America
Matt Wolf
It's long been a theatrical given, especially in musicals, that characters need to be seen to change: a climactic duo in the eternally crowd-pulling Wicked makes that abundantly clear. ("Because I knew you," goes the lyric, "I have been changed for good.") But what happens when people can't or won't change, and are so ground down by circumstance and their own temperament that they retreat inwards until they implode?That's the situation at the provocative and ever-stirring heart of the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change, whose revival at Hampstead Theatre boasts a central Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Oh dear. After a bumpy couple of years which included an all-too-public arrest for domestic violence to which he pleaded guilty, Don McLean is releasing his first new studio album in eight years. Metaphorically (and sometimes literally) it hits a lot of bum notes and often tips over into self-parody.For a singer-songwriter whose back catalogue includes such genuine classics as “Crying”, “And I Love You So”, “Winterwood” and of course “American Pie” (the manuscript for which recently went for $1.2 million at auction), and whose talent was (according to some) is hymned in the Charles Fox-Norman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive history may have missed some nuts out. Not that anyone would question the sanity of a deserter from the US Army in 1968. Seen on the ground and from the air, the hot front of the Cold War was no place to be.Thus a group of four daring pioneers shucked their uniforms while on leave in Japan, and made their way via a fishing vessel to the eastern shore of the Soviet landmass, across which they were ceremonially paraded as propaganda Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.Even its running time is designed to provoke. At a mere 85 minutes, it rejects the creeping bloat which has become endemic in Hollywood, and the shock of its abrupt ending leaves you feeling as if you’ve just staggered out of some terrible accident, and you’re trying to put Read more ...
Marianka Swain
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a case for director Frecknall as a luminous rising talent in British theatre.During a long, hot summer in early 20th century, small-town Mississippi, minister’s daughter Alma (Patsy Ferran, pictured below) – whose name means “soul” in Spanish – yearns hopelessly for the boy next door: dissolute doctor’s son John (Matthew Needham), who believes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is it possible to get too much of American politics? With Donald Trump’s daily tweets invading our digital space, a new Kevin-Spacey-free House of Cards on the, well, cards, and new films set in Watergate times, it might be that few will have any appetite for this revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 play set during a Democratic Party convention, and now making its West End debut. But to dismiss it completely would be a pity because, for all the creaks of its plotting, this is quite a watchable account of political in-fighting. After all, any show that has Maureen Lipman and Martin Shaw in the cast Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Al Jourgensen is pissed off with Donald Trump. Really pissed off. So pissed off that he’s dragged the latest incarnation of mighty industrial metal originators Ministry back into the studio for the first time since 2012’s Relapse to produce an album made up solely of songs of resistance against the 45th President of the USA and his alt-right junta. Ministry’s signature monster guitar riffs, jackhammer beats, spoken-word samples and Uncle Al’s unmistakable roar are all given a fresh airing to unleash a tropical storm of revolutionary rock with one very definite target. Make no mistake though, Read more ...
howard.male
Believe it or not, it’s been 14 years since the one-time Talking Heads frontman’s last solo album proper. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like that because his interim collaboration projects always sound so very David Byrne. Even when he took equal billing with the formidably talented and highly individualist Annie Clark (St Vincent), it still sticks in the memory as a Byrne album with guest Clark. But anyway, here we have it, and it too sounds very much like a David Byrne album. Is this meant as a backhanded complement? Not at all.For one thing, it’s not as sonically dense as that St Vincent Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. “I don’t do detached observation.” A large number of the images in Another Kind of Life were taken by photographers who took care to befriend their subjects. Given that these were people on the margins of society – either from choice or necessity – gaining their trust was no mean feat. Once accepted, though, the photographer was in clover.In the mid-1960s, Danny Lyon took many memorable shots of Chicago bikers burning Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Fake news takes on new meaning in the largely gonzo Game Night, which leaves spectators wondering moment-to-moment whether what they are watching is reality or part of a continually unfolding game. Telling of a gathering of six whose game night doesn't quite, um, go according to plan, this co-directing effort between John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein throws numerous genres into the celluloid megamix and blends them to the max. And if the results sometimes tip towards self-indulgence or self-parody, the movie is still far cleverer and more engaging than one had any right to expect. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The practice of mining the rich seam of popular movies to turn them into stage plays or musicals seemingly never grows tired in theatreland. And sometimes it produces a gem but all too often it’s just a cynical ploy to attract ticket sales by piggy-backing on fond memories of a beloved film. It’s unfair to accuse this stage adaptation of Hal Ashby’s cult movie, Harold and Maude, of cynicism; the efforts of all involved are patently sincere, but sadly it just doesn’t work. Whereas the 1971 film was a superior slice of absurdist black humour tinged with transgressive romance, the 2018 Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Essay collections are happily mainstream now, from Zadie Smith to Oliver Sacks, with more and more bits and bobs coming from unexpected quarters. These patchwork quilts from remarkable writers can be significant, nowhere more so than with those from Ursula K Le Guin that are collected here as her “Selected Non-Fiction”.Le Guin died in January, aged 88, and this latest selection was especially chosen for a British readership, comprising reprinted speeches and short essays from 1972 to 2014. All are underlined and anchored by her paradoxical and hard-won success which, however, never soothed Read more ...