Three disaffected young men are at the centre of punk rock band Green Day’s rock opera American Idiot. The story is expanded from its album of the same name, (released in 2004) and also features music from its 2009 album 21st Century Breakdown. The band – formed in 1986 by lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong and…
Based on a true story, Till is a film full of pain, grief, anger. It’s a powerful howl of outrage against a blatant miscarriage of justice that has never been rectified. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) was holidaying with his cousins in Mississippi. A native of Chicago, Emmett was an outgoing, high spirited,…
In director Bobby Farrelly’s Champions, Marcus (Woody Harrelson) is a basketball coach who dreams of a big future in the NBA. The problem is he has no filter. He says what he thinks, when he wants and doesn’t hold back. So he’s lost several jobs in the US and abroad. Now he’s an assistant to…
We are in Paris in 1899. Take the best actor in the world, in this case a middle-aged woman with a particularly healthy ego that is constantly being stoked. Her last stage role was a critical success but failed to sell tickets. This is a woman who doesn’t hold back – who always speaks her mind. She spends what…
A riotously fun, thoroughly entertaining musical for our new, enlightened times, & Juliet picks up Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet where it ended and kicks it up a gear. It does so after the Bard himself (Rob Mills) is challenged by his wife Anne Hathaway (Amy Lehpamer), who has suffered as second fiddle to his writing for…
Ron Gallo has been a very well known name on the indie circuit since his solid 2017 record Heavy Meta was released. He has earned a loyal live following and shared the stage with plenty of big names like Spoon, Parquet Courts, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Wilco, and J. Mascis to just name a…
What a phenomenal piece of writing by Andrew Bovell (who wrote the powerful Australian film Lantana, which debuted in 2001). When the Rain Stops Falling is a magnificently rendered, complex work that continually shocks and surprises. Its drip feed narrative comes together to form a most disturbing picture. It is only when the full truth outs that you…
Award winning Irish author Sebastian Barry deals with the stain on his country’s soul in his latest book Old God’s Time. But he does it in a roundabout way, taking his time to get there and delivering plenty of regret and tragedy along the way. It is the mid-1990s and Tom Kettle is a retired…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 3 March 2023. Metropolis Metropolis is an abbreviated version of the most recent electronic music soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) by the techno music producer and cultural icon Jeff Mills. Unlike his first soundtrack where tracks addressed specific…
I am faced with a predicament that I can’t say I have confronted too many times after a few decades of reviewing. I have just seen a compelling piece of theatre, which I am about to highly recommend, but I will resist going into detail about the plot. I choose not to do so because of political…
