America
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 ...
Graham Fuller
Trumbo depicts the 13-year struggle by the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) to break the blacklist imposed on him and the other members of the Hollywood Ten in 1947. By continuing to get his scripts produced throughout the Fifties, Trumbo made a heroic, if morally complex stand against rabid Red Scare-mongers like the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne (David James Elliott). It’s disappointing that his courage and brinkmanship should grace a movie with no attitude of its own – that has the narrow sensibility of a 1980s or 1990s telefilm.Cranston nails the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in 1984 launched the late August Wilson on to Broadway, where I first saw it, and here announces itself as a bellwether achievement in artistic director Rufus Norris's still-young National Theatre regime and as, very possibly, the finest Ma Rainey yet.For that, credit the surpassing empathy of a director in Dominic Cooke, who brings much the same easy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The opening scene of Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes plunges us into the darker depths of American society, post-2008 financial crisis. We’re in the world of home repossessions, and the blood spattered around the bathroom of one property by an ex-owner who wouldn’t go quietly speaks chillingly for what is in store.Bahrani’s title hints at wider issues, principally the 99/1 wealth distribution inequality that was a slogan of the Occupy movement, and his film shows how that process is consolidated in practice. We first encounter single father Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) as he attends a court hearing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Communities function in different ways depending on their constituencies, to note just one of the many salient points made by the deeply compelling and equally disturbing Spotlight. The Catholic church in Boston for years closed ranks and shut its eyes so as to enable the systemic culture of child abuse that a cadre of Boston Globe journalists in time uncovered, winning a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their work: one societal sector pitted against the other only for the scribes' sleuthing to emerge triumphant alongside a legacy of damage that time will never fully put right. The Globe's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-fated attempt to become State's Attorney, she's now trying to start her own law firm from home and scuffling for work.Thus she found herself on the cab-rank of hard-bitten bar attorneys down at the bond court, waiting to be lobbed a sheaf of the day's drink-and-drugs cases by the abrasive Judge Schakowsky (Christopher McDonald). Some comic value was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Revenant's production designer Jack Fisk wasn’t required to build multiple sets for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 1823 wilderness epic. Indelible, however, are the few man-made settlements and structures with which Fisk marked the route of the bloodied, abandoned Hugh Glass (Leonard DiCaprio) as he struggles 200 miles southwards on his revenge mission through present-day Montana into South Dakota.They include Glass and his fellow beaver-trappers’ rudimentary camp among towering trees that afford Arikara Indians eyries from which to shoot at them; a Pawnee village following a massacre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We're packed into the basement of Madrid's Costello Nite Club, a kind of narrow brick-lined tunnel off the Calle Gran Via. It's the kind of place where you could imagine finding groups of earnest jazzniks nodding along to atonal pandemonium in 11/7 time.Not tonight though. Onstage, we find a stocky, bearded gentleman in a burgundy-coloured jacket and fedora hat. He's leading his all-American band through a selection of country-rock, bluegrass, hoedowns and swamp blues, played with a downhome country twang and a topping of scorching country fiddle by Erin Slaver. From the look of him, you Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That purveyor of everything from crazy cosmic jive and plastic soul to epic disco and elegant Berlin ambient gloom made a hell of an exit last week. His last release, his “parting gift” Blackstar, was a dazzling curtain bow unlike any other. He was a brilliant magpie, smuggling all kinds of ideas from Kabuki and Nietzsche to avant-jazz and cut-ups into impeccable, usually subversive, pop. Whether you saw him as a “major liberator” (Jon Savage) or were put off by the “smorgasbord of lachrymosity" (Julie Burchill), in the past week it became clear how many different types of people's lives Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories have abounded about the epic bouts of punishing location shooting that went into Alejandro González Iñárittu's frontier saga. Seeing the results on screen, you'd have to say that whatever suffering the cast and crew had to endure, it was worth it, and The Revenant's 12 Oscar nominations will be balm to their bruised and battered limbs.One winner should surely be cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, going for his third successive gong (following Gravity and Iñárittu's Birdman). Shot mostly amid astounding scenery in the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia, The Revenant is as much about Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Following in the footsteps of Star Wars: The Force Awakens another popular film series which began in the 70s is passed over to a young, admiring pretender. And just as JJ Abrams succeeded there, Ryan Coogler – who announced his talent unapologetically with the searing Fruitvale Station – does so in emphatic fashion here. This add-on to the Rocky franchise boasts a comparably deft mix of crowd-pleasing familiarity and freshness, particularly in the shape of its canny new casting – a combination that’s set to excite a new generation of fans.When we last saw Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Read more ...
Jasper Rees
About a dozen years ago the publishing industry cottoned on to the sex lives of women. Memoirs in which women wrote with complete candour about their sex lives appeared in sudden profusion, from Belle de Jour's blog-turned-book and The Sex Life of Catherine M to Jane Juska’s account about what happened when she advertised in the NYRB, aged 67, for sexual partners. At the younger end of the market there was One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by a Sicilian teenager known only (at her parents’ insistence) as Melissa P. Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl feels like a late Read more ...