America
Joseph Walsh
Since Play Misty For Me in 1971, Clint Eastwood has been tearing up the American myth with a body of muscular, often melancholic work. He continues this theme with Richard Jewell, the story of a security guard falsely accused of the 1996 Atalanta Olympic Park bombing.Eastwood focuses squarely on the witch hunt by the media and FBI that turned Jewell from overnight hero to one of the most hated men in America, showing just how vulnerable a private citizen is to the machinations of state power. The real bomber, white-supremist Eric Rudolph, is barely mentioned.It’s easy to see why a film like Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a palpable rage to Melina Matsoukas’ first feature film Queen & Slim, starring Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya and newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith. Cast in the mould of Bonnie and Clyde, it’s a film that has you clinging to the arms of your seat from the first fifteen-minutes. In the opening scene, we learn that Turner-Smith’s character - called Queen for the majority of the film - is a defence lawyer who has recently lost her client to the death penalty. She’s on a Tinder date with Slim (Kaluuya), to distract herself. On the way home in Slim’s car they get pulled over by a trigger Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Cormac McCarthy’s two-hander, premiered at Chicago's mighty Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006, has by this point been everything short of an ice ballet: a self-described “novel in dramatic form”, as one might expect from the American author of such titles as All the Pretty Horses and The Road, followed by a film made for TV directed by, and starring, Tommy Lee Jones, opposite Samuel L Jackson.Its British premiere at the fledgling Boulevard Theatre represents a further audacious programming move by this new arrival to London’s array of venues but looks unlikely to reap the plaudits of its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 18-year-old Japanese horror hit Ju-On (The Grudge) was remade once before, as – yes – The Grudge (2004), with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now it's re-rebooted in this stylishly photographed but fatally crass incarnation directed by Nicolas Pesce, who is of the view that if something is scary once, keep repeating it ad nauseam.It’s the story of number 44 Reyburn Drive in Cross River, Pennsylvania, a house cursed with a spirit of murderous rage. This passes on to anyone who enters, having made its way to the USA from Tokyo by attaching itself to Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood), who, rather Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen King’s novels have generated an impressive lineage of successful adaptations. This HBO treatment (on Sky Atlantic) of his 2018 novel The Outsider, developed by Richard Price and featuring screenwriting input from Dennis Lehane, is shaping up as one of the best TV incarnations. If the first two episodes established an atmosphere of pervasive horror and dread, this third one began to lure the realistically-drawn world of Cherokee City, Georgia further into King’s familiar supernatural territory.It’s a town metaphorically shot in black and white, where nothing cheerful ever looks likely Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece. Curtis Harrington made dark and wonderful work as an independent film maker, not least in Night Tide, now released in a 4K version, along with a very well-curated collection of eight of his short films, many of them as interesting in their own way as the more Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Just Mercy, the latest film from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), is based on a New York Times bestseller. It has a star-studded cast. It’s emotionally moving as well as intellectually accessible. But it’s no easy film to watch. “They can call it what they want – it’s just another way to lynch a black man.” Just Mercy is about death row in the American South, and it is a bruising and beautiful film. It lights a fire under you.Just Mercy is based on a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, an American civil rights attorney who has spent his life working with adults and children condemned to die in Read more ...
Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle, BBC Four review - meticulous account of a haunting American tragedy
Adam Sweeting
It happened 42 years ago, but the mass suicide of 900 people at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana is still an event that freezes the blood. They were members of the Peoples Temple, the semi-totalitarian cult founded by Jim Jones, who began as a mere egomaniac but morphed into a bullying dictator convinced of his own God-like powers.This was the first of two 80-minute Storyville films (on BBC Four) but the length paid off, allowing director Shan Nicholson to assemble a meticulously detailed portrait of the way Jones built up his “Temple” and persuaded ostensibly rational people to follow him Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The dinosaur credentials of disgraced cop Frank Penny (Aaron Eckhart) litter his flat, from his battered old TV to his binning of his daily newspaper, bar the sports section. As he begins his beat, vlogger Ava Brooks (Courtney Eaton, pictured below) is blathering wokely about the mainstream media. The appearance of a pair of ruthless but remarkably stupid kidnappers results in Penny’s jaw-dropping decision to let her live-stream his hunt for the kidnap victim, due to drown in 63 minutes in an undisclosed location.The film’s real-time rampage through those minutes is screamingly unconvincing, Read more ...
howard.male
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had every intention of making Songs Of Our Native Daughters featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah my Album of the year. It’s a solid work of great beauty, elegance and substance. But you can read my thoughts on it elsewhere on The Arts Desk. And the album is number eight in Rolling Stone’s Top 40 of the year, as well as being Iggy Pop’s personal album of the year, so more waffle on it from me is neither here nor there. Whereas the still relatively unknown Louisiana pop group Seratones may still be new enough to this game Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The acclaim of being the first to represent the mid-1980s AIDS pandemic in cultural form was a plaudit that none of those concerned would ever have wished for. With New York as its epicentre, and almost nothing known about the disease that was hitting at the heart of the city’s gay community, such early attempts were tentative, the boundaries between personal and political still rough. Strictly, theatre came first, with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart premiering in 1985.Dating from the same year, Arthur J Bressan Jr’s Buddies was certainly the screen pioneer, a piece of urgently made Read more ...