The best Oscar nominees to catch in cinemas before Sunday’s glitzy ceremony, spectacular stage performances and some marvellous new music – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of film, theatre and music. Read on to find out what to see and do this weekend…
FILM – OSCARS SPECIAL
FILM OF THE WEEK
Oppenheimer Cert: 15, 3hrs
At the London premiere of Oppenheimer, writer-director Christopher Nolan, prior to walking out in solidarity with the strike by Hollywood actors and writers, told the audience that he expected people to be ‘blown away’ by his film.
It was a worthy sentiment, clumsily expressed. Nolan’s keenly awaited picture tells the riveting story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant theoretical physicist who ran the top-secret Los Alamos compound in New Mexico spearheading America’s Manhattan Project.
That was the name given to the development of atomic weapons and most notably the devastating bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.
The acting in Oppenheimer is commensurately wonderful, led by Cillian Murphy, who inhabits the title role completely. He is favourite to win the Best Actor Oscar on Sunday
Yet three hours after rolling my eyes at the English director’s choice of words, they were wide with wonder at the scale of his accomplishment.
Oppenheimer is a stunningly well-made film, with one scene (you can guess which) that is genuinely jaw dropping in its intensity. It’s no surprise the film is up for 11 Oscars on Sunday, the most nominations for one film at this year’s ceremony.
Nolan adapted his screenplay from a 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I can’t speak for the book but on screen the story really has four components: the race to create atomic weapons ahead of the Nazis; the attempt to stop nuclear secrets falling into the hands of America’s wartime ally, Soviet Russia; the post-war campaign to besmirch Oppenheimer for his own alleged Communist affiliations; and finally, his messy private life.
It’s a complicated tale that Nolan doesn’t particularly try to simplify.
Whisking us forward and backward in time, from ‘Oppy’s’ time as a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s to the 1954 ‘security hearing’ in Washington DC where he is effectively on trial, the director trusts his audience to grasp what is going on. It’s not always easy. I confess that my own understanding of quantum mechanics, nuclear fission and related topics is approximately the breadth of an atom, maybe even a split atom, but I didn’t mind being occasionally baffled. This is grown-up storytelling of the highest quality.
The acting is commensurately wonderful, led by Murphy, who inhabits the title role as completely as he does that of Tommy Shelby in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders. Robert Downey Jr is excellent as Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and arguably, apart from the unseen Nazis and a Soviet spy, the nearest thing this film has to a villain. But everywhere you look there are terrific actors at the top of their game, including Matt Damon as the army officer who recruits Oppenheimer to set up Los Alamos, Gary Oldman as President Truman, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck and, perfectly convincing as Albert Einstein, dear old Tom Conti.
If the film has a flaw, it is perhaps that the female parts are underwritten. But Emily Blunt makes the most of her screen time as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty; ditto Florence Pugh as his emotionally fragile mistress, Jean Tatlock. Both women are former card-carrying members of the American Communist Party, and Oppenheimer’s own Leftist sympathies are scrutinised after the war, understandably so even in the febrile McCarthyite era.
Nolan, however, doesn’t mind showing his own cards. He plainly sees Oppenheimer as a flawed hero, absolved by this film of being anything other than an American patriot who understands better than anyone the murky ethics around the development of a nuclear arsenal. ‘I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon’, he says. ‘But I know the Nazis can’t’. The scene in which the weapon is detonated, in a test in the desert near Los Alamos, is, I don’t mind asserting, one of the most thunderously powerful pieces of cinema in the entire history of the medium.
But beyond that virtuoso moment, much of Oppenheimer unfolds like a thriller, while not swerving profound questions about the morality of laying Hiroshima and Nagasaki to nuclear waste. I despair at the inordinate length of many films these days, yet even at three hours this one never seems unreasonably long. There is an awful lot of story to tell, and Nolan tells it magnificently.
