New York
Katherine Waters
According to their mother, Luda (played by Madeleine Worrall, pictured below), each of the three sisters (pictured top) in Napoli, Brooklyn, bears one of their father’s admirable traits. Tina (Mona Goodwin), the oldest, who left school early to earn money for the family in a factory job, has his strength. Vita (Georgia May Foote), who is smart but has been banished to a convent school for crossing her father, has his tongue. Francesca (Hannah Bristow), who by cutting her hair short precipitated the violent row, has his spirit. But really, the attributes Luda is describing belong to her, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The best joke in Men in Black: International happens before the film starts, when the iconic Columbia Pictures lady in a toga whips out a pair of familiar dark glasses. It’s a nifty, witty gag that doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is more than can be said for the feature that follows. The original stars are absent and there’s an absence too of the screwball humour that made the first film, back in 1997 such a hit. Gone is Agent Tommy Lee Jones with his dry wit (or his simulacrum in Men in Black 3, Josh Brolin) and gone is Agent Will Smith with his gleeful energy. Instead we have two Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Kiss My Genders may not claim to be a survey, yet it seems perverse to mount an exhibition of work by LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender identity without including some of the best known names. Particular emphasis is placed, says the press release, on works that revisit the tradition of photographic portraiture; so why no sign of Claude Cahun, Gilbert and George, Urs Lüthi, Robert Mapplethorpe or Pierre et Giles – all pioneers in using photography to explore gay sexual identity ?They, or their representatives, may have declined to take part, of course – a decision that would have been Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“Get me rewrite!”: That’s likely to be a common reaction to Late Night, the well-meaning but surprisingly slipshod star vehicle for Emma Thompson set in and among the writing world of a New York late-night chat show that is hitting the skids. Thompson brings a peppery command (and some seriously stylish hair) to the role of Katherine Newbury, a disdainful small-screen personality who refers to her writing staff not by their names but by numbers.And yet time and again, Mindy Kaling’s script seems itself in need of doctoring from one of Katherine’s put-upon scribes. You applaud the film’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you know of any chauvinists who dare to maintain that women can’t paint, take them to this astounding retrospective. Lee Krasner faced patronising dismissal at practically every turn in her career yet she persisted and went on to produce some of the most magnificent paintings of the late 20th century.Despite her brilliance, she is still known to most people as the wife of Jackson Pollock, whom she married in 1945, so it comes as no surprise to discover how hard it was for her to pursue her own path amid the male egos that dominated the New York art scene at the time. Among the abstract Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage. Reuniting the two-time Tony-winner with his lifelong chum Kenneth Lonergan, who since this play's premiere has become an A-list Oscar-winner, Sam Yates's production is equal parts intriguing and irritating, and Broderick's singular theatrical deadpan may alienate as many people as it attracts. It may not help this play's cause that Lonergan has been represented in successive Broadway Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Woman in the Window (1944) was the first of the two riveting film noirs in which Fritz Lang directed Edward G Robinson as a timid New York bourgeois, Joan Bennett as the alluring woman ill-met on a street, and Dan Duryea as the dandified sleaze who manipulates her.Scarlet Street (1945) has a higher reputation than its predecessor, perhaps because it is the more sordidly and expressionistically noirish of the pair, as well as the bleakest. Adapted by producer-screenwriter Nunnally Johnson from JH Wallis’s novel Once Off Guard, The Woman in the Window softens its fatalism (and honours Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.The narrative picks up where 2017’s John Wick: Chapter 2 left off, with Wick declared “excommunicado” by the crime lords of the High Table and running for his life through New York City as massed assassins queue up to kill him and collect the $14m reward. Drolly, the killers Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The joint is jumpin’ at Southwark Playhouse, now hosting an irresistible Fats Waller-inspired, Manhattan-set musical revue (a co-production with Colchester’s Mercury Theatre, where it opened last month). Though originating in the Seventies, this sizzling show benefits from a fresh infusion of talent, with actor Tyrone Huntley making his directorial debut, and Strictly Come Dancing pro Oti Mabuse making hers as a musical theatre choreographer.Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr. supply the book, but this early jukebox musical is blessedly free of a story awkwardly pegged to existing Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For her swansong, departing Donmar Artistic Director Josie Rourke goes Swinging Sixties in this stylish but flawed revival of the Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon musical. From the numerous Andy Warhol homages to Charity’s silver minidress and the cigarette haze, it’s a period dream, but the production shimmers more than it grips.Anne-Marie Duff stars as the eternally hopeful New York taxi dancer, making a pittance at her “temporary job” at the Fandango Ballroom; she’s been there eight years. Too quick to trust, Charity has been let down by numerous boyfriends, but she finds a real Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Drums appeared a decade ago out of New York, riding a media froth about indie music to critical acclaim and, at least for their debut album, some degree of commercial success. They were a four-piece who owed a large debt to New Order but had enough of their own pizzazz to look promising. Ten years and four albums later (meaning this is their fifth), The Drums are a one man band and don’t sound anything like New Order. This isn’t necessarily always an improvement.For a couple of years The Drums have been the solo project of frontman Jonny Pierce. According to the press release, Brutalism Read more ...