America
Kathryn Reilly
Sometimes magic really can’t be recreated. However hard it’s strived for. The incendiary magic that was Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg three decades ago has not been conjured again in this long-awaited reunion. There are sparks of genius, for sure, and some notable beats and samples but it’s certainly no Doggystyle. Maybe the clue is in the “cheeky” title and painfully obvious condom packet imagery on the cover. So far, so teen.One might expect a more mature vocabulary and smarter ideas from the now 53- and 59-years-olds but, sadly – and predictably – we are served liberal sprinklings of effing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Kenny Barron’s Beyond This Place is glorious. Whereas I’ve found some of the more talked-about albums of 2024 either been uneven or unfocused – as if attracting debate is more important than just setting out to make a great album – everything just works so well here.We are treated to the most fluent playing from young alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins I have heard to date. The way in which the recording has captured Johnathan Blake’s shimmering and empathetic busy-ness is just fabulous. The quintet is often reduced to duos and trios, and that gives the individual musicians, and Read more ...
John Carvill
It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here is framed around the women in Bogart’s life, starting with his aloof, undemonstrative mother, Maud. Proper consideration is given to Bogart’s first three wives, Helen Mencken, Mary Philips, and Mayo Methot. In particular, Mayo is rescued from the cipher status to which many previous accounts of Bogart’s life assigned her: she was a former Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this piece today?The key themes of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play look promising on paper: a strong-willed woman battling her brothers for an inheritance, Succession replayed in the deep South. Regina Hubbard Giddens was a plum role for Tallulah Bankhead on stage and Bette Davis in the 1941 film version. And the cinema is where the piece is most at home, a Hollywood melodrama for an actress who can give Regina (the clue is in the name) a regal grandeur, as well as a skilled line in manipulation. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.Refitted with a largely fresh creative team, the show ticks all the boxes that devotees of the movie will want and expect, while never really establishing a reason for being of its own, as Kinky Boots, from the same director (Jerry Mitchell), managed so triumphantly some while back.Mitchell's latest has a vaguely Primark feel where it ought to feel haute couture Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rachel Yoder says she wrote her debut novel Nightbitch as a reaction to Donald Trump’s first term as President, with what she saw as its consequent mood-shift in America towards “traditional values and women staying home, taking care of the kids.”It’s presumably safe to assume that the second coming of the Donald has not filled her with glee, but she can at least console herself that the combination of director Marielle Heller and star Amy Adams have delivered a sizzling screen version of her book.Adams’s Mother – the key characters are called by their roles rather than their names – is a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major film noir and has just been released on a Masters of Cinema Blu-ray.Written by the former newspaperman Sydney Boehm (who also scripted The Big Heat), the movie was directed by Hugo Fregonese, the nomadic Argentine auteur whose films frequently explored entrapment. Stanley Cortez’s expressionistic black and white camerawork, notably his use of chiaroscuro and huge closeups of faces juxtaposed to faces in medium shot within the same frame, captures rapid shifts Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not really on the way to anywhere, but not a destination either and obsessed with popular music and sports, it's very Scouse. Okay, the Mersey did not catch fire as the Cuyahoga River did in 1969, but it would not have surprised anyone in Liverpool had it done so.So it’s almost inevitable that Matt (Sam Mitchell) and Shawn (Enyi Okoronkwo) (pictured below) are like the lads with whom I grew up – okay, they’re like me, I’ll admit it. They bond over their NBA Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...