Brian Viner
FOUR MORE NOMINATED FILMS BACK IN CINEMAS
Poor Things
Cert: 18, 2hrs 21mins
You may come out of Poor Things thinking it’s just way too weird, that it’s a tad too long, but my goodness you’ll want to have seen it. Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director whose last film, The Favourite, picked up no fewer than ten Oscar nominations, has just delivered his masterpiece.
Emma Stone pours heart and soul into her portrayal of Bella Baxter in Poor Things
Its star, Emma Stone, won the Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Actress, and is up for the Oscar this weekend. She pours heart, soul and naked body into her portrayal of Bella Baxter, the extraordinary young woman at the beating heart of this visually stunning production.
But I can’t stress enough what a strange story it is, or the highly stylised manner in which it is told. It certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste.
Based on a novel by the Scottish writer, Alasdair Gray, it begins with the apparent suicide of an unhappy, pregnant young woman… only to resume in the Art Deco-meets-steam-punk London residence of the celebrated surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a man whose digestion is aided by machine and who routinely belches up, er, huge floating bubbles. The name ‘Frankenstein’ springs to mind as soon as we see his heavily scarred face.
In this house of padded carpets and bizarre chimeric pets – look out for one that is part duck, part dog – also lives Bella, who has the body of a beautiful young woman but whose tantrums, clumsy gait and habit of referring to her guardian as ‘God’ suggest the mind of a toddler. No wonder Baxter’s swiftly besotted new assistant initially mistakes her for ‘a very pretty retard’.
But Bella’s mind is maturing fast and soon catches up with her body, and it’s at the moment she discovers sexual pleasure (‘furious jumping’ as she gloriously describes it) that Baxter’s caddish lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) sets out to have her for himself. But there’s something about this headstrong, straight-talking young woman that suggests no man will get the better of her easily.
What ensues is a peripatetic, episodic and often very funny cautionary tale that takes in heavily stylised versions of Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris, and calls to mind novels such as Vanity Fair and Fanny Hill.
Stone is quite brilliant, Ruffalo – delivering the worst English accent since Dick Van Dyke, one hopes deliberately – a game hoot, and Dafoe quietly rather moving. But you’ll definitely want to see for yourself.
Matthew Bond
The Zone Of Interest
Cert: 12A, 1hr 45mins
The director Jonathan Glazer is best known for big, glossy films such as Sexy Beast and Under The Skin. His latest, The Zone Of Interest, could not be more different. Played out in subtitled German and shot in a deliberately low-key, fly-on-the-wall style, it is set in the meticulously run house and well-tended gardens occupied by the family of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp.
Even better than Christian Friedel as Höss is Sandra Hüller as his wickedly deluded wife
The gas chambers and crematoria are literally next door, separated only by a high concrete wall topped by barbed wire. Inside – which Glazer never shows us – we know is the embodiment of hell. But outside in the Höss household it is very much suburban life as normal.
Nominated for five Oscars and winner of three Baftas, this powerful, brilliant and terrifyingly timely film is about the so-called ‘banality of evil’. How ordinary people can do terrible things simply because they fail to think fully through the consequences of their actions.
For Höss, beautifully underplayed by the German actor Christian Friedel, putting people to death has simply become an industrial process. Even better is Sandra Hüller as Höss’s wickedly deluded wife, a woman as happy to describe herself as ‘the queen of Auschwitz’ as she is to preen and pose in a freshly stolen fur coat.
Much of the film’s power comes from its meticulous sound design, with family life underpinned by the constant low thrum of furnaces and punctuated by distant gunshots.
The ending is haunting beyond belief.
Matthew Bond
Killers Of The Flower Moon
Cert: 15, 3hrs 26mins
Martin Scorsese’s lavish picture – starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio – was inspired by a book, David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction bestseller Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI.
It focuses on the sustained attempt, by a cabal of white businessmen in Oklahoma, to steal the wealth of the Osage tribe by killing off dozens of them.
Lily Gladstone is superb alongside an unsurprisingly brilliant Leonardo DiCaprio
The Osage had become astoundingly rich following the discovery of oil on their land in 1897. By the 1920s, when this film is set, they have become the wealthiest people per capita on Earth.
