New York
Helen Hawkins
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this documentary from the Swiss-born Eva Vitija. We hear the director say at the outset that by reading her then-unpublished diaries she learned to love, not just the writing, but the writer, which not all commentators have managed to do.It’s tempting to say, "Join the queue, lady.” Highsmith was the most prolific of seducers, haunting gay bars around the world and specialising in pursuing married women. None of the relationships lasted, except for a couple Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow! James Norton naked! Wow! New play by Ivo van Hove. Wow! It’s four hours long. Wow! Wow! Wow! The much anticipated play of the year, an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s 700-page bestselling novel of 2015, comes to the West End in a huge blaze of publicity.It’s been hyped as the must-see show of the season, and its superstar is the heartthrob Norton, an actor who can make a psycho interesting (Happy Valley) and an international criminal attractive (McMafia). But can the equally well-regarded van Hove – whose theatre work in Britain has garnered praise from all quarters for more than a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Kiefer Sutherland has proved to be a hardy perennial over the decades, from movies like Young Guns and Flatliners to TV shows including Designated Survivor and especially the much-lauded 24. And he seems to have picked another winner with Rabbit Hole.This time, Sutherland stars as John Weir. He works for a New York company called DBA Advisors and calls himself a financial consultant, but that barely tells a fragment of the story. Agent Jo Madi (Enid Graham) from the FBI’s Financial Crimes Unit suspects him of corporate espionage and manipulating the markets on behalf of his clients, though Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It now seems an inevitability that Marisha Wallace will be a frontrunner at next year's theatre awards, not just this year’s. Having barnstormed her way to a 2023 Olivier nomination for playing Ado Annie in the Young Vic’s Oklahoma!, her Miss Adelaide, luckless fiancée of crap-game organiser Nathan Detroit, is the crowning achievement of Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant new production of Guys and Dolls at the Bridge, which itself should be a shoo-in for prizes of its own.Hytner has taken the 1950 Frank Loesser comic musical about gambling low-lifes in New York along a new route. It’s what Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions won a devoted readership. Yet she began her career as a kind of hack, writing magazine fillers about shopping and design.No doubt these routine weekly assignments, and later a photography column, helped her to develop the keen eye for detail that she brought to long-form journalism. In countless articles and a dozen genre-bending non-fiction books, including In the Freud Archives (1984), The Journalist and Read more ...
India Lewis
It seems that Andy Warhol’s Factory – silver-dusted and populated with tragic, drug-addicted minor celebrities – will always have its draw. The Factory was the Pop Artist’s studio workspace, established in various locations over its 24-year life-span.It was also the site of his infamous, celebrity-studded parties. Its glamour, no matter how poisoned and fleeting, has been attractive to the art world and beyond ever since its inception in 1963. We see its flaws but are still fascinated, returning to it again and again, as Nicole Flattery does here, to poke and prod at its occupants.Nothing Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As films and television series based in New York City tend to do, Fleishman Is in Trouble opens with an aerial shot of Manhattan – except, significantly, this sequence is presented upside down. To the celestial sound of tinkling arpeggios, the slim skyscrapers of the Upper East Side hang down from the sky into a blue cloudless ocean like futuristic stalactites, the camera moving gently through them before dipping, Psycho-style, through a window. There, the man whose life has similarly been upended is lying on a bed in an austere room, with a buzzing phone beside him. Its screensaver is a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The New York Dolls, The Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, The Dictators, The Heartbreakers, The Shirts, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. From 1974 onwards, New York buzzed with bands. There were also Tuff Darts, The Fast, Pure Hell, Von Lmo and others who didn’t quite grab the brass ring. Out of towners like The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Devo and The Real Kids jostled for attention too.Despite the crowded market, The Senders were central to this mix. Formed in 1976 by ex-pat Frenchman Philippe Marcade, who had arrived in New York in 1974, they issued one single in 1978, a seven-track 12-inch EP Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A film telling just the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s campaign against Purdue Pharmacy would have been worth the ticket price alone.But Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers so much more. It moves between two interlocking strands: the twin stories of Nan the activist and Nan the artist, and, fascinatingly, shows how one informed the other. Goldin grew up in New Jersey but at 14, silenced by her older sister’s death, was sent away to reforming schools and was only saved when she ended up at a hippie establishment that didn’t believe in expelling Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Velvet Underground’s music is hardly heard for 45 minutes in Todd Haynes’ film on the band. The director’s debut documentary instead sinks deep into the early Sixties New York underground culture they rose from. It is as much a loving tribute to the cinema of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol as the songs of Lou Reed and John Cale.A premonitory, violent sliver of Cale’s “Venus In Furs” viola jolts the titles, then Haynes splits screens like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, paralleling his Sixties screen test portraits of Reed (high-strung stillness) and Cale (sensuous) with imagery signifying their Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel has captured a particular moment in time. A few long-term residents of the legendary building at 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan are still hanging in there after several years of constant and oppressive building noise. They're gamely holding on to its artistic and counter-cultural spirit, keeping their values and beliefs intact, living through what they hope are the last stages of the Chelsea's redevelopment, hoping they'll not be forced out once it becomes a luxury boutique hotel.It is not just an idea thar we see dying. The Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
What do you mean you haven’t heard of the newsboys’ strike of 1899? It’s a classic David and Goliath story: a group of New York kids selling newspapers for Joseph Pulitzer (him of the prize), who take a stand when their boss tries to charge them 20% extra to buy their “papes”.The 1992 Disney film, Newsies, became a cult classic, and was turned into a Tony-winning Broadway show in 2011 that ran over 1000 performances. The newsies have now burst onto the stage of the shiny Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, backflipping, wise-cracking, and making the most of some mediocre songs.Director/ Read more ...