mon 02/12/2024

Chicago

A Raisin in the Sun, Lyric Hammersmith review - of race and men

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also a cultural goldmine. So powerful is its depiction of the postwar African-American experience that it has...

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Presumed Innocent, Apple TV+ review - you read the book and saw the movie...

Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the...

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Album: Lizz Wright - Shadow

Lizz Wright has established herself, over a number of steadfastly excellent albums, as one of the very best vocalists of her generation. Not so long after a gripping live album recorded in Berlin Holding Space (2022), her latest offering shines with...

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Blu-ray: Brannigan

Brannigan begins in arresting fashion, Dominic Frontiere’s funky theme playing over leery close ups of the titular hero’s Colt revolver. Directed by Douglas Hickox and released in 1973, this was the only film starring John Wayne which wasn’t shot in...

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Album: Ratboys - The Window

Ratboys have been around since 2010, knocking out their guitar-powered indie fare over three albums in their home city of Chicago. However, with album number four, they have decided to branch out and pay homage to the US alt-rock scene of the early...

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Best of Enemies, Noel Coward Theatre review - opposites attract, sort of

Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy James Graham, and he conjoins the two to riveting effect in Best of Enemies.Telling of the televised 1968 debates between William F Buckley and Gore Vidal during that year's...

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Vivian Maier: Anthology, MK Gallery review - what an amazing eye!

The story is riveting. A nanny living in New York and Chicago spent her spare time wandering the streets taking photographs. She learned to develop and print, but her plan to publish the images as postcards fell through and, as time passed, she...

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Blu-ray: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the...

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Album: Earthen Sea - Ghost Poems

Kranky, run in Chicago for very nearly 30 years now, is one of the most remarkably consistent record labels around. They helped define “post-rock” in the Nineties with key releases from the likes of Labradford and God Speed You! Black Emperor, and...

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The Outfit review - threadbare tailor-gangster yarn

“A man walks in,” Leonard (Mark Rylance) begins. “What about him can you observe? What does a man like to be? And who is he underneath?” Leonard is, in common parlance, a Savile Row tailor – “a cutter from the Row,” he insists – fetched up for murky...

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Clybourne Park, Park Theatre review - excellent revival of Bruce Norris's award-winner

Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park arrived at London’s Royal Court like a blazing comet in 2010, a bold kind of satire about race relations that was both sassy and savvy.Now it’s back for a run at the Park Theatre, N1. Twelve years on, we have learnt to...

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Candyman review - Nia DaCosta's clever sequel to the 1992 slasher movie

Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful...

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