New York
Markie Robson-Scott
The first series of What We Do in the Shadows, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary about vampires in Staten Island (a TV spin-off from their cult New Zealand-located film) was a joy, and although it’s a hard act to follow, it’s delicious to be reacquainted with these timeless Transylvanian transplants and their mission to conquer the Americas. At least, that’s what their master, a crumbling vampire baron, has told them to do. Trouble is, as Laszlo (plummy-voiced Matt Berry; Toast of London, The IT Crowd) noted in the last series, the New World is “fucking massive”. Best stick to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Woody Allen’s filmography, like Michael Caine’s, is remorseless, accepting mediocre work to mine more gems than most. Even after his career and this film’s planned 2018 release became collateral damage to #MeToo and a revived child abuse allegation, he has kept directing. A Rainy Day in New York is a thorough résumé of late Woody flaws, but still sparks with residual brilliance.The octogenarian Allen is increasingly divorced from modern life and remotely realistic plots. Undeterred, he sends young lovers Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet) and Ashleigh (Elle Fanning, pictured below centre with Rebecca Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Featherweight is one thing, brainless is another. Can You Keep A Secret?, the romcom adapted by screenwriter Peter Hutchings from the 2003 novel by Sophie Kinsella, uneasily straddles the two until a conclusion that goes off the rails altogether and tumbles into the ludicrous. Alexandra Daddario plays Emma, one of these insecure chatterboxes you'd run a mile from in real life but whom we’re here apparently meant to find irresistible.That's certainly the effect Emma has on Jack (Tyler Hoechlin, stuck in the role of a walking pin-up), the smiling, hirsute stranger whom Emma ends Read more ...
David Nice
Maybe you can't compare incomparables, but it was instructive to watch this Broadway lockdown gala feting nonagenarian Stephen Sondheim a night after the Metropolitan Opera's galaxy of stars welcoming us into their homes. More slick, no doubt (once it started, an hour late), with all the accompaniments clearly heard and sassily done, equally blissful in its funny spots, but somehow less warm and spontaneous-seeming: odd that many of those opera singers on Saturday came across as more companionable than some of the more self-regarding or intense show folk here. But again, carping is unfair: Read more ...
David Nice
So many of the world's great opera singers inviting us to look through the keyhole at a carefully presented version of their lockdown lives over four very variable hours, such bad sound for the most part (Skype, like Zoom, catches the voice but loses the accompaniment). But that's not the point, nor would it be politic to pick out the few turkeys; these were all personable, supremely gifted human beings giving of their time and their artistry to raise money for New York's Metropolitan Opera (how the house has treated its artists and crew financially since lockdown is another matter altogether Read more ...
David Nice
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of programming in the company's attempts to keep the world happy for free during lockdown, including a whole Wagner week. These two of the top masterpieces by Wagner's natural successor - "Richard the Third", as Strauss was dubbed, because there could be no second - both reminded us of what worked and what didn't when Robert Carsen's sort-of-1920s Read more ...
David Nice
One person playing one instrument from home to the edification and delight of thousands: it's been a constant in these confining days, and well meant even if the sound isn't always up to it, a necessary substitute for live communication on both sides. But this is something else: an education, a detailed sharing of love and consolation which makes me wonder why other musicians haven't taken up the challenge (maybe some have, but I haven't heard about it). The fact is that few can match Jeremy Denk's ease of playing as he talks, his infinite knowledge of the richest sets of piano music in the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Crying never solves anything. Be strong.” An admonishment from a stern grandmother haunts this low key first feature film by Alan Yang (Parks and Recreation, Master of None), loosely based on his father’s 1950s immigrant experience of leaving Taiwan and coming to New York City (his father does the voice-over in the film) and on Yang’s own recent trip to Taiwan with his father.No tigers in evidence here, kings, tails or otherwise. It’s a gentle, elegiac Asian-American story of lost love and emotional repression, told, in Mandarin and English, from the perspective of a disappointed middle-aged Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Their debut’s title was a disillusioned shrug, and for most of the 19 years since Is This It, The Strokes have continued with seeming reluctance, releasing new albums fitfully. But here they are, still riding the afterglow of Manhattan’s decadent energy in the season before 9/11 and Giuliani’s clampdown, and with producer Rick Rubin, career resurrection a speciality, on hand to tease out growth beyond the Television tribute act they once resembled.The New Abnormal is a diverse and mature sixth album, exuding worldly confidence as it dismisses the detractors, rivals and lovers of a time less Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We’ve all spent time considering our desert island discs, which is of course why the programme Roy Plomley devised one winter’s night in 1942 is still thriving. The choices are perhaps less favourites than music that takes you back to a specific moment in time, that reminds you of someone, or something, special. “Favourites” are almost necessarily changeable. I prefer to think of music – a track, an album – that has in some way changed my life. Clichéd maybe, yet I suspect that most of us for whom music is a central part of life, not mere wallpaper, could come up with a little list of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Miles – where to begin? Some 21st century revisionists find his art fatally tainted by his personal life, and his violent behaviour in relationships. His rasping, epithet-scarred voice, the sound of a snake sloughing off its own skin, able to weaponise ‘motherfucker’ to some kind of deadly bio-mass, his long rich history of drug use and abuse, his vivid, aggressive take on race relations and his studied indifference to his audience – this is not how musicians and artists are supposed to behave, especially nowadays.Miles Davis comes from a creative and political world that is the polar Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...