America
Matt Wolf
Filmed, as one would, well, imagine, prior to lockdown, Imagine .... My Name is Kwame hearkens to what now seems a bygone era of full and buzzy playhouses and adventurous theatre-making that was about the live experience and not some facsimile online. That the hourlong film, directed by Charlie Sever, tells of the multiple iterations over time of a theatre practitioner, Kwame Kwei-Armah, now running the Young Vic makes one long to be back in the whirligig of playgoing again to see where this multi-hyphenate talent will lead us next.But the focus of such programmes is inevitably to look Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.The screenplay is based on a four-part New Yorker short story called Sell-Out by Simon Rich. That piece of writing along with other short stories earned him a reputation as a modern-day PG Wodehouse, not to mention being SNL’s youngest ever writer and polishing scripts for Pixar. Rich’s writing is sharp, often high-concept, and very, very funny. But the story has lost some of its Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel universes, the threads that connect us. Vincent, an impoverished bartender in a remote hotel on Vancouver Island, leaves her job to enter a new life in the “kingdom of money” with Jonathan Alkaitis, an immensely rich, much older New York financier. But she has an unsettling sense of other versions of her life being lived without her. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in.”In Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be one of the first movies to be shown in cinemas post-lockdown, but Unhinged is a pale ghost of some much better movies. Its headlining hook is the presence of Russell Crowe in the central role of a road-rage vigilante itching to find victims upon whom to vent his spleen – at one point he gives his name as Tom Cooper, but it probably isn’t – yet Crowe is barely recognisable as the star who bossed Gladiator or rocked the house in LA Confidential. You could almost imagine he picked this role because they paid him to loom large on screen while having to learn hardly any dialogue.Director Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like a sub-par Natural Born Killers for Gen Z, director-screenwriter Joshua Caldwell’s latest film, featuring Disney-child-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne, tackles the perils of social media like a parent trying to navigate TikTok. Arielle (Thorne) is a provocative Florida teen whose sole desire is to become famous any way she can. After a video of Arielle beating up a girl in a night club goes viral, she sees her road to stardom lies in making videos of violent acts to boost her online profile. Having dragged reluctant ex-con Dean (Jake Manley) along for the ride, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We knew that Michael Sheen was a skilful and versatile actor, but lately he’s been getting dangerously good. Last year he roared into the third season of The Good Fight as the outrageous drug-fuelled lawyer Roland Blum, like an explosive fusion of his fellow-Welshmen Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Now, after wickedly impersonating Chris Tarrant in ITV’s Quiz and indulging in some comical actor-baiting in the BBC’s Staged, he arrives in Sky 1’s new US import Prodigal Son as the brilliant Dr Martin Whitly.But behind his suave and charming exterior, Dr Whitly is a profoundly deranged serial Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve already had The Last Five Years in lockdown; now, we get a digital production of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s earliest work. A series of wistful pop/jazz numbers loosely linked thematically, rather than narratively, this 1995 abstract musical features various characters responding to a moment that upends their lives. Formally, it’s another Brown show that suits our current circumstances, since the songs are mainly standalone solos, and the performers’ various homes work fine as background; no need for a helicopter or falling chandelier in this one.The central idea also speaks Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When she announced her “surprise” 8th album on social media this week, Taylor Swift described its subject matter as a combination of “fantasy, history and memory” told with “love, wonder and whimsy”. For the listener, this hits home around track three. “The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of Rebekah, a “middle-class divorcée” who marries a heir to the Standard Oil fortune and spends her widowhood - and inheritance - on boys, ballet and annoying the neighbours of her Rhode Island mansion. And then? “It was bought by me,” sings Swift, turning the song’s misogynist refrain of “who Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
At this year’s Oscars Bong Joon Ho brought the audience to its feet in honour of the director whose words had struck a chord with him as a film student. The comment, simple but difficult to adhere to in the cut-throat, risk-averse movie business, was that “the most personal is the most creative”. The director, Martin Scorsese.Of course, Scorsese’s The Irishman was also in contention in the same ceremony, the film a powerful continuation of themes, collaborations and inimitable film language of a career spanning more than 50 years – and proof that the American is still following his Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, The Plot Against America flashes back to the global turbulence of the 1940s to depict a counterfactual America that turns to the dark side. Instead of the re-election of Franklin D Roosevelt for a third term in 1940, the aviation pioneer and wildly popular celebrity Charles Lindbergh is elected President, on a platform of keeping America out of the new war in Europe.The real Lindbergh had lived in Europe during the 1930s and was suspected of Nazi sympathies – he was awarded the Order of Merit of the German Eagle, which the Hitler regime gave Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an opening line to BBC Two's new three-part series, “Rupert Murdoch is an enigma” failed to set pulses racing. It rather implied that after three hours of documentary TV, we may end up none the wiser about what makes the scary Australian media tycoon tick.Still, director Jamie Roberts and his team had done their due diligence in the research department, turning up a trove of nuggets from the archives interspersed with pithy interviews from assorted players in Murdoch’s extraordinary journey, including Alan Sugar, Hugh Grant, Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil. There were some chilling Read more ...