America
Sarah Kent
It's 100 years since Georgia O’Keeffe first showed at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York, a hub of avant-garde activity, and the opening room of this major retrospective revisits the 1916 exhibition. Inspired by Arthur Dow’s emphasis on freedom of expression and Wassily Kandinsky’s book The Art of Spiritual Harmony, O’Keeffe made a series of drawings and paintings in which natural forms are abstracted to the point where they are only just recognisable. In Pink and Blue Mountains, 1916, for instance, the landscape is transcribed into bands of watercolour washes, and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rebecca Miller’s fiction and her previous films’ manifestly ambitious visual style and narrative structures led to high expectations from Maggie’s Plan. As a movie, it may appeal to audiences craving the kinds of films that Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Richard Curtis make – talky comedies revolving around middle-class professionals chewing over their relationship crises with their friends. But if that’s not your cup of decaf, it may just grate on your nerves.Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, an arts administrator in her early 30s, contemplating single parenthood with the help of donated sperm. She Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year’s smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, with Sean Holmes’s production once again nailing the beguiling blend of Alan Parker’s 1976 film: children performing musical mobster pastiche, smartly knowing in their deconstruction of adult absurdities, but sidestepping cloying precocity.There’s a ramshackle feel to this Bugsy – some garbled dialogue, accents meandering between broad New Yoik and distinct south London – that actually adds to its charm. No Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and has been for the past 42 years, ever since Garrison Keillor first reported on the town's goings-on in his weekly radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor's purring baritone is the gentle voice of non-coastal America, and it is picked up by 700 local public radio stations by four million listeners. But at 72, and after a health scare, Keillor is stepping down. So anyone who wants to get a regular fix from Lake Wobegon will need to go back to the books.Keillor's first fame as a writer was as a regular contributor to William Shawn's The New Yorker Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Take Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and add Handel and Mozart and the Frenchman Massenet, and you have the composers whose operas the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has made her own. She's one of the few who has become a classic opera diva while remaining true to her roots (she was born in Prairie Village, Kansas, and one of her all-time favourite songs is "Over the Rainbow": remember Dorothy was a Kansas girl too.)Melvyn Bragg’s empathetic interview, conducted in the Crush Bar of the Royal Opera House, was a real treat. Question and answer was interspersed with clips of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shamed and reviled, Richard Nixon had the misfortune (albeit self-authored) to be the star of one of the murkiest chapters in American Presidential history. It's not much compensation for him now, but he has become something of a goldmine for film-makers.Anthony Hopkins went to town on him in Nixon. Zack Snyder brought us a grotesque, parallel-universe Nixon in Watchmen. Frank Langella revelled in the wily, devious President in Frost / Nixon. Now here's Kevin Spacey with what could be the best Nixon yet, in Liza Johnson's delicious fantasy-satire about the day when the President met the King. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While many acts have deployed the live album as a stop-gap or an easy money-spinner, some of Neil Young's best work was recorded live – Rust Never Sleeps, Weld and Arc-Weld, Live at Massey Hall 1971, the enigmatic Time Fades Away and so on. As an artist who works spontaneously and intuitively, much of his studio work is effectively live anyway.With Earth, Young has put a new spin on the live approach by picking a batch of songs from across his career, recorded onstage last year with backing band Promise of the Real (featuring Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and Micah), then piecing them together Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are a lot of cheerful people in the world, most of them outside the United States. That's the startling conclusion of Michael Moore's pointed comic jeremiad Where to Invade Next, in which American cinema's premier schlub decamps overseas to encounter numerous life- and work-related lessons that our ketchup-loving conqueror wants to take back home.What surprises isn't Moore's view of present-day America, which is unexceptional in its assessment of a hard-scrabble country ruled by multiple iniquities – not least the overriding potency of money, and a signal inability to face up to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Revenant is released as a home entertainment garlanded in fewer Oscar laurels than it might have been. Its impact as a pure cinematic experience is far greater than this year’s best picture Spotlight. Hence awards for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The paucity of dialogue means that few best actor winners can have had as little to say as Leonardo DiCaprio. He plays Hugh Glass, a tracker and guide abandoned by the party in his charge when he is mauled by bear and presumed next to dead. Spurred by the ghost of his Native American wife, slaughtered in a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it was his grit and authenticity, even more than his musical skills – though the two go hand-in-hand – that the audience fell in love with. Read any fan forum and it’s clear that Steve is loved because most audiences believe he’s experienced exactly what he sings.The official biography, documented repeatedly in the hundreds of press interviews Steve Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An increasing concern for society at large, dementia has become a recurrent theme in films and TV too. Concussion comes at the subject from an unusual angle, as it tells the story of Nigeria-born neuropathologist Dr Bennet Omalu, who identified a form of dementia which was killing an alarming number of American football players.Working as a forensic pathologist in Pittsburgh, Omalu conducted an autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steelers superstar Mike Webster (played here by David Morse), who'd died destitute and mentally shot away at the age of 50. This prompted Omalu's identification of what he Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“The most interesting characters are initially difficult to like,” proclaims Jesse Eisenberg’s would-be filmmaker protagonist, in case his cringe comedy’s mission statement was otherwise unclear. Ben is an outlandish collage of unlikeable qualities: abusive, misanthropic, arrogant, vicious, self-loathing, needy, and a poor little rich kid. Eisenberg does everything possible to alienate in an indulgent two and a half hours, short of throttling a puppy, before asking if we can still love him.Perhaps the more intriguing question – and one Eisenberg’s therapist has surely raised – is why the Read more ...