But we still see them being abysmally treated. Deemed unfit to spend their own money freely, they can only do so through white ‘guardians’, who are complicit in a heinous system of over-charging.
Systematic theft, however, is not enough. De Niro plays a cattle baron called Bill Hale who affects to be the tribe’s greatest champion and benefactor. He laments the fact that ‘most Osage don’t live past 50’.
But one reason they don’t is that he is discreetly having them murdered, sometimes by stealth (poison, mainly), sometimes with a bullet in the back of the head. That way, if there’s a white man in the family, their land can be inherited.
One of the principal instruments of his dastardly scheme is his sleazy, slow-witted nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), whom Hale manoeuvres into marriage to Mollie (Lily Gladstone), the Osage heiress he drives around.
Unsurprisingly, both De Niro and DiCaprio are both wonderful but Gladstone pinches the film from under their illustrious noses. She gives a superb, award-worthy performance as Mollie, who watches her mother and sisters die in various horrible circumstances, before falling mysteriously ill herself.
The film is not a whodunnit, still less a why-do-it. It’s not really a thriller or a crime procedural, even once Jesse Plemons as a smart, tenacious FBI man enters the fray, two-thirds of the way through.
What it is, albeit at prodigious length, is a masterly example of story-telling by one of cinema’s greatest exponents of the art, with an unexpectedly cheeky conclusion that, despite the tragic events depicted, will send you away with a smile.
Brian Viner
Cert: 15, 2hrs 13mins
The Holdovers is set in an all-boys boarding school in New England where crusty, irascible, world-weary classics teacher Paul Hunham (a role practically machine-tooled for the wonderful Paul Giamatti) has spent his entire career, having also been a pupil there back in the mists of time.
Dominic Sessa, Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers
It is a wry, intelligent, bittersweet comedy with cross-generational appeal and a simple enough narrative.
It’s December 1970 and unmarried, unloved Mr Hunham is preparing for the holidays when the headmaster, who cordially loathes him, gives him the unenviable job of looking after the ‘holdovers’, the boys who for whatever reason can’t get home for Christmas.
One of them is a bright but rebellious lad called Angus (superbly played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), who ends up as the only holdover, resentfully holed up in a big, otherwise empty building in the strangest of menages-a-trois, with Mr Hunham and the African-American school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, also terrific and, like Giamatti, a Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee).
She has even more reason than the others to be angry at the world – her son has recently been killed in Vietnam – yet her humanity shines through her sadness.
By increments, this unlikely trio become friends, learning from each other as they do.
It’s a beautifully paced film and Payne cleverly presents it in washed-out colours, almost as if it were made, not just set, in 1970. Another A+ for one of the best directors of his generation.
Brian Viner
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Nye
Michael Sheen was born to play his hero, Welsh wizard Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, the miner-turned-MP. Bevan was a bellowing bull who couldn’t resist a china shop. But he did more than any other individual to bring the NHS into being.
In this fantasy-style play, we meet him in pink pyjamas in an NHS hospital bed with trademark bouffant hair. It’s 1960 and he’s dying of stomach cancer, though he doesn’t know that.
I thought Nye would be a weepie about Saint Nye and his Bevanly host of fellow socialists. But what the play’s writer Tim Price has delivered is a messy epic that’s both engrossing and good fun.
Michael Sheen is terrific in the title role of Tim Price’s fantasy-style play about the miner-turned-MP Aneurin Bevan, who did more than any other person to bring the NHS into being
We all know that the NHS is on its own sick bed. But this is a cheering reminder of what the NHS was meant to be, not what it is.
Sheen is terrific and never off stage. We get flashbacks to the lad whose stammer was punished at school, the miners’ rep who becomes a Member of Parliament and finally Minister of Health.
Nye ended up keener on gin and tonics than pints. But it was his long stint down the pit as a boy and his father’s death from ‘black lung’ that fired in him a passion for healthcare.
