America
Adam Sweeting
The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.But, as Nick Broomfield’s new documentary reveals, none of this could protect her from a grasping family, parasitic hangers-on, and an unfaithful husband who aided and abetted her Read more ...
Mark Kidel
One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon Brando ever directed, is a masterpiece by any reckoning, a classic western about love and treachery, as well as a startling and boundary-breaking re-invention of the genre.The tragedy unfolds, through many twists and turns, from a moment of betrayal that subsequently haunts two bank-robbers, Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden). The story focuses on Rio’s quest for revenge: after five years in a horrific Mexican prison, he comes upon Longworth, who has now re-invented himself as the sheriff of Monterey, California. The two actors, both originally Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff, metaphorically speaking, at any moment?University life in various guises is at the centre of The Idiot. Elif Batuman is an autobiographical writer whose subject is her own intellectual and geographical adventures, imbued with a sense of discovery and emotional involvement that does not seem to depend on amatory alliances, unless you count the books and authors Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The second episode of Bruce Miller’s brilliant dramatisation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4 finds Offred (the wonderful Elisabeth Moss) being penetrated by Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes, looking conflicted). Of course, his barren wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) is there too, lying on the bed with Offred’s head bouncing in her lap. Offred tries to take her mind off this no-fun threesome with thoughts of blue things from the time before. Her blue car, "Tangled up in Blue", Blue Oyster Cult – how alien the words sound. Especially as handmaids only wear red Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless. Subtitled "How Skiffle Changed the World", this is an impressive work of popular scholarship by the singer, songwriter and social activist whose 40-year (and counting) career has embraced folk, punk, rock and Americana, and various combinations of those genres. It has also seen him anointed as an heir to Woody Guthrie, the late great journalist and song-maker, the Dust Bowl balladeer who, more than half a century ago, wrote a song about a little-known racketeer landlord whose mercenary tactics would lay the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Make no mistake about it, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright to watch. London receives its first opportunity to appraise his vibrant, quizzical talent with this production of An Octoroon, for which he received an OBIE in 2014 (jointly with his second Off-Broadway work of the same year, Appropriate). His follow-on play Gloria, opening at the Hampstead Theatre in June, was a finalist in the Pulitzer drama category in 2016.An Octoroon is a cracking piece of writing. Jacobs-Jenkins has taken on that defining American subject, slavery, and deconstructed it via the prism of an 1859 melodrama by Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There are not many bands who are obtuse enough to begin a gig with a 45 minute unrecorded song, especially when they are preparing to go their separate ways at the end of the tour and have no plans for further recording. Sonic adventurers Swans, however, have no such qualms. After taking to the stage with a minimum of fuss and looking like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch gone feral in the backwoods of Twin Peaks, they pick up their instruments and launch into “The Knot”.Slowly building up a head of steam from a woozy and disorientating oceanic drone, the song builds and falls away again until Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Initially released to coincide with Record Shop Day (we’re in the UK so yes, it’s a shop, thanks very much), we’re a little late out of the blocks with the Miracle Legion frontman’s latest solo venture, but then, The Possum in the Driveway is an album that benefits from a little time to bed in and take root.Compared to 2013’s Dear Mark J Mulcahy, I Love You, Possum feels like a daring and deliberate attempt to reach further and broaden scope: to play many parts. “Stuck on Something Else” opens the album with a hushed reverence before Mulcahy’s voice takes hold: bold, purposed and drenched in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An Australian who emigrated to New Zealand in 1965, Roger Donaldson cut his teeth in documentaries and TV before launching into a career in feature films. His first feature, Sleeping Dogs (1976), on the unlikely theme of a New Zealand plunged into totalitarianism, immediately attracted attention, and after he made Smash Palace (1982) Hollywood came calling. Donaldson embarked on a string of high-profile projects which included The Bounty (with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins), No Way Out (an espionage drama starring Kevin Costner), The Getaway (with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger), the sci-fi Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The subtitle of Richard Nelson’s new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, almost invisible craft fulfils the President’s most hollow promise. It restores full humanity to a family of lower-middle class Americans who often feel slighted and helpless. As they gather around their kitchen table, the Gabriels talk and live more fully than most media and politicians ever really believe of those they describe and rule. Nelson has said his aim is “verisimilitude”, a seemingly modest ambition which wonderfully succeeds.Like Nelson’s The Apple Family Plays, seen at the 2015 Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gražyna Bacewicz: Chamber Music Diana Ambache and friends (Ambache Recordings)This is an easy disc to love. Gražyna Bacewicz’s music is consistently good, often exceptionally so, and it's gratifying that new recordings on Hyperion and Chandos have appeared in recent years. Pianist Diana Ambache’s wide-ranging compilation contains some brilliant stuff, the quality of the performances reflecting her evangelical powers of persuasion. Every player is on inspired form, beginning with the soloists in the invigorating Quartet for Four Violins – a combination which works so well you wonder why Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"We live past hope," or so remarks the AIDS-afflicted drag queen-turned-prophet, Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield), late in Angels in America. But surely not even Tony Kushner, author of the eight-hour theatrical landmark that some while ago entered the canon of contemporary classics, could have hoped for lightning to strike twice when it comes to the National Theatre and his play.Twenty-five years ago, this same address launched Kushner as a major name on the back of Declan Donnellan's flinty British premiere of the diptych's first and more immediately accessible half, Millennium Approaches, Read more ...