race issues
Free State of JonesWednesday, 28 September 2016
Given the fractious state of American politics, perhaps it's a suitable moment for a movie taking a look back at the American Civil War. However, despite heaving at the seams with good intentions and noble sentiments, Gary Ross's Free State of Jones... Read more... |
10 Questions for Actor Don CheadleWednesday, 10 August 2016
Cinema has waited a long time for a film about Miles Davis. It hasn’t been for want of trying by Don Cheadle, who stars in, directs, produces and takes a co-writing credit on Miles Ahead. Despite the support of Davis’s son, daughter, nephew and... Read more... |
EU Referendum Results – BBC, ITV, Sky NewsFriday, 24 June 2016
And so we come to the end of the most spiteful, divisive and downright deceitful political campaign in living memory. And while we’re on the Ds, I’ll have disingenuous too, thanks. The remain camp was captained by a mildly Eurosceptic prime minister... Read more... |
RaceTuesday, 31 May 2016
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s... Read more... |
Blue/Orange, Young VicFriday, 20 May 2016
Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy, it won an Olivier Award for Best Play and has been... Read more... |
10 Questions for Playwright Joe PenhallTuesday, 10 May 2016
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-... Read more... |
Les Blancs, National TheatreFriday, 01 April 2016
Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. But she thought Les Blancs (The Whites) was potentially her... Read more... |
The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, BBC TwoTuesday, 15 March 2016
Halfway through its 10-week run, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story appears to be running in real time as it slowly, painstakingly tells the story of how one of the US's biggest sports stars was accused of the murders of his ex-wife... Read more... |
Fifty Shades of BlackWednesday, 09 March 2016
In case anyone hasn’t guessed from the flauntingly obvious title, Fifty Shades of Black is a parody of 2012’s favourite piece of trash lit: EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which was adapted for film by director Sam Taylor-Johnson in time to... Read more... |
The Maids, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 01 March 2016
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that... Read more... |
Red Velvet, Garrick TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2016
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned its flames, while quips about a paranoid Russian regime... Read more... |
Capital, BBC OneWednesday, 25 November 2015
If the title wasn’t already occupied, television-wise, the BBC might have titled Capital “The Street”. It’s got the high soar-aways over urban geography that recall the soaps, but here they spread wider, taking in a metropolis. It’s “capital” as in... Read more... |
