Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)In Treasure of Foggy Mountain, Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall (all in their mid-to-late twenties) portray bro-buddies housemates who embark on a lighthearted and lightly-plotted quest for buried loot. When they lose their map, tensions flare.Marshall, gangly and Read more ...

There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and bewilderment of their parents. The myth taps into parental anxieties that rear up when their offspring doesn’t resemble them. Harsh rejection of this seemingly alien being, who has usurped the place of a beloved child and threatens family harmony, is traumatic. We don’t see the moment when Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) told one of her two sons that she can no longer be their mother. That denunciation happened long before the film begins, when Monica ( Read more ...

As the title character in Eileen, set in a miserable Massachusetts backwater in the days before Christmas 1964, Thomasin McKenzie plays a depressed hybrid of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty who’s awakened by a patently fake Princess Charming-cum-Hitchcock blonde.The new psychologist at a correctional facility for youths, Anne Hathaway’s mysterious Rebecca is equipped with above-it-all insouciance, a Marilyn hairdo, and a Harvard degree (she claims). Drab Eileen is smitten by this martini-drinking sophisticate and comes alive when Rebecca takes her under her wing. Hathaway and McKenzie make Read more ...

The vast and various spaces of Frank Gehry’s monumental Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris suit the needs of the thrilling Mark Rothko exhibition now inhabiting its labyrinthine multi-storey suite of galleries.Some of the 115 works on display require a kind of intimacy – enclosed spaces with the feel of a chapel rather than the classsic antiseptic white cube – and others benefit from wider vistas, in which his relentless explorations can breathe, standing alone while being connected with other works from the same period. With help from the artist’s son Christopher Rothko, the curator Suzanne Read more ...

If nothing else, you couldn’t accuse Greta Van Fleet of short-changing fans when it came to costumes or pyro. It felt like every few minutes the Michigan throwback rockers frontman Josh Kiszka was disappearing offstage, only to reappear in a variety of jumpsuits or robes, while roasting flames regularly shot up from behind the four piece.A shame that the outfit changes represented the most variety in a one-dimensional arena rock show. No matter what garb Kiszka donned, the songs remained the same, which was fantastic news from those wanting to enjoy a Led Zeppelin revival and substantially Read more ...

There’s much to admire  here – May December features impressive performances from Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, and director Todd Haynes shows his mastery of classic Sirkian style. But disappointingly, this comes across as a movie that aims to critique media exploitation of a scandal while indulging in its own manipulation.  May December is a riff on a real-life story from the ‘90s, when Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle teacher in her mid-thirties had sex with a 12-year old boy in her school. At the time, she was married with four children of her own. When Read more ...

Ella Glendining has made an impressive documentary debut with the autobiographical essay, Is There Anybody Out There? Born without hip joints and very short thigh bones, we first encounter her as a perky, confident little girl walking in the woods near her home, in video footage filmed by her parents. They were aware from the first pregnancy scan that she was different and have done an exemplary job of ensuring that she had as happy a childhood as possible.As an adult Glendining’s confidence shines through and it informs her approach to the medical establishment throughout her Read more ...

When Dolly Parton was nominated for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she requested that her name be withdrawn.She was "flattered and grateful" for the honour but "I don't feel I have earned that right," she wrote. "It kind of would be like putting AC/DC in the Country Music Hall of Fame. That just felt a little out of place for me.” Officials responded, saying they respected the star's "thoughtful note” and saying that "in addition to her incredible talent as an artist, her humility is another reason Dolly is a beloved icon by millions of fans around the world." A few weeks Read more ...

This is a tribute to a forgotten hero, gay black Quaker Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington, the vast peaceful protest that sanctified Martin Luther King as his oratory seemed to lift black America towards a Promised Land.King (Aml Ameen) is a cautious rising star here, a flawed figure who betrays Rustin early on, as his sexuality proves his Achilles Heel to Civil Rights movement enemies including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins (grizzled Chris Rock) and black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright, pictured below). Produced by the Obamas’ Higher Read more ...

Derived from the similarly-titled novel by Thomas Mallon and directed by Ron Nyswaner, Fellow Travellers tracks the course of its protagonists through several decades of 20th Century American history. It’s also an account of changing attitudes to homosexuality, and how gay culture emerged from the shadows and went mainstream.Spanning the era from the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunts of the early 1950s to the Aids crisis of the Eighties, the story revolves around the entwined fates of Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey, familiar from Bridgerton), who meet when both are Read more ...

Lynn Nottage’s second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde’s, is a comedy about a sandwich, the perfect sandwich. With just a little more punch to the plotting it would be another masterwork from this award-winning American playwright whose book for the musical MJ arrives on the West End next spring.Ebullient truckstop owner Clyde (Gbemisola Ikemulo, pictured below, left) takes on ex-cons as workers. This entraps them from the off: nobody else will be in a hurry to hire them, so Clyde is free to exploit and harangue them and generally make their iives tense. She does Read more ...

Margot (Emilia Jones; Coda) has made a terrible mistake. She’s landed up in bed with Robert (Nicholas Braun; cousin Greg in Succession) and realises the sex is going to be excruciatingly bad.How to tell him that she’s changed her mind? Can she leave before it’s too late? Or is it easier to get it over with, otherwise he might turn nasty? Maybe, as a last resort, she can make herself get turned on by his gratitude. “Look how much he wants us,” she tells her better self, who watches, cringing, from a corner of the room.Director Susanna Fogel (Booksmart; The Flight Attendant), and Read more ...