Savage is brutal, devastating, powerful. It features a war of attrition borne of a tyrannical upbringing in New Zealand told in three time-frames over 24 years. Savages is the name given to a patched-up gang started by a couple of cell mates from juvenile detention. But let’s go back a step, Danny – known in…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 9 October 2020. Future Islands have released their sixth album As Long As You Are via 4AD.As Long As You Are looks to the past as well as the future, confronting old ghosts and embracing a new hope. It…
In New York, a crotchety, chain-smoking Chinese-American grandmother gets lucky after leaving a casino … and then all hell breaks loose. Sasie Sealy’s black comedy, Lucky Grandma, places granny in the middle of a turf war between rival gangs. It all starts when Lei Lei the Fortune Teller (Wai Ching Ho) tells Grandma (Tsai Chin)…
In the nearly four years since Lydia Loveless’ last album, Real, the country-rock singer/songwriter has divorced her bass player husband, left her record company, and moved house, before writing and recording her new record, which has been released on her own label. If on Real she refined her edgier cow-punk leanings with a more accessible…
Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) works hard – in a bar and at a mortuary – to keep her head above water and make something of herself. But, of course, the bills keep coming in. In 2004 it looked like the world was at her feet. That was when she won the title of Miss Juneteenth*…
The British crime fiction industry is a little obsessed with the elderly solving crimes. Going back to the seemingly doddering but sharp Miss Marple, through to more modern efforts like The TV series New Tricks. Fixed firmly in that tradition is Richard Osman’s debut novel The Thursday Murder Club, which features a group of retirees…
Benjamin Stevenson’s first book featuring documentary maker Jack Quick was a revelation, particularly when considered again, in hindsight, from the viewpoint of the second novel in the series. Quoting from my own review of GREENLIGHT at the time: “There’s a something about GREENLIGHT that feels like a non-too-subtle dig at the commercialisation of true crime….
Director Egor Abramenko delivers a creepy creature-feature with Sputnik. It starts with two cosmonauts planning to return to Earth, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. It’s 1983. After a Soviet space mission returns into barren Kazakhstan, the support team find one of the intrepid travellers hasn’t make it and the other – the commander…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 2 October 2020. Platinum-selling singer, songwriter, producer, and activist Aloe Blacc has released his newest album, All Love Everything via BMG. Inspired by his family, the new album is shaped around Aloe not only as a husband, but his…
The Babysitter: Killer Queen is a hybrid of gory horror, coming-of-age tale and black comedy. It’s the sequel to 2017’s cult favourite The Babysitter. In that film, teen Cole (Judah Lewis) discovered his babysitter was involved in a satanic blood cult. Two years after the events of that film the angst-ridden Cole is still traumatised,…
