LGBT+
joe.muggs
Twenty-five-year-old South Londoner and current Celebrity Traitors contestant Cat Burns is a charming performer. Her songs have a rare ability to present the most fundamental of youthful relationship ups and downs as fresh and real. They also make more modern expressions of hope and solidarity around sexuality and neurodivergence escape the twee, flowery framing of live-laugh-love Mum’s-on-Facebook-again posting.Maybe most important of all, sings in her own accent with her own mannerisms, with a rich tone. All of which makes me want to like her second album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Demi Lovato is impressive on many fronts. She’s a Noughties Disney tween star who’s become an outspoken activist in an America where it’s increasingly dangerous to be one. She’s lived a rollercoaster ride of a life, rampantly exploring sexuality, drink and drugs amid chaos, abuse and serious mental health calamities, and she’s overcome the worst of it.Alongside all that, unlike most of her Disney child star peers, she’s maintained a successful career, both as a film and TV actor, and as a singer who, for well over a decade-and-a-half, has consistently taken her albums Top 10 in the UK and US Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The backscreens pop alive. A wall of photographer’s flashguns. On cyberpunk crutches, Lady Gaga stumbles jerkily towards us. She sings her 2009 global smash “Paparazzi”, her arms clad in armour, on her head a metallic skullcap. Her corseted dress has a train that extends, diaphanous, floating back behind her the entire length of the long catwalk into the audience. It disappears into the darkness of an arch.Theatre, yes, but Gaga is committed. Her eyes on the big screen above aren’t smirky or cool. They have a performative, deranged intensity. Lady Gaga is a proper pop star, haemorrhaging Read more ...
James Saynor
The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream. After an extended run of successes from Blood Simple (1984) up to but excluding Intolerable Cruelty (2003), intermittent irritation has greeted some of their 21st century offerings, a few Read more ...
Heather Neill
The title refers to a line in Henry VI, Part III: the future Richard III boasts that midwives cried, "Oh Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth", a sign of both his monstrosity and his readiness to snarl and bite.Modern technological analysis suggests that the three Henry VI plays might well have been written by Shakespeare in collaboration with Marlowe, an idea which started American playwright Liz Duffy Adams on an imaginary journey into their possible relationship, set against the dangerous world of Elizabethan politics. "Born with teeth" is both a phrase the collaborators might have Read more ...
Gary Naylor
$8.2B. That’s what can happen when you re-imagine Hamlet.I doubt that writer, James Ijames, had The Lion King’s box office in mind when he set out to create a Deep South, black and contemporary version of Shakespeare’s drama of familial dysfunction, but he’s got a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece at home and now a run at the RSC. I suspect he’d have settled for that.We open on a barbecue to celebrate the marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra, to her husband’s brother, Rev, after the murder, in prison, of Juicy’s father, Pap. Juicy’s friend, Tio, is larking about, but sees the ghost of Pap and, soon, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife.Sex opened Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy in Norway, and closes it here, forming an appropriate climax to his distinctive MO. The nameless sweeps’ 15-minute break-room conversation at its start, panning from widescreen one-shot to two-shot with sometimes Read more ...
David Kettle
The Ode Islands, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★ I might be going out on a limb here, but you’re unlikely to encounter anything quite like The Ode Islands elsewhere on the Fringe – perhaps anywhere, to be honest. That’s both in terms of form and content. Let’s get the first of those out of the way: Irish-born, Hastings-based solo performer Ornagh (yes, she’s single-named) dances, acts and lip-synchs sandwiched between two screens, interacting with intricate CGI both as a backdrop of psychedelic landscapes and in the foreground as monsters, demons and more. The effect isn’t always 100% faultless, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart.Gay nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) and his straight doctor colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) are complementary leads in a film as concerned with female desire as the queer lens Haugerud’s work is conceived through. The set-piece speech, Read more ...
David Kettle
As shockingly beautiful as it is horrifyingly brutal, actor Armando Babaioff’s deeply Brazilian adaptation of thriller Tom at the Farm leaves a rancid taste in the mouth and harrowing images seared on the retina. It’s a show to shock and provoke, but also to deeply disorientate, blurring the boundaries between pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion in a way that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.And it’s quickly become something of a classic text, beginning life in 2011 as a play by Canadian Michel Marc Bouchard, before being filmed by Xavier Dolan in 2013. Babaioff returned it Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year. It’s an incredible work of fathomlessly deep ambient and drone music, and I was baffled to see something so out-there clocking up millions upon millions of views, until I finally clocked her previous success. Though Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world. Taking the top prize at this year's Berlin film festival, Haugerud's drama is no singular achievement but one-third of a loose trilogy that non-judgmentally explores the complexities of human relationships, sexual identity, and romantic and not-so-romantic love and passion. Each film presents characters troubled in some way by their inner selves Read more ...