An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Charles Burnett.
Cast: Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Angela Burnett
Description: Vivid portrait of a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker called Stan and his struggle to keep a ramshackle roof over the heads of his wife and two children, Stan Jr and little Angela. Unfolding as tableaux of the family, neighbours and friends going about their daily lives, the film illuminates a microcosm of society stripped bare of opportunities and resigned to a grim fate.
Country: UK. 1977. 80mins
Sight unseen: Killer of Sheep missed a proper release in 1...
Charles Burnett is as important a black American director as Spike Lee but less lucky as far as recognition is concerned. This, his debut from 1977, now regarded as "the least known great modern movie from the States", was never properly released, chiefly because Burnett didn't have the money to pay for a soundtrack which now includes Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington.
It was shot in Watts when Burnett was a 33-year-old student at UCLA. Its central character is Stan, who works in a slaughterhouse and tries to get by. Though socially conscious, the film has no polemic, but its fractured images contain a melancholy poetry that's just as relevant as the blaxploitation films which became more fashionable.
Killer of Sheep is now re-released as part of a retrospective of Burnett's work including To Sleep With Anger, another masterpiece in which Danny Glover gives the performance of his life as a charismatic conman who arrives in LA to disturb the stability of a middle-class black family.
There can be no real appreciation of black American films without seeing these two classics.
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Morning:
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