New York
Joe Muggs
One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins reigned supreme as producers – but through the 2010s and ‘20s, it has established a whole set of performers who are able to exhibit extreme range in subject matter, style and seriousness, held together with force of artistic personality.Post-Lemonade Beyoncé tends to absorb the majority of critical attention, but Kehlani, Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2012, the award-winning American writer Sarah Ruhl met a Yale playwriting student who became a special part of her life. Out of their friendship she created Letters from Max, a 2018 book of their correspondence, then a play performed in New York in 2023.On the page, it’s a piece with a level of diction befitting two poets who like to recite their latest work to each other, sometimes more like a poetry reading than a play. But interspersed is the sparky dialogue between the two, the skinny student in his early twenties and the established playwright, mother of three, two decades older. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).In 2013, he covered his childhood home in mulberry paper and painstakingly made a rubbing of every single nook and cranny of the exterior. He left the paper in situ for nine months until the drawing had weathered to resemble an old Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Purporting to be a documentary about John Lennon in the 1970s, Borrowed Time is no such thing. Instead, we have a lot of fan boys stating the bleeding obvious and covering a much longer period of time. On the other hand, there are some really interesting and illuminating details here, so the film is an absolute must for fans.Touring plans for 1981 were afoot when Mark Chapman changed the world. And it was going to be extraordinary technically (Lennon’s brief was "to give Mick and Elton ulcers"), a glimpse of which is recreated here. Tariq Ali, Bob Harris, Earl Slick and many, many others ( Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped away at gunpoint, And… make it into a musical? Stranger ideas have worked - try Evita and Assassins for starters, but there’s plenty more cut from unpromising cloth and don’t forget that the first words on the programme say ‘BASED ON THE NOVEL WRITTEN BY JAMES LEO HERLIHY’. For all that assertion, the key question persists: can the stage show Read more ...
John Carvill
Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Woody Allen weighs in at an eye-popping 800 pages, yet he waits only for the fourth paragraph of his introduction before mentioning the toxic elephant in the room: i.e. the sad fact that, despite never having been charged with – let alone convicted of – any crime, Allen in 2025 is, to all intents and purposes, cancelled.So let’s deal with that first. The reason for Allen having suffered what McGilligan calls “the living death of being declared an unperson” has transmogrified over the years. Initially, he was weighed in the balance of public opinion and found Read more ...
Saskia Baron
La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.But if the trailer is a tightly-edited taster that whets the appetite, the film itself shows little evidence of the director’s ability to exercise similar restraint in the cutting room. At 139 minutes, La Cocina somewhat outstays its welcome, particularly with a series of false endings. To overcook this metaphor, it’s like going to a restaurant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic. With his track record of crime-dynasty epics including The Godfather Part II, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas and Casino, De Niro is able to inhabit the gangster milieu merely by slipping on a favourite overcoat and homburg hat, but watching him play both Genovese and Costello here creates a sort of visual dyslexia.While his Costello feels like a fully-rounded Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music requires you to be in balance with other people”, contrasting it with unnamed but all-too-obvious examples in the US of the rise of cultures based on principles diametrically opposed to that, i.e. the search for victory and 'greatness' through bullying and subjugation.As I listened to Just, the new ECM album from the quartet of octogenarian drum icon Billy Hart, I became rapidly convinced that this Read more ...
David Nice
Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite, maybe, with enough bold textures to recall wandering attentions. We needed less of this, and more of the Duke Ellington selections superbly played by the 15-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in the first half.Right at the start, clarinettists Sherman Irby and Alexa Tarantino blew us away in "The Mooch". Trumpet solos flamed; the saxophones had Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If not quite his last will and testament, the work now known as Bach’s Mass in B Minor represents a definitive show-reel or sample-book of the Leipzig cantor’s choral and orchestral art. Its complex patchwork of manuscripts dating from different decades only came together for a full public performance in 1859: the year in which Wagner completed Tristan und Isolde. So, in the form we know it, this is decidedly modern music, always open to exploration and renewal. At St Martin-in-the-Fields, Kristian Bezuidenhout and the English Concert chose – in choral terms – an almost-minimal Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.He has opted to depict just the 90 minutes before the show was due to go live, a real-time madcap sprint to the moment when the first sketch rolled and Chevy Read more ...