America
Liz Thomson
Sixty years after her debut at Club 47, Harvard Square, Joan Baez this year bows out of formal touring and recording with an album every bit as remarkable as her 1960 debut, preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry. Now 77, she’s reached an accommodation with a voice once famously described as “an achingly pure soprano”, which wrapped itself effortlessly around Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras #5. Once a bright-white diamond, it is now a deep topaz, still an exquisite instrument in the lower registers in which Baez is most comfortable.Whistle Down the Wind, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tonya Harding and the kneecapping of Nancy Kerrigan – what a story it was, back in 1994. Even if you knew nothing about figure skating, you followed the tale of Tonya, the red-neck, white-trash Olympic hopeful from Oregon, her more elegant rival Nancy and the clumsy plot, hatched by Tonya’s estranged husband and other bozos, and perhaps Tonya herself, to ruin Kerrigan’s chances in the Winter Olympics.If you're expecting answers or insight from I, Tonya, you'll be disappointed. It may be better to come to it without prior knowledge. It stars an impressive, fiercely focused Margot Robbie in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Beach Rats is a film that has “indie” etched in its bones. The second feature from Brooklyn-born Eliza Hittman, it was made with support from New York's independent outfit Cinereach, and went through development at the Sundance Labs. Appropriately, it took that festival's Best Feature Director award last year.It’s strong on the kind of atmosphere that might easily float into nowhere, but is backed up by a striking performance from British newcomer Harris Dickinson that holds the attention in the subtlest ways. Dickinson plays 19-year-old Frankie, who’s on the cusp of adulthood and apparently Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Greta Gerwig, in her hugely acclaimed, semi-autobiographical directing debut (a Golden Globe for best director, five Academy Award nominations) opens Lady Bird with a Joan Didion quote: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”Brits may well think the place doesn’t look that bad, what with all the sunshine, big houses and swimming-pools, but 17-year-old Lady Bird (a delicate, acne-scarred Saoirse Ronan in a brilliant performance), who describes it as the mid-west of California, is keen to get the hell out of there. She longs to go college in New Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Transangelic Exodus is a roller-coaster ride. Songs twist, turn, have sudden shifts in tempo, are punctuated by unexpected instrumental interjections, and come to a dead stop after which they resume their unpredictable course. Although Ezra Furman's musical touchstones of late Fifties pop and The Modern Lovers are still apparent, the follow-up to 2015’s Perpetual Motion People comes across as nothing less than a vigorously shaken-and-stirred take on pre-Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen.Furman says the narrative thread running through the frenzied Transangelic Exodus is his being “in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The American family has seldom looked more desperate. Will Eno’s The Open House depicts a gathering of such dismal awfulness that it surely sets precedents for this staple element of American drama. Yet for viewers who relish humour in its most pitch-black form, and enjoy a dramatic turn-around that is as unpredictable as it is accomplished, the writer’s 2014 play (which won him the playwriting Obie award that year) is deliciously scalding.Eno introduces his five characters, assembled for the parents’ wedding anniversary, not by name but by their role in the family, suggesting something Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A macchiato may never taste the same again. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and history behind your cup of designer coffee, The Monk of Mokha will answer all your questions, and more.This is the prolific Dave Eggers’s third semi-biographical work: What is the What tells the story of one of Sudan’s “lost boys” and his journey to America; Zeitoun is the dramatic story of a Syrian American survivor of hurricane Katrina. In both of these works of reportage, Eggers gets close to his subjects and exposes trauma, injustice and prejudice. And both are page-turners, just as many of his Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This Vietnam vet/road movie is a warm-hearted, meandering piece, but any similarities to Linklater’s Boyhood or the Before…trilogy end there. This is a darker story, but not dark enough, and you wish it could have been less conventional and harder-hitting. Set in 2003, its first scene is in a run-down Virginia bar with Sal, a jaded alcoholic ex-marine (Bryan Cranston in a stand-out performance) at its helm. Doc, a shy former medic from Vietnam days who Sal doesn’t recognise at first (a low-key Steve Carell), re-enters his life, followed by a third ex-marine, Mueller, who was once a hell- Read more ...
Katherine Waters
On their return home from Ohio to New York, young couple Jenny and Elias (Anneika Rose and Tom Mothersdale, main picture) make a detour to Gettysburg for a few days’ sightseeing. Elias has been fascinated by the town and its bloody history since he was a young boy; Jenny is ambivalent, and in the throes of an incapacitatingly painful period. The outline is simple, but this is Annie Baker’s John and nothing is quite as it seems. (The same writer's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick played this same address in 2016.) Their B&B is run by Mertis (Marylouise Burke, pictured below), a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Michael Portillo has barely been off a train since leaving politics, taking journeys blending scenery and history: it must be a relief receiving plaudits for edutainment instead of the abuse habitually heaped on politicians.Herewith the third American series, around the East Coast, its history perhaps intentionally a subtle rebuke to Trumpian values. Ten hours of film divided into 20 programmes detail an 1,100 mile journey from Boston to Toronto. Long-distance American railroad journeys in the 21st century are an odd enterprise: once a country where great fortunes were made by the railway Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
"The Times They Are A-Changin'" has never sounded so menacing. The Brothers & Sisters’ gospel version accompanies the end credits of The Final Year documentary as we watch the stunned UN ambassador Samantha Power unpinning her son’s drawings from her office wall and moving out of the White House on the day before Trump’s inauguration.It’s only towards this grisly end that director Greg Barker’s film gathers momentum. It starts with a promise of intimacy – Power getting her bouncy kids ready for school, secretary of state John Kerry forgetting his cell phone before he’s driven off in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It beggars belief that, from the moment Steven Spielberg took delivery of the script by first-timer Liz Hannah, it took a mere 10 months to get The Post in the can. Its subject being the race to publish, that's a fitting rate of production. Introducing the film at its London premiere, Spielberg stressed the urgency of a story about the media under renewed attack. For Richard Nixon, who tried to suppress the bad news about Vietnam, read Donald Trump’s confected concept of fake news.The Post has since acquired an extra timeliness. There’s an indelible image towards the end of Katharine "Kay" Read more ...