His wife, the MP Jennie Lee – played by Sharon Small, superb – looms large. Quite rightly. She was a political firecracker with her own story. Other parts include the long-suffering Clement Attlee, obstructive Cabinet Minister Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather – brilliantly played by Jon Furlong – who tries to suffocate Nye with a pillow (!), plus sundry miners, nurses and family members.
Winston Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) gets a good look in. Bevan attacked him throughout the war, ignoring the parliamentary truce and making himself hated. What a fool he could be.
The play is thrillingly directed by Rufus Norris with inventive designs and a stage that’s teeming. There’s a great scene in which a cohort of masked doctors reject the proposed NHS – a mutiny of entrenched self-interest that the play doesn’t duck.
Passionate stuff, often moving and totally relevant.
Robert Gore-Langton
Olivier Theatre, London. Until May 11, 2hrs 40mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
Ben And Imo
Around the same time that Bevan was trying to get the NHS on its feet, the cantankerous composer Benjamin Britten was trying to create an opera for the coronation of Elizabeth II.
Britten’s music is often a dissonant assault on the ear. He was a fickle friend who had dubious relationships with choirboys.
Victoria Yeates and Samuel Barnett star in Mark Ravenhill’s two-person play
And yet there is nothing that the love of a good woman can’t fix in Mark Ravenhill’s two-person play which premiered on Radio Three in 2013.
The woman in question was Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, another English composer.
She pitches up in Britten’s Aldeburgh home to help him finish his opera, Gloriana. But between his homosexuality, and her settled spinsterdom, the only thing at stake is the seldom-performed opera, all but disowned by the composer himself.
Even so, Erica Whyman’s playful and finely tuned production creates a sympathetic portrait of an intense and unlikely friendship.
Imo (Victoria Yeates) is a cheerfully unpaid shrink, nanny, big sister, alter ego and chef.
Samuel Barnett’s petulant Britten is a tortured, self-pitying neurotic who suffers psychosomatic shoulder pain when composing.
Luckily, Imo believed ‘composers are the most fascinating things that ever lived’. And her faith gets us over the line.
Patrick Marmion
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until April 6, 2hrs 15mins
The Lonely Londoners
There is a particularly arresting slow-mo balletic sequence in Ebenezer Bamgboye’s stylised, superbly performed production of The Lonely Londoners when the various characters, all Windrush immigrants, ricochet and crash.
As each one collapses, deflated and defeated, his mates bolster him, help him to stand tall and bounce back. They are not quite friends but they are fellow Trinidadians, supporting one another in the so-called Mother Country, which is proving as hostile and impenetrable as the freezing fog.
Tobi Bakare, Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Gamba Cole – stunning – in The Lonely Londoners
At the centre of Roy Williams’s vivid adaptation of Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel is Moses, the fixer desperate new arrivals seek out. Not because he has found the promised pavements of gold but because he alone knows the parts of London where newcomers will be welcomed, and where ‘dem slam doors in your face’. It takes a moment to tune in to the patois, a powerfully atmospheric element of Selvon’s rich, resonant portrait of a time and a place.
The meagreness of their existence is suggested by the sparse staging. Each immigrant perches on a small metal trunk, all they’ve got — and more than Romario Simpson’s optimistic Galahad needs. He arrived with just a toothbrush, his pyjamas underneath his clothes.
Big City (a towering Gilbert Kyem Jnr) spent his first night in a bed with three other men. Hungry Moses (a stunning Gamba Cole) becomes adept at catching — and cooking — London pigeons. Gentle, uxorious Lewis (Tobi Bakare) becomes so frustrated and emasculated by his failure to get a job, he turns to drink and beats his wife, Agnes.
The women prove more resilient. Agnes (dignified Shannon Hayes) stands up to the Portobello market-trader who sells her rotten vegetables. Lewis’s disgusted mother disowns her son.
An important and impressive addition to the current debate about immigration.
