New York
Saskia Baron
Nanny is being marketed as a horror movie, and arachnophobes should certainly beware, but it’s also a stylish exploration of race and class by African-American writer-director Nikyatu Jusu.Its heroine is Aisha (Anna Diop) a Senegalese graduate teacher who is fluent in several languages. Without official papers, however, she can only work as a nanny in New York. Amy (Michelle Monaghan) is pursuing her own career and pays Aisha cash in hand to teach French to her five-year-old daughter Rose. Amy also wants Aisha to stay overnight in her slick Lower Manhattan apartment whenever Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Five years have elapsed since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey revealed that dozens of women had accused the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment over three decades. Based on Kantor and Twohey’s book about their investigation, which sparked the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, She Said is an urgent if belated film.In February 2020, former Miramar chief Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment, a term that might increase depending on the outcome of the trial currently proceeding in Los Angeles. She Said, which stars Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Was it lockdown that did it? Forcing filmmakers to sit at home, contemplate their lives, and conclude that just as soon as the masks came off, it was time to shine a light on their youth?Since Covid struck, we’ve seen Kenneth Branagh’s growing-up-in-the-Troubles memoir Belfast, Richard Linklater’s nostalgic animation Apollo 10 1/2 : A Space Age Childhood, and The Souvenir Part II, in which Joanna Hogg mines her film student days yet again.There's also Charlotte Wells’s superb debut Aftersun that looks back from a grown daughter's perspective on a Turkish package Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows have thus far probably been more important than her albums, but her third raises the bar.Where previously her music has been rap-laden, post-electroclash, the excellently titled Midnite Fukk Train is more fully-formed, in New York’s underground punk rock tradition. And she nails it.Accompanied by her Fukkn Band, the album has eight tracks and is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cynical might think Pearl Cleage’s play had been expressly written to address the over-riding issues in today’s USA – abortion and contraception rights, gun control, homophobia, racism. But the cynical would be wrong, as Blues for an Alabama Sky was written in 1995. What is notable is its timely scheduling by the National Theatre.Cleage has written a period play, set in the Harlem Renaissance during Prohibition, that works as a tribute to the major players of that movement. Their names are bandied about by the characters as their associates and colleagues – the poet Langston Hughes, the Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Playhouse Sessions: Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene (Rubicon)The Playhouse Sessions is a follow-up to the irresistible Alehouse Sessions, in which Bjarte Eikke and his Barokksolistene recreate a 17th century London pub gig, where sea shanties and rumbustious dance tunes rub shoulders with Purcell. I was very disappointed to miss the recent live London outing for both these projects (reviewed by David Nice for theartsdesk) and while nothing can quite match being in the room, the Playhouse Sessions in recorded form still offers more musical revelation and sheer fun than anything else I Read more ...
David Nice
You know you’re in good company the minute these two appear on stage: they are so splendidly what they are, comfortable in their own skins and perfect in role-play. Justin Vivian Bond, consummate trans cabaret artist, meets Anthony Roth Constanzo, one of the world’s top countertenors, and nothing is out of bounds.Hot from Brooklyn, the partnership seems both unlikely and utterly natural, subversive from the start. The glamorous, sassy Bond can hit the bass register if necessary; Costanzo adapts what, at least with miking, sounds like the most powerful of falsettos to torchsongs and disco as Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s a minor tragedy that Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived just in time to be bundled in with a spurious “new rock revolution,” because they were so much more than rock. The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Libertines all may have had decent enough songs, but all were ultimately extremely trad rock, sonically living in mythical pasts.But YYYs were anything but that: they were explosively in-the-now, perfectly able to use classic rock and punk tropes as tools but never beholden to them. Indeed they even sounded less retro than their more electronic NYC hipster contemporaries LCD Soundsystem. Not Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Life is messy and so is Carolee Schneeman’s work. She wanted it that way. Breaking down the barriers between art and life, between inhabiting a woman’s body and using it as primal material, was a key objective.And if this meant appearing naked in performances or filming herself having sex, so be it. “Can I be an image and an image-maker?” was a question she sought to answer over and over again in her work. And in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the male-dominated art world of New York responded with a vehement “No!”.In 1954, for instance, she was kicked off the undergraduate course at Bard College Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It was not until October 2017 that The New York Times ran a front page story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey with the title “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harrassment Accusers for Decades.”A few days later, the board of the Weinstein Company, including the crucial vote of his younger brother Bob, ejected him. And from then on, the prosecution started to put together the case against Weinstein, which, after over a hundred women had testified against him, resulted in his conviction and imprisonment in February 2020.But could the tide have turned against him many years earlier? Why didn’t it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.It’s in no way comparable to the classics which Keaton produced and directed in his mid-1920s purple patch, the wordy screenplay cobbled together from a pair of popular stage plays and the film directed in workmanlike fashion by Herbert Blaché, who wasn’t familiar with Keaton. Douglas Fairbanks was originally slated to star, recommending his younger colleague for the part of Bertie Van Alstyne when he found himself unavailable.That Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bankruptcy, rubble, rape and murder: Manhattan in the Seventies could be grim, as multiple New York punk memoirs make clear. The trade-off was the art, steaming and burning in the stinking, crucially cheap degradation. Punk was just one symptomatic part of a crumbling Lower East Side where old Beats, folkies, jazzers, poets, theatre, film and visual artists also lived.The point of Danny Garcia’s Nightclubbing doc is to stake Max’s, Kansas City’s claim as a punk epicentre, and challenge CBGB’s fabled status. Despite a few key interviewees, his low-budget, artless film does no one any favours. Read more ...