Los Angeles
Album: Lindsey Buckingham - Lindsey BuckinghamWednesday, 22 September 2021
Lindsey Buckingham was last in and first out of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up (quitting in 1987, and forced out by long ago ex- Steve Nicks in 2018). He was a would-be Brian Wilson in their midst, an unlooked for, maverick auteur whose first hit “... Read more... |
Album: Willow - Lately I Feel EverythingMonday, 26 July 2021
Willow Smith has done more during her life than the average 20-year-old. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, she bounced off her childhood appearance in her father’s film I Am Legend to a No 2 UK hit with “Whip My Hair” a decade ago,... Read more... |
Album: Peyton - PSAWednesday, 21 July 2021
For 25 years now, LA label Stones Throw records has become one of the most reliable brands in music. It began with, and has always been associated with, the leftfield hip hop of founder George “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak, and regular contributors... Read more... |
Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Apple TV+ review - sprawling account of the singer's rise to superstardomSunday, 28 February 2021
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Visual AcousticsTuesday, 29 December 2020
One of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Julius Shulman was the subject of a show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this autumn, “Altered States of America”. That title surely alluded to the visual modernism that changed the face of... Read more... |
Album: The Struts - Strange DaysThursday, 15 October 2020
Making sourdough, PE with Joe Wicks, writing a novel… none of that for Derby’s finest purveyors of unapologetically retro rock. Instead, the Struts decided to make the most of lockdown by recording a new album – all piling into producer Jon Levine’s... Read more... |
Kajillionaire review - quirks, strangeness and charm from Miranda JulyFriday, 09 October 2020
Old Dolio, the oddly named central character played, wonderfully, by Evan Rachel Wood in Miranda July’s third feature film, learned to forge signatures before she could write. “In fact that’s how she learned to write,” says her father Robert (the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: This Gun for HireSunday, 20 September 2020
The 1942 thriller This Gun for Hire, which opened five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was closely adapted from Graham Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett and directed for Paramount by... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Safety Last!Sunday, 30 August 2020
Comparing Harold Lloyd with Keaton and Chaplin is difficult. Though the input he brought to his films was crucial, Lloyd didn’t write or direct, and there’s much discussion as to whether he was a genuine comedian or a straight actor playing the part... Read more... |
She Dies Tomorrow review - intimations of mortalitySaturday, 29 August 2020
Watching the semi-satirical psychological horror film She’ll Die Tomorrow conjures the last lines of TS Eliot’s "The Hollow Men": “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature doesn’t... Read more... |
Album: Katy Perry - SmileFriday, 28 August 2020
Katy Perry occupies an odd position. By some measure the biggest pop star in the world over the last decade, with streams in the billions, she’s always been an awkward mix of old-school razzle-dazzle showbiz hucksterism, knowing sass and awkward... Read more... |
Spree review - a wild ride through social media madnessFriday, 14 August 2020
Allergic to that word “influencer”? Afraid that social media is the death of civilisation as we’ve known it? Then this movie may be for you.Despite its overt absurdity and compulsive over-the-topness, director Eugene Wobble Palace Kotlyarenko has... Read more... |