Georgina Brown
Jermyn Street Theatre, London. Until April 6, 1hr 45mins
Little Shop Of Horrors
Here’s a 1980’s revival, spoofing 1960’s sci-fi horror with vigorous bebop and Motown, but very apt for Budget week 2024. For we’re on skid row, with dustbins, dossers, and a small shop going bust.
Oliver Mawdsley is a sweetly geeky Seymour in this revival of the musical
Orphan Seymour will lose his job, and poor Audrey, with a black eye from her loutish boyfriend, will have to go back to working the clubs.
But Seymour (a sweetly geeky Oliver Mawdsley) has been tending a rare Venus flytrap. How rare he has no idea. The novelty brings customers in, but unfortunately a cut finger reveals the plant’s taste for human blood, and he gets anaemic keeping it going, as it grows before our eyes.
Luckily, when you have a really good villain — Matthew Ganley as a sadistic, nitrous-oxide addicted dentist — the plant can be an instrument of natural justice.
But can it also free our hero Seymour to woo the lovely, golden-hearted Audrey? You bet it can.
By this time the thing is 8ft tall and a very messy eater: all credit to invisible puppeteer Matthew Heywood both for eloquent writhing and some flawless, lip-synching to the wild and terrifying offstage baritone of Anton Stephans.
The four co-producing theatres do honour to Howard Ashman’s loopy story, and the cast to Alan Menken’s songs: especially Laura Jane Matthewson as Audrey. Not to mention Stephans’ bluesy, hungry musical howling as the carnivorous giant avocado.
Shrieks of glee meet every demise.
Libby Purves
New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich. Until March 23, 2hrs 10mins. Touring to Bolton, Keswick and Hull until June 8
Standing At The Sky’s Edge
Chris Bush’s love letter to Sheffield and its famous Park Hill Estate, powered by Richard Hawley’s magnificent songs, started life at the city’ Crucible Theatre, before transferring to the National Theatre, where it proved it’s anything but local. Now, garlanded with awards, it is lighting up London’s West End.
Alastair Natkiel as Marcus and Laura Pitt-Pulford as Poppy in Chris Bush’s musical
Park Hill is truly iconic. An ultra-modern post-war dream rehousing the slum-dwellers in 1961, its subsequent decay reflected the decline of the city’s steel industry in the Eighties and Nineties. But it rose again. Revamped by urban developers (and now Grade II listed), it’s been gentrified inside and out.
The building’s history emerges through three sets of imagined residents whose lives simultaneously intersect in the same space.
As steelworker Harry carries his wife Rose over the threshold, they can’t believe their luck. Until it runs out, and a splintered family of Liberian refugees moves in and Connie is born.
How ironic that she is the estate agent who shows her former home to yuppie Poppy, a Londoner starting afresh following a break-up with her girlfriend.
In one characteristically economical and comic scene, Sheffield’s famous Henderson’s Relish, the essential accompaniment to Harry and Rose’s shepherd’s pie, doesn’t work the same magic on the Liberians’ dish or Poppy’s Ottolenghi aubergines.
Inevitably perhaps, the piece can at times feel schematic, soapy, predictable. While Hawley’s glorious, hopeful As The Dawn Breaks intensifies the moment, other songs seem slotted in.
Lynne Page’s choreography, in which characters wave their arms like living lava lamps, could be more inspired.
But there more to relish here than the Henderson’s. In its own way, Standing At The Sky’s Edge is a monumental achievement.
Georgina Brown
Gillian Lynne Theatre, London. Until August 3, 2hrs 50mins
MUSIC
SHOW OF THE WEEK
OMD
O2 Apollo, Manchester Touring until March 27
If you’re going to spend half your life listening to music, you need some luck with the timing of your teens. When you’re 17, especially, there have to be new albums that are even greater than the sum of their tracks.
For me that meant Armed Forces by Elvis Costello, Fear Of Music by Talking Heads, Eat To The Beat by Blondie and the self-titled debut by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.
