New York
Adam Sweeting
Coinciding with both Pokémon Go madness and a developing backlash against the insidious modern plague of mobile gadgets, Nerve is a moral fable for the social media era, and a Cinderella story that turns into The Hunger Games. Luckily, it's much more fun than that makes it sound.The movie's title is also the name of an online game in which players undertake increasingly risky dares while being egged on (via a mobile phone app) by unseen controllers. These have access to all the participants' various sources of online information (Facebook, Instagram, whatever), which they use to exploit the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
America is a country that has always thrived on dramatic battles between "good" and "evil", God and the Devil. Demonising may have Puritan roots, but it remains a particularly American obsession. The photographer and artist Robert Mapplethorpe, whose sexually explicit images shocked many of his compatriots, drew much of his strength from exploiting the chasm that divides the self-righteously "pure" and the darker forces of revolution. He embodied the shadow of his country more radically than any other artist of his time, and cultivated a devilish notoriety that ensured him the fame and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Squash! Bulldoze! Blow-Up! Tie Up! Break-Up! Re-Build! There is practically nothing the artist Cornelia Parker won’t and can’t do with found materials, offcuts, the discarded and the recycled, not to mention tieing up Rodin’s The Kiss at the Tate in miles of string. Since she discovered bulldozer drivers like nothing better than bulldozing, she has been practically unstoppable. That DANGER! sign can be all too true when she is blowing something up, although found materials have included two small wooden American churches, one hit by lightning, and the other torched by racist biker gang Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Weiner is the story of a rapid ride from comeback to meltdown. It’s an enthralling journey to witness, even if you sometimes feel like averting your eyes. What can be more inexorable than a political life – not to mention a private one – imploding on screen in a documentary where the subject has promised full access to the filmmakers, and sticks to that pledge regardless?The story of Anthony Weiner’s 2013 bid to become mayor of New York made front page news in America. He was clearly an extremely articulate and dynamic Democrat political operator, but that wasn’t the main issue. What made his Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The language of documentary is shot through with conventions. Rare is the occasion when a film-maker breaks the rules and throws the genre wide open. It takes a versatile artist like Laurie Anderson to free the medium from genre and invent a whole new way of doing things.Heart of a Dog is a resolutely personal, emotionally charged and often witty exploration of the passing of Anderson’s rat terrier Lolabelle, but the film is also a meditation on dreams, death and love. Without ever seeming gimmicky, pretentious or over-intellectual, Anderson manages to seamlessly draw together reflections on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps as a hopeful harbinger for Paul Simon's new album Stranger to Stranger, Disturbed recently topped Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart with their flabbergasting version of Simon's 1965 song "The Sound of Silence". However, while vocalist David Draiman could launch a career as a new kind of Wagnerian baritone on the strength of his extraordinary performance, Simon himself is headed in a less stentorian direction. Stranger to Stranger is his 13th solo studio album, finds him reuniting yet again with his old production buddy Roy Halee, and successfully manages to blend together Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.Playing in real time, its engaging performances and tight direction veer from thriller to comedy. Director Jodie Foster keeps the plot moving along swiftly with some well-placed suprises and comedic touches in the first half, after which it's too easy to guess how the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The pre-title sequence – in which a middle-aged man without any trousers lies trussed up on the floor – immediately tells us that we are not to take Billions too seriously. A woman in thigh-high leather boots with killer heels towers over him. Removing a cigarette-holder from her lips, she tells him he’s in need of correction before stubbing out the fag on his bare chest.All that’s missing on the soundtrack is Disco Inferno by The Trammps. Burn, baby, burn… As if this weren’t enough, the dominatrix then puts out the fire by urinating on him. That’s right: someone is taking the piss.A turn-off Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary story here stands apart by virtue of that rare leading lady who can make a character's misguided belief in her gifts seem a form of bliss. Was it a blessing of sorts that Jenkins's head was somewhere in Read more ...
Ed Owen
How would you behave if your wife was killed in a random car accident? In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Davis, a wealthy banker, is almost relieved – he can ditch his job, his house, nearly everything of his old life, and shack up with a total stranger.Over the course of his three previous English-language films, Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée has created successive award-winning tales with stand-out craft, scripts and performances. Whether Emily Blunt in Young Victoria adapting to life as queen, Matthew McConaughey fighting an HIV diagnosis in the Dallas Buyers Club, or Reese Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Relentless is the word. The second studio album from post-punk jazzers Melt Yourself Down starts as it means to finish. It opens with a hard, pulsing bass guitar which sets the scene for “Dot to Dot”, a persistent chant suggesting Sufi adepts with a yen for Killing Joke. It ends, nine tracks later, with “Yazzan Dayra’s” melding of Nyabinghi percussion to the sound of an exotic market-stall barker and strident saxophone interjections. Over its 36 minutes, Last Evenings on Earth does not let up.The varied roots of the Melt Yourself Down sound are clear. They have collaborated with New York no Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity.This outpouring in the House of Representatives provides the title and sets the scene for Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbarto. We have to wait until the closing shots, though Read more ...