America
Adam Sweeting
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on thrillers like The Parallax View, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American political conspiracies, and inevitably he portrays CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies. If you work for the CIA you'll hate Snowden (★★★★), but Stone has fashioned the story into a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Snowden starts out as a sincere young patriot, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs in 1965, he was intending to make a concert film. The backstage, limo and hotel room material was imagined as filler. But something unexpected happened: Dylan and his entourage, not least his constant companion road manager Bob Neuwirth, realised very soon that the performance didn’t end as the protest singer stepped out of the spotlight, high on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Moby’s last proper album, not including the ambient affair he released via a free download from his LA restaurant earlier this year, was Innocents in 2013. It was a rich yet melancholic affair, the culmination of some years when a sober Moby, no longer on the touring conveyer belt that followed his post-Play mega-success, appeared to find solace in elegant musicality. His new album leaves that behind. Moby has relocated his noisy inner punk and put him to good use.Moby’s career began on the straight-edge US punk scene but his last attempt to reanimate these origins was 20 years ago with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cinema trailer for A Monster Calls ★★★★ looks faintly ludicrous, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around the landscape, but don't be deceived. In conjunction with screenwriter Patrick Ness, who also wrote the original novel, director J A Bayona has conjured a bittersweet and often painfully moving account of bereavement and growing up, in which the grim burden of terminal illness is alleviated by the healing power of art and fantasy. In the lead role of 12-year-old Conor O'Malley, trying to cope with being bullied at school while his mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) fades inexorably Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Ye olde love triangle returns, this time as the centrepiece of a rock chamber musical that premiered Off-Broadway in 2013 and now makes its UK premiere. There’s a good guy, a bad boy, and the promise of a violent end, but despite the oft-referenced roiling passions – and a storming quartet of performances – Sam Yates’s staging feels too cool and clinical for its purportedly hot-blooded subject.While the original American production dragged a reluctantly complicit audience into the grungy downtown New York bar where reformed party girl Sara – now with a husband and child on the Upper West Side Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Crichton's 1973 movie Westworld became a paradigm of fears about technology running amok and turning violently against its human creators. HBO's new series, executive produced by JJ Abrams and written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, looks as if it's aiming to explore the ghosts in the machinery, and take us to a Blade Runner-ish place where the boundary between the human and the man-made starts to dissolve.But this was only episode one, so let's not get ahead of ourselves. If you know the film, you'll recognise the set-up. Westworld is a futuristic holiday resort, where vacationers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much was anticipated from Tate Taylor's film version of Paula Hawkins's bestselling novel, but there really are times when the best plan is to stay home with a good book. Despite a high-octane girl-power cast and the lustrous screenwriting reputation of Erin Cressida Wilson, this thing clanks along like the 3am milk train to Exeter sidings.It probably didn't help that the action has been transported from Hawkins's grimy London commuterland to the plusher environs of upstate New York (though at least it means Emily Blunt's rail-riding character, Rachel, always gets a seat), which seems to Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's one of those true stories you couldn't make up: in 1920s Kentucky, Floyd Collins, visionary cave explorer, happens across the spectacular sand cave of his dreams only to become trapped on the way back to the surface. The media attention he might have hoped would turn his discovery into a commercial proposition for him and his impoverished family is instead
– irony of ironies
– focused on his entrapment.Will he or won't he make it back into the light? While the carnival arrives above ground, Floyd's dark night of the soul is played out below. Billy Wilder turned it Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are two ways of reacting to an opera company like WNO staging a musical like Kiss Me, Kate. You can ask yourself whether this is work that an opera house should concern itself with at all. Or you can take Confucius’s advice, and just lie back and enjoy it. Of course you could say the same if WNO put on an air display or a cricket tournament. But at least Cole Porter is sung drama of a kind, which is one definition of opera, and it’s also on the whole enjoyable, though that naturally depends on the how as much as the what.WNO’s Kiss Me, Kate is a revival of a co-production originally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Given the fractious state of American politics, perhaps it's a suitable moment for a movie taking a look back at the American Civil War. However, despite heaving at the seams with good intentions and noble sentiments, Gary Ross's Free State of Jones ultimately can't justify its debilitating 140-minute running time.It's based on the real-life story of Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a Mississippi farmer who turned deserter and ended up declaring his own independent mini-state, one peopled by runaway slaves and former soldiers sickened by the Civil War carnage and the rapacious martial law Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter onscreen than Bogart and Bacall, but their visual harmony as slender, diminutive blond(e)s
– he hard and unsentimental, she silky and insouciant
– made for noir's coollest romantic partnership.Arrow Academy has now rereleased The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahia (1946), the middle pair of the four thrillers that teamed Ladd and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Ira Sachs is becoming a master at telling the small stories of life, giving them a resonance that speaks beyond the immediate context in which they unfold. That context, for his three most recent films, has been New York, and he’s as acute as anyone filming that metropolis today in sensing how the city itself plays a role in the lives of those who make it their home.Or rather, as often as not, who struggle to do so. His last film, Love Is Strange, was about the tribulations involved in finding a new home for a long-established couple whose circumstances had changed (as had Read more ...