America
Adam Sweeting
I hope Todd Haynes isn't consumed with bitterness about the way Carol was ignored at the Oscars – mind you, a world where the dreary Spotlight can get Best Film probably isn't one he misses much – but the discerning filmgoer can be in little doubt that this is a masterpiece. A lesbian love story derived from Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt, it's as poignant and haunting an exploration of the ways of the human heart as you could hope to find, graced with central performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara which are as brilliant as they're dissimilar.As Carol Aird, a fashion- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
News that Richmond Fontaine were calling it a day with one final album and tour was not itself a surprise: across latter-day releases, from at least 2009’s We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, the music had become progressively incidental, an increasingly subtle backdrop to frontman Willy Vlautin’s surprisingly widescreen storyteller’s vision of small-town Americana. Their decision to tie up loose ends with one final album, described by Vlautin as “an end piece for all the characters who inhabited the world of Richmond Fontaine over the years”, is not one most bands would take Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
As settings for musical comedy go, this one promised some boom for your buck. Las Vegas in the early 1950s was just emerging as a magnet not only for hedonists and gamblers, mobsters and showgirls, but also for the personnel of America’s Atomic Energy Commission, engaged in fortnightly A-bomb tests over the Nevada desert.Too bad that this fascinating scenario should be squandered on a run-of-the-mill show that scurries frantically from one well-worn musical-comedy trope to another without once pausing to reflect on the wider issues. In 1952 the words “mutually assured destruction” hadn’t yet Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Shorter feels longer in the West End iteration of Motown the Musical, a minor-league jukebox venture that became a Broadway hit courtesy of an unbeatable back catalogue – keep those hits coming! – and a well-drilled production that at least delivered what it promised on the tin. Despite trims for London, the production feels more attenuated and looks markedly less polished, even if there remains little doubt that people who go expecting to rock out to the world-class sequence of hits won't hesitate to do precisely that. On second viewing, the relentless gesture of self-hagiography that Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young man who turned up on a railway platform with no knowledge of who he was or how he came to be there. In the wake of the story’s publication, hundreds of bereaved families came forward to claim the unknown soldier as their own.Now Anthony Weigh – an associate writer at the Donmar – offers his “new version” of Anouilh’s Le Voyageur sans bagage. It turns out to be a thorough rewrite, with added Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that locates hunger for creation and liberation in the imitation and destruction of another. Lloyd employs Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton’s salty new translation – the latter’s wife, Cate Blanchett, led a 2013 Sydney Theatre Company production – to emphasise the unflinching modernity of Genet’s piece, which uses and unmasks theatrical Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John.The show is also making, if you like, a statement about the market. Photography as a medium has been around since the 1840s, ubiquitous for much of the 20th Read more ...
Tim Cumming
While his old friend and sometime touring companion Bob Dylan has just re-entered Capitol Studios to record a new set of standards to follow the Sinatra-inspired Shadows in the Night, Willie Nelson’s latest release for Sony Legacy focuses solely on the brothers Gershwin – he was awarded the Gershwin Prize in 2015.Nelson, for whom this territory is like a second skin, and one he wears lightly, picks out a most charming late-career foray into the gold standard of American popular song. It's the latest in a fairly long list of albums in the genre, topped by his first, 1978's Stardust. Since Read more ...
Anthony Weigh
In the icy early hours of 1 February 1918 a bizarre figure was seen wandering aimlessly along the platform of a railway station in Lyon. A solider. Lost. When asked his name he answered, “Anthelme Mangin”. Other than that he had no memory of who he was, of where he had been, of where he was going, or of what had happened to him prior to arriving on that station platform on that frigid February night.The story of Anthelme Mangin captivated France. For many he was the living embodiment of the unknown soldier buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. A walking, talking memorial to the horrors of the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s always a slight sinking feeling when the first words to appear onscreen are "Based on a True Story". The first worry is that it’s a story you already know, and the movie will lack any narrative surprises, the second that it will be a Good Cause. Sadly, Freeheld doesn’t dodge these pitfalls, despite a quality cast. This has to be blamed on the predictable script by Ron Nyswaner (of Philadelphia fame) and Peter Sollet’s by-the-numbers directing. Set in the mid-Noughties, it’s the tale of a dedicated New Jersey police detective, Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), who falls in love with Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robert Askins’ provocative farce, which began life Off-Off-Broadway in 2011, lies a sentiment that makes this one of the cuddlier shows on the West End. Albeit one that features a graphically detached ear lobe.Askins’ play is based on childhood experience. Growing up in small-town Texas, he assisted his mother with puppet ministry – essentially telling Bible stories via Sesame Street. Like his protagonist, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The flip side of the apocalyptic evolution-and-destiny concerns of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's previous foray across the Last Frontier, The Martian is a feelgood take on the theme of space travel. Having landed the first astronauts on Mars in 2029, NASA is pursuing its Ares programme to establish a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet. However, a calamitous storm forces the NASA crew to evacuate, leaving behind botanist Mark Watney, seemingly killed by flying debris.But Watney is Matt Damon and he's the star of the show, and has better luck this time than he did as the stranded astronaut Read more ...