America
Funny Pages review - comic-book confidentialSaturday, 17 September 2022
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist.From this... Read more... |
Album: The Afghan Whigs - How Do You Burn?Saturday, 03 September 2022
Hedonism and romance still drive Greg Dulli’s rock’n’roll on his main band’s ninth album.Relationship traumas have always simmered just beneath the Whigs’ surface, most notably on Gentlemen’s 1993 autopsy of an affair. Whatever the real life... Read more... |
Batiashvili, Philadelphia Orchestra, Nézet-Séguin, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - classy playing, mismatched programmeMonday, 29 August 2022
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous... Read more... |
Queen of Glory review - carving an identity between two worldsFriday, 26 August 2022
Queen of Glory is a passion project, nurtured for almost 10 years as a script by Nana Mensah, who ended up not only directing the film but taking the lead role as well in order to get it made.It’s the story of Sarah Obeng, an ambitious second-... Read more... |
Better Call Saul, Season 6 Finale, Netflix review - end of the line for TV's most celebrated con artistFriday, 19 August 2022
It was the end of an era, as Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s bittersweet epic of the brilliantly devious Saul Goodman wound to a close. Hints of redemption were in the air, signalled by Saul reverting at last to his real name, James McGill. A... Read more... |
Album: Cass McCombs - HeartmindSaturday, 13 August 2022
Cass McCombs has something of the detailed, opaque depth of his late peer Jason Molina, with more taste for pop shapes under a broader musical canvas, while still in the Americana underground. The Dead’s Bob Weir, Blake Mills, Tinariwen, Noam... Read more... |
Where the Crawdads Sing review - picturesque film glosses over its darker themesMonday, 25 July 2022
Derived from Delia Owens’s massively successful novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of Kya Clark, a girl from an abusive, broken home in the North Carolina marshlands who raises herself almost single-handedly. The few people she encounters... Read more... |
Anything Goes, Barbican review - shipboard frivolity still fizzes, mostlyFriday, 22 July 2022
This is the summer, in musical theatre terms at least, of the revival of the revival, with several recent remountings of iconic titles (South Pacific, now in London previews) getting a renewed lease on life, alongside the likes of My Fair Lady,... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The MenSunday, 17 July 2022
“Arriving late at a performance… I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote of watching Brando on Broadway in 1946. “I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me... Read more... |
Milton Avery: American Colourist, Royal Academy review - from backward-looking impressionist to forward looking-colouristThursday, 14 July 2022
I’ve always been bemused by the American painter, Milton Avery. Not having seen enough of his paintings together, I couldn’t gauge if they are quirkily naive – lodged in a cul de sac aside from the mainstream – or hyper-sophisticated harbingers of... Read more... |
Mad House, Ambassadors Theatre review - David Harbour is magnificent in Theresa Rebeck's family dramaMonday, 27 June 2022
For sheer extremes of family dysfunction Theresa Rebeck’s Mad House must be aiming to set new records in American drama. The latest in a line that stretches back to Eugene O’Neill, the plentiful other contenders that have appeared over the decades... Read more... |
Album: Damien Jurado - Reggae Film StarMonday, 27 June 2022
American singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is both prolific and enigmatic. His latest album follows too many to count (OK, not really, I think this is his 20th). On his own label, it's as opaque as anything he’s done, and that’s saying something.There... Read more... |
