happens to come from Guthrie's home town of Okemah, and while his songs don't inhabit the same folk-protest territory as Guthrie's, they're steeped in the music of the American south and west. Blues and country, gospel and hymns Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Over 30 years, Bon Jovi has remained one of the more cartoonish fixtures in soft rock. With characteristic lack of irony, the boys from New Jersey have perfected the art of singing nonsense - my favourite example is "someday you tell the day / by the bottle that you drink" - with straight faces. Now, they’re getting more ambitious. What About Now is being touted as a “big rock record full of social commentary". Its subject is Obama’s America. How odd then that half of it sounds a bit like the Stereophonics.Still, it’s not all bland, anthemic, stadium rock. The lead single, “Because We Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It’s no exaggeration to say that The Wizard of Oz has a special place in the hearts of millions. For many, their last trip over the rainbow will have been watching its 1985 sequel Return to Oz, a commercial flop berated at the time for a too tenebrous tone. Yet Return to Oz was the stuff of numerous childhood nightmares, and so it's gone on to achieve cult status. That film's mixed fortunes proved what anyone could have guessed - that following in the colossal footsteps of Victor Fleming's 1939 MGM musical was never going to be easy.In Sam Raimi's prequel Oz The Great and Powerful, he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Master is one of several remarkably challenging epics which have somehow been financed in 21st-century Hollywood. Like Tree of Life, Synecdoche New York (also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman) and There Will Be Blood (also written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), it attempts a fractured, literary grab at the American soul. The Master’s calamitous box-office means it might be the last.Joaquin Phoenix returns to acting after the career-immolating performance art of I’m Still Here as Freddie Quell, a dislikeable World War Two vet on the run from the post-war US dream, and everything Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In one of the great US sitcoms, Seinfeld, the mantra of the show's producers was "no hugging, no learning". Well, Parks and Recreation - which may end up occupying a similarly lofty place in comedy history - takes the opposite tack. Warm and wonderfully witty with characters and relationships that actually evolve, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur's sitcom also features TV's finest comedy ensemble. This perky, award-winning comedy has taken an absolute age to reach us, considering it debuted in the US in 2009 (where the fifth season has already aired). As with other such imports, BBC Four Read more ...