America
Matt Wolf
Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't. One's best advice for Elizabeth Olsen, who walks off with the film playing a lovestruck undergrad, is to get out - and fast. Instead, this vibrant actress spends most of the film mooning over Jesse (Josh Radnor, who also functioned as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This year’s glut of haunted house films have been unusually, often painfully intimate. Elizabeth Olsen’s pure, panting terror in Silent House, like Gretchen Lodge’s depraved unravelling in Lovely Molly, added to the sub-genre’s essential horror: the thought that when you shut your front door you’re locking something awful inside, not out; that your home, every creaking floorboard and attic thud of it, isn’t a safe haven but an insidious foe. Even as a long-time horror film lover, I’ve found them at times almost unbearably tense, creeping under my skin in minutes.Sinister seems set to push the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright. If Brick was conceptually ambitious yet small-scale, Looper gives us filmic chutzpah with the budget (and stars) to match.It’s set predominantly in a dystopian 2044, in and around Kansas City, with Read more ...
theartsdesk
R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Described by Peter Falk as, “a love story between a woman who’s half wacky and a guy who’s inarticulate”, John Cassavetes’ seventh feature from 1974 is without doubt one of his finest achievements. It’s one of several collaborations between Cassavetes and his actor wife Gena Rowlands, here giving a performance of show-stopping complexity.Falk plays Nick Longhetti, an overworked construction foreman. Rowlands is his wife Mabel and the mother of his three young children. She’s struggling with mental illness and - though their relationship is placed under violent strain - their love for each Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The moment everyone will remember came exactly an hour in: Brandon Flowers was singing “All These Things That I've Done” with the conviction of a man at confession. Behind him a video screen showed a loner carrying a long wooden sign on his shoulder like a cross. In the desert in front of him scantily dressed women stood by a grave. Suddenly there was an explosion above us all. Red and silver glitter thunderbolts rained down. Whilst some rushed to gather them up, others waved smartphones to capture the instant on video.Last night’s Killers concert was part of iTunes Download 2012, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the American presidential election campaign now in full swing, the search is surely on for cultural expressions of the two nations that the candidates represent: white rich people versus the rest. Okay, maybe an exaggeration, but who says I’m unbiased? Anyway, a new play from Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the most innovative black American playwrights of his generation, runs the risk of being seen as a metaphor for Obama’s first term in office. But does this burden the new play with too many expectations?At first sight, maybe so. The setting is the Charles R Drew Prep School for Boys, an Read more ...
mark.kidel
Like Orpheus, Bob Dylan is familiar with the underworld. As he gets closer to meeting his maker, the tone of his work has become less baroque, increasingly stripped down and almost naïve in its simplicity. His latest album marks another episode, perhaps the darkest, in a series of sung chronicles, blues-soaked dirges and timeless ballads that draw from the poet’s seemingly unstoppable stream of memories, dreams and reflections. Even the more jaunty tunes – such as “Duquesne Whistle”, one of several songs on the album to evoke the emotions associated with the arrival and departure of trains – Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Lady Gaga arrives in the UK this weekend to play two huge shows at Twickenham Stadium, before moving on to Manchester. Today, she is the biggest pop star in the world. Three years ago she was in the final stages of a highly orchestrated campaign intended to claim that position. What follows is an interview with her in Israel in the autumn of 2009, right around the time the world went Gaga gaga. Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Praise be, they’ve kept the title sequence. Dallas, the mama of all American soap operas, is famous for a lot of things – Stetsons, satin sheets, surreal shower scenes, the slow disintegration of Priscilla Presley’s nose – but perhaps the most memorable component in its Eighties incarnation was the opening credits in which mirrored skyscrapers were juxtaposed with the bucolic idyll of Southfork, and split-screens showed JR, Bobby, Sue-Ellen et al pulling panto poses to a histrionic orchestral soundtrack. Such things are sacred.The new show is billed not as a remake but a sequel, the exhuming Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who says you can't go home again? American actor-singer Anthony Rapp does that, and then some, with his solo show Without You, in which one of the original leads of the Broadway musical Rent relives the passions and pain of an extraordinary time. Quite how the 80-minute piece will register with non-Rentheads (as the show's fans remain known) must be up for grabs.Its narrative is inextricably linked to a city, New York, where the late Jonathan Larson's rock musical became a sensation that registered well beyond arts pages. On the other hand, if the response of the opening night crowd Read more ...