New York
Sarah Kent
When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon, a successful thirtysomething New Yorker. His screen presence is so appealing that one could ogle him for hours and if, indeed, that is his body sauntering naked past the camera, he is well hung as well as handsome. Like Hunger, Shame explores bondage, but of a different kind: Bobby Sands was in prison, while Brandon is free but imprisoned by his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near. Scripted and shot by first-time writer-director JC Chandor, it was made on the very stringiest shoestring – a snappy little irony given the numbers its characters bandy around in the course of its Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London's Barbican Centre is 30 this year, and with a special Olympics subsidy boost as the world's eyes turn to the British capital this summer, it aims to be as lovely inside as it is famously unlovely outside. Film beauties Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche appear live on stage and theatre giants Pina Bausch, Philip Glass and Shakespeare are celebrated in a season of prominent internationalism. Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison, Yukio Ninagawa, Krzysztof Penderecki and Chick Corea are among many other world names invited to EC2 over the season. Three key British theatre companies are Read more ...
theartsdesk
“Brandon is everyone.” Shame, Steve McQueen’s new film, opens later this week. It is a brutally frank portrait of a man’s struggle with addiction to sex. As McQueen explains here, it was shot in New York for the specific reason that no one in the UK would talk to him about sex addiction. No sex please.And yet the film has a distinctly British flavour. McQueen co-wrote the script with Abi Morgan, the television scriptwriter who has branched out into film and theatre: she wrote the script for The Iron Lady, which opened last week, as well as the plays 27 and, opening this week at the Lyric Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A generally grim year for musicals (Matilda and Crazy For You very much excepted) nears a belatedly emotional and rewarding close with the Crucible Theatre's revival of Company, which brings the Sheffield playhouse's artistic director, Daniel Evans, back into the orbit of the man whose work is responsible for his two Olivier Awards. That the person in question is Stephen Sondheim means that interest is keen in an onward life for a staging that results in the knockout punch one always hopes for from this piece while offering up not a few eccentricities along the way. Indeed, just as Read more ...
graham.rickson
Unlike audio recordings, classical DVDs can only be properly taken in if you're sitting down for 80 minutes, ideally in the same seat. So they have to be pretty special to warrant repeated viewings. So much depends on the production and direction; how to make interesting the sight of a middle-aged bloke waving a stick at a sea of other middle-aged blokes, many of them looking as if they'd rather be somewhere else. Here's a selection of things which have lodged in my conciousness over the past year, including a couple of seasonal discs.A Concert for New York: Mahler Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, the joys of eccentricity. Welcome to the Vanderhof family of misfits. The head of the household, Grandpa Martin, refuses to pay any taxes, preferring to keep snakes on a hatstand. Good for frightening off the tax inspector, who unexpectedly drops by.Other members of the three-generational New York family variously make fireworks in the attic, bake strange candy, play Beethoven on the xylophone, produce unrecognisable masks and write unsuccessful melodramas. Daughter Essie moves around the place as a hopeful hopeless ballerina, aided by an explosive Russian teacher, Olga (Maggie O'Brien, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Idiotically buried by a release which sees it appearing on just one screen nationally, Kenneth Lonergan’s triumphant follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut You Can Count on Me (2000) is, without a scintilla of a doubt, one of the finest films of 2011. Rich, resonant and with a meticulous approach to characterisation, it captivates, convinces and challenges.Margaret opens on the streets of New York in intermittent slo-mo, giving the impression of a city collectively under strain (not least as such images are sombrely set to Francisco Tárrega’s "Recuerdos de la Alhambra"). Our protagonist is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
New York, late August 2010I am at the opening of a swanky new gallery. Around me, the latest daubs by the hottest names adorn the walls of room after room. It’s worth mentioning a couple of discrepancies from your regular opening. This is a canapé-free environment, for one. There is no chilled white wine, no pretentious appraisal of carefully lit works. Nobody has come dressed to thrill. In fact, nobody has come at all. Apart from me.As it happens, I am the only person who will ever be invited to view the complete collection, and it’s not as if I’m even a guest. I am here as an independent Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This weekend’s three-day Minimalism festival at Kings Place comes to an end tonight looking at the cross-over between rock and new music in New York in the Seventies. It seems to me that the collision between popular and high-art music produced some of the most dynamic movements of the 20th century, not only in New York.In the 1920s, Paris had wildly original performances like Parade, with jazzy music by Erik Satie, design by Jean Cocteau and costumes (including dressing people up as skyscrapers) by Pablo Picasso, commissioned by the great ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev. Then there was Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own. A friend of Gershwin’s said, when reminiscing about hearing it for the first time Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making. By his own estimation, his subsequent 1964 road trip from California to the World's Fair in New York with his anarchic band of Merry Pranksters was his finest Read more ...