When a band puts out a “best of” album it is often the sign of a big change: they’re breaking up; looking for a quick way to fulfill their contract with a label so they can sign a better contract somewhere else; or maybe just cashing in. When Snow Patrol released their Greatest Hits in…
Rob Reiner directs LBJ, a biopic on the emergence of Lyndon Baines Johnson (played by Woody Harrelson) following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The story pivots around the then-contentious bill for the Civil Rights Act. It deals with Johnson’s struggles to have the bill passed in the face of opposition from powerful Senator Richard…
I long to see whatever Joanna Murray-Smith generates (and her output is prolific) … with very good reason. Her writing is pithy and pointed, insightful and invigorating. The shocking and dynamic Fury is a case in point. Salt is rubbed into raw wounds and new scars created in this “take no prisoners” drama about cultural…
Tea with the Dames provides a fly-on-the-wall look at four grand dames of British theatre. This quartet have been friends for ages. They get together periodically and now, for the first time, they have let the cameras record their interplay. At the same time, we take a look back at their careers through clips of…
The letter i is the square root of -1, which cannot occur; it is impossible, not because it doesn’t exist as much as because it makes no sense. It is a metaphor, perhaps for theatre, but even more so for experience of The Mathematics of Longing, a co-production between La Boite, The Farm and The…
Toni Collette puts in a dominant performance in the dramatic thriller Hereditary. When the matriarch of the Graham family passes away, her daughter Annie’s (Collette) life begins to unravel. Their relationship was always prickly, and they were estranged for an extended period. Now cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about the family’s ancestry will come to…
Last year we had the all-female remake/reboot of the 80s cult comedy Ghostbusters, which opened to lacklustre reviews and box office returns. And now we get this all-female reboot of the comic crime caper Ocean’s Eleven. The original Ocean’s Eleven was basically an excuse for Frank Sinatra and his “rat pack” pals to hang around…
In these days of instant communication, you have to come up with a pretty good reason for a road trip. The creative team behind Kodachrome have done so by going old-school. The result is a film yearning for a golden past that – perhaps – never existed. Matt Ryder (Jason Sudeikis) is a music executive…
Fortunately, Alexander Skarsgård isn’t by nature a voiceless person. It would have been a strange sight in The Legend of Tarzan. In Mute he’s such a person; with no sound leaving his mouth. And that because of a painful confrontation with the propeller of a motorboat (I suppose). What remains is a guy with the…
It’s been five years since Neko Case’s last album, but it’s not as if she’s been silent since the release of The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. In 2016 she collaborated with k.d. lang and Laura Veirs on their fine trio album Case/Lang/Veirs, and…
