America
Sarah Kent
The Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition opens with Cell IX, 1999 (pictured below) one of the wire cages that Louise Bourgeois filled with memories of her dysfunctional family. This one contains a block of marble carved into hands. A tender portrayal of the mother-daughter bond, it is under scrutiny via three circular mirrors.The sculpture embodies Bourgeois’s dilemma as an artist. While paying tribute to her main source of inspiration – her childhood – it also proclaims her need to protect her memories from prying eyes. Once, when Alan Yentob probed her with questions for a television programme Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s not breaking any secrets to note that the woman immortalised as the “Chestnut-brown canary/Ruby-throated sparrow” in Stephen Stills’ “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” will shortly turn 83. Not that you’d know it from Spellbound, her new album.Her voice has retained a youthful quality – no uncontrollable vibrato, no loss of top notes – and a general surety of pitch which singers many years younger long ago lost (and in some cases never possessed). It’s a little over 60 years since she released A Maid of Constant Sorrow, and she’s not stopped since. Extraordinarily, this is the first album featuring Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Con artists in film or TV need to be clever, charming, mysterious or at least entertaining (for instance Leo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can or Michelle Dockery in the much-underrated Good Behaviour). Bafflingly, Anna Delvey, the notorious fake heiress whose story has been fictionalised by Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland company in Inventing Anna (Netflix), is none of these things.Between 2013 and 2017, Delvey bilked, scammed and fleeced hundreds of thousands of dollars from an array of wealthy New Yorkers and financial institutions. Her real name was Anna Sorokin, the daughter of a fairly Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
US televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker’s rise and spectacular fall from grace in the Seventies and Eighties has already been covered in a documentary film of the same name, released in 2000 with a voice-over by RuPaul.Why, you may ask, another one now? This biopic, directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick; Search Party; Wet Hot American Summer) starring Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye – she was inspired by the original, bought the rights to Tammy Faye's life and immersed herself in all things Tammy for seven years – with Andrew Garfield as Jim, doesn’t adequately answer that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Animal Collective were getting themselves back to Joni Mitchell’s Edenic Woodstock garden right from the start – musically evoking the natural high of a 5-year-old’s wide-open wonder, in their case heightened by hippie schooling in rural Maryland. Since rejecting the regal indie status offered by their avant-pop breakthrough Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009), the very idea of career peaks and troughs has been ignored as an ego-trip dead-end, replaced by wandering, often fractured progress, as when a duo version of the Collective’s quartet made last year’s trippy Crestone soundtrack. As the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does restoration and upgrading to 4K always make a film better? I used to think so but after watching an unnervingly image-perfect Blu-ray of Down by Law, I’m not so sure.Jim Jarmusch's shaggy dog tale about three strangers thrown together in a prison cell was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1986. Shot in black and white by the late Robby Müller (Wim Wenders’ favourite cameraman), Down by Law stars John Lurie (the louche lead in Stranger Than Paradise), singer-songwriter Tom Waits, and the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni in his first English-language role.There are a few Read more ...
David Nice
They’re back, the Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Ozark District, otherwise sleek-seeming middle class Chicagoans Marty and Wendy Byrde. And thanks to the super-subtle performances of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, we hate them more than ever – except when they’re up against worse.It's clear where our sympathies should really lie, however complicated: with the young people caught up in the network of money-laundering, murder and general amorality. Ozark shares the concerns of Dickens over betrayed and abused children and adolescents. The Byrdes believe in family values, but are fucking up their Read more ...
Sarah Kent
America in Crisis revisits an exhibition staged in 1969 soon after Richard Nixon was elected President. Pictures taken by 18 Magnum photographers including Elliott Erwitt and Mary Ellen Mark cast a critical eye over American society and capture many of the key events that preceded Nixon’s election.The addition of photographs taken in 2020 and 2021 bring the exhibition up to date and invite comparison between the Trump and Nixon eras. The juxtaposition is pretty devastating, since it reveals the degree to which many of the problems revealed by the first exhibition have got worse over the Read more ...
Justine Elias
Champion (1949), one of many boxing films of the 1930s and 1940s, made a sculpture – and a star – of Kirk Douglas. In one of the few non-fight scenes, Douglas, as middleweight Midge Kelly, agrees to pose for an artist (Lola Albright), but quickly gets bored.A bruiser in and out of the ring, he’s got his eye on the artist. So he drops his robe, crushes his clay likeness, and moves in, even though she’s his manager’s wife. Midge is always on the make. What he wants, he takes. Women, trainers, managers. And he bails on them like a snake sheds its skin.“I’m not gonna be a ‘Hey, you’ all my life Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mr. E’s music examines hellish depths, but always climbs back towards the light. Electro-Shock Blues (1998) was soon redeemed by “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues”, and a trilogy of sometimes feral, wracked albums ended with Tomorrow Morning (2010). As the hard blows of deaths, disaster and divorce were absorbed, The Deconstruction (2018) even found a kind of faith. All things considered, E’s a remarkably optimistic writer.Souljacker was, though, a plunge into heavy darkness with Unabomber vibes, coincidentally released in 9/11’s aftermath. PJ Harvey’s frequent collaborator John Parrish produced, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Guillermo del Toro has described Nightmare Alley as “a straight, really dark story”, lacking the supernatural elements in his previous films such as Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. Nonetheless, Nightmare Alley still feels like a spectral visitation from a weird and menacing dimension.Based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham (previously filmed in 1947 starring Tyrone Power), it’s the story of ambitious carnival worker Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who we see in the opening sequence setting fire to what we will learn was his own home in the Midwest. At first he’s a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Virtual “mixtapes” are not proper albums. Their purpose is often to whet the appetite. Nowhere is this more so than in US hip hop and right now Lady London’s new teaser is much-vaunted.Off the back of a couple of hot tunes that woke her peers to her talents (“Money Over” and “Never”), the new 33-minute, 13-track collection collates and polishes freestyles that have appeared on various platforms, as well as adding a couple of new ones. The content varies in quality, but the delivery and style never does.Zaire Stewart – AKA Lady London – hits her mid-20s having achieved much. She has self- Read more ...