Andy McCluskey, above, and Paul Humphreys of OMD are currently on a roll after reaching the top two for the first time with a studio album, the likeable Bauhaus Staircase
While those others were three or four albums in, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were absolute beginners. Both under 21, they mixed adult angst with childlike fun.
The album was planted on my turntable, the cover propped in front – a sliver of silver and orange, signifying something. ‘To this day,’ McCluskey says, ‘I think half the people bought it for the Peter Saville sleeve.’
Forty-four years on, these men from the Wirral are in Manchester, packing the Apollo for two nights. They’re on a roll after reaching the top two for the first time with a studio album, the likeable Bauhaus Staircase.
They open with a track from it, which can be a passion-killer. And this song, Anthropocene, is a sobering look at the state of the planet. But it soon turns into something I’ve never witnessed before: a climate-crisis clapalong.
The atmosphere never falters. McCluskey brings the yearning vocals and the whirling arms. Famously likened to a trainee teacher, he’s now more of a football manager, revving up his team. Humphreys and Martin Cooper supply the gleaming synth hooks, while Stuart Kershaw adds drums.
The stage design, like the music, is high-tech but heartwarming. As songwriters, OMD are a match for any of the musicians they influenced, from Vince Clarke to Pet Shop Boys. Messages, Souvenir, Joan Of Arc and Locomotion now feel like classics, while Enola Gay always did.
The evening ends where the story began, with Electricity, possibly the catchiest tune ever to get stuck at No99. The whole show has been like bumping into old friends and finding you like them even more.
Tim de Lisle
FOUR FABULOUS NEW ALBUMS OUT NOW
BLEACHERS: Bleachers
Best known as the go-to producer for an array of talented and famous women — Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde and others — Jack Antonoff reasserts his own credentials on his fourth album with New Jersey band Bleachers.
The sound is rooted partly in the Garden State’s rich rock traditions, with sax lines and gang-like vocals on Modern Girl. Elsewhere, retro-flavoured synth-pop rules, with Tiny Moves a 1980s-flavoured love song, and the wonderful Alma Mater one of several hazy electronic ballads. ‘I’ll make it darker,’ sings Del Rey on the latter, but this is a bright, buoyant album.
Adrian Thrills
THE ROLLING STONES: Live At The Wiltern
Like all Stones tours, the Licks outing of 2002 was dominated by hits-heavy concerts in huge venues. But, amid the arena gigs, they also visited smaller, more intimate places, including Los Angeles’ 1,850-capacity Wiltern theatre.
The upshot was a less predictable night out, complete with the odd bum note and a setlist featuring rarely-played gems like blues ballad No Expectations, the disco-inspired Dance (Pt. 1) and Keith Richards’ delightful reggae homage You Don’t Have To Mean It.
The world doesn’t need another live version of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, but these deep cuts are a delight.
Adrian Thrills
NORAH JONES: Visions
Jones has always been more enterprising than her demure image suggests, and she continues to spring surprises. Her ninth solo album, made with soul saxophonist and drummer Leon Michels, puts dinner-party jazz on the back burner in favour of funky R&B and raw country.
She’s a versatile instrumentalist, too, at home on the piano and twangy, Nashville-style guitar.
If 2020’s Pick Me Up Off The Floor, made in lockdown, was her mid-life crisis album, she’s now far more philosophical (on That’s Life) and even celebratory (on I Just Wanna Dance). A refreshing return.
Adrian Thrills
LIAM GALLAGHER & JOHN SQUIRE: Liam Gallagher & John Squire
Mancunian giants Liam Gallagher and John Squire have teamed up on a new LP that should captivate anyone who has ever worn a fishtail parka and Adidas trainers. It’s not, it should be said, an album full of surprises. But, in playing to their strengths, the pair complement one another perfectly.
With Squire the sole songwriter, Gallagher is free to focus on his singing, and he brings personality and presence to a set of guitar-powered tunes that swing between the bright melodies of Oasis and the fluid ‘Madchester’ rhythms of the Stone Roses – with nods to the Sex Pistols and 1960s blues-rock.
Adrian Thrills
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