"Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day!" Curly the cowboy sang in the opening scene of Oklahoma!, the first musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943). In the midst of war here was sheer optimism and celebration set – with some nods at reality ("there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, an’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up the sky") – in the American West. It was also a fully integrated show – music, book, lyrics, choreography (Agnes de Mille, Cecil B DeMille’s niece) and set design with everything pushing the narrative, another Read more ...

The aura of Ben Affleck burneth bright. It only seems about 10 minutes ago that he starred in The Accountant, and now here’s Live by Night, his fourth outing as director, and the second movie on which he’s been writer, director and star. He’ll be performing that multitasking feat again on the forthcoming solo-Batman flick The Batman, when he’s not putting in guest appearances in all the “DC extended universe” franchise spin-offs.If a gangster movie could ever be described as a “romp”, Live by Night would be that film, as it vaults across the Prohibition years of the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...

50 is titled to mark fifty years of touring. Now 75, Michael Chapman released Rainmaker, his first album, in 1969. Though well-known devotees have never been lacking – Bowie recruited Mick Ronson after hearing his playing on a Chapman album; Elton John wanted Chapman for his band – his lengthy presence has not brought Chapman the stature of contemporary and similarly idiosyncratic British singer-songwriters like Roy Harper or John Martyn. Yet, he endures.The swift follow-up to 2014’s The Polar Bear is ample evidence why. 50 opens with the atmospheric, energised and rolling “A Spanish Incident Read more ...

The arrival of this oppressively atmospheric 19th-century historical drama is being trailed as the BBC's bold attempt to break the Saturday night stranglehold of soaps and talent shows. No doubt they were encouraged by the success of all those Saturday night Scandi dramas on BBC Four, and if Taboo falls short it won't be because of a lack of stellar names.Front and centre is Tom Hardy, starring as the previously-presumed-dead James Keziah Delaney who suddenly reappears in London in 1814 at his father's funeral. Hardy is also co-creator (with his dad Chips) and co-producer of Taboo with his Read more ...

In American mythology, the frontier offered a clean slate, the opportunity to escape from the shadow of the past and live heroically. But, as with everything else in the context of the American Dream, which continues to unfold in real life as if it were but a simulacrum of myth, the present is haunted by the shadow of evil: greed, violence – between white men, but also against native Americans – and personal tragedy. We are prisoners of our past, and nothing can save us.David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water is shot through with echoes of classic Westerns – two brothers on the loose, bad men Read more ...

Popular music works best when it strikes a chord that goes beyond the beauty of the hook, the seductive quality of the melody, or the catchiness of the lyrics. The resonance can be personal or universal, or perhaps, in order to qualify as a critic’s choice as album of the year, it should be both. Leonard Cohen’s last album, made in the full knowledge that it would be his last, spoke to me with a directness and depth that induced a paradoxical mixture of pleasure and pain.Cohen was, it would seem, born wise, and a certain native maturity coloured his work from the start. As he revisited over Read more ...

A 90-minute biographical documentary about Bruce Springsteen, you may think, is for Springsteen fans only. But really anyone who is interested in fame, friendship, family relationships and the creative process will have enjoyed this – a revealing mix of personal testimony, The Boss reading from his recently released autobiography of the same title, Springsteen family home movies, and rarely seen footage of his early career.For music fans, the most interesting section was where Springsteen talked about his influences – they are wide and varied, and have a noticeably large number of British Read more ...

Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.On the other hand, 1980s racer Tommy Byrne was a working-class chancer from Dundalk who was permanently skint and got nicked for stealing. Yet the evidence suggests he was one of the fastest natural drivers who ever sat in a racing car, and who even gave Ayrton Senna a run for his money when both of them drove for the Van Diemen team at the start of the Read more ...

Anyone who expected a simple robots-versus-humans confrontation, like in Michael Crichton's original Westworld movie from 1973, had another think, or bunch of thinks, coming. The final episode of the Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams Westworld was more like a sci-fi manifesto for a post-human world.It was further proof of how the new wave of long-form, big-budget television is developing vast horizons way beyond what even filmmakers can now envisage. While they get about two hours to get their message across, here auteur Nolan (along with his wife and co-writer Lisa Joy) has already had 10 and a half Read more ...

Cities, the fastest growing habitats in the history of the world, provided the subject for the sixth and final programme in Planet Earth II, the series that came a decade after the original Planet Earth programmes set new standards for television coverage of wildlife and nature.The follow-up confirmed that they are still being set, even though we have become accustomed to intrepid cameramen getting close to subjects never seen before, and tight narrative editing that gives us both visible and verbal comprehensible sequences, all anchored by the comforting familiarity of David Read more ...

The Good American, a Texan no less, has landed at Tate Modern in style. This posthumous retrospective of the great Robert Rauschenberg includes a paint-bespattered, fully made-up bed hung vertically on the wall, and called – you guessed – Bed,1955 (pictured below right). A huge White Painting, 1951 – latex housepaint on seven panels, glossy and smooth – is joined by a huge, swirling, all-black painting, Untitled, c.1951, and an installation of various substances resembling bubbling mud, called Mud Muse, 1968-71. One gallery contains so-called Jammers, 1975-76, swathes of material leaning Read more ...

Any show that starts with a shot of a naked bubble-butt is likely to grab the attention – especially when it belongs to Milo Ventimiglia – but, alas, the barefaced cheek of this opening gambit becomes all too symbolic. This Is Us scrapes the bottom of the barrel of American TV drama. However, its saving grace could be that it does so with irony – there are 17 more episodes to come.Dan Fogelman, its creator, also wrote Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). The cast of that movie, which includes Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling and Julianne Moore, suggests his work appeals to actors. It’s not so easy to Read more ...