Car reviews

Motherless Brooklyn (15) Verdict: Stylish gumshoe drama  Rating: Ordinary Love (12A) Verdict: Gentle tearjerker Rating: How many fictional detectives can you think of with physical, psychological or even neurological impairments and disorders? There are loads: from Raymond Burr's wheelchair-bound Ironside to Sofia Helin's impassive cop Saga Noren in the 'Scandi-noir' TV series The Bridge, who suffered from Asperger syndrome. It is a transparent device, in a desperately overcrowded field, to give sleuths some form of singularity, just as Hercule Poirot had his waxed moustache and dear old Lieutenant Columbo, despite plying his trade in sunny southern California, his raincoat. Fifties film noir with a twist: Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Edward Norton feature in Motherless Brooklyn - the tale of a New York private eye with Tourette syndrome Sometimes, these foibles actually contribute to the protagonist's crime-busting skills. That is very much the case in Motherless Brooklyn, … [Read more...] about Edward Norton is terrific in this tale of a private eye with Tourette syndrome: BRIAN VINER reviews Motherless Brooklyn

Florence Welch recently told a journalist that her fourth album pursues a noticeably different direction. It is, she confirmed, less “Florence-y”. It’s a statement that is hard to read without raising a quizzical eyebrow. Being Florence-y means dealing in a showy kind of musical melodrama, where tribal drums meet sawing orchestras, grandiloquent piano and the singer’s war-cry voice, heavy on the vibrato. It’s an approach that has earned her three platinum albums and a level of fame that’s led Penguin to collect and publish her biro-written poems, lyrics and inspirational notes-to-self in a book. Moreover, we have been here before. Her last album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, arrived in 2015 after advanced publicity suggested it was going to be less Florence-y, too: the stripped-down work, as she put it then, of “a quiet person”. In reality, it sounded like the work of a person who could drown out a car alarm at 20 paces; an album … [Read more...] about Florence + the Machine: High As Hope review – older, wiser, comparatively calmer

‘Everybody wants, nobody’s ashamed, everybody wants you to know their name,” sing Superorganism on Everybody Wants to Be Famous, catching the obsession with celebrity culture and the supposedly instant fix of fame that has become so central to our culture. Ironically, the super-catchy song is making them not exactly famous, but certainly virally well-known, after the song’s video racked up 1.5m views online. Being championed by Frank Ocean and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig is an unlikely situation for an eight-piece band who live in a shared house, wear charity shop clothes and describe themselves as a “DIY pop production house”. The London-based octet’s airy, disembodied music mashes up white noise, early Human League synthesisers, car horn parps, slamming car doors, radio broadcasts, cartoon characters, fat rubbery basslines and sublime, breezy pop hooks, with a childlike glee. At times, they could be a shaken-and-stirred take on early … [Read more...] about Superorganism: Superorganism review – sharp pop-culture mashups

Kairo is growing up in 1960s Sri Lanka at a moment of gathering political repression and destabilising social change. His father is a dyed-in-the-wool communist, in an armchair sort of way. His mother is trying to work out what to do about her son’s education now the schools have been suspended. But Kairo doesn’t care too much about all this. He’s just met Jay – be warned, it’s never a coincidence when the glamorous, wealthy character with the gilded life is called Jay – and he’s going to appear in a coming of age tale. Jay has a life that Kairo finds intoxicating. His family are rich and live in a beautiful house; he has an attractive, unstable mother and a gangsterish uncle with a farm and a classic car collection; he likes to cycle, drive, shoot, build, skinny-dip, defend the helpless and all the other things boyhood heroes do. His bedroom is filled with metaphors for the contained experience of childhood – fish tanks, in this case, … [Read more...] about Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera review – coming of age in Sri Lanka

Liam Payne recently lamented that when One Direction’s management realised he was the sensible one, they made him keep his bandmates in check. Getting cast as Mr Boring was annoying, he explained, yielding him the least screams from fans. Happily for Payne, solo freedom has let him reap maximum screams and embrace his officiousness: with 3.7bn streams, he is the most commercially popular 1D member. It’s hard to see why. Despite LP1’s effortful attempts to cast Payne as a sexual piranha, the 26-year-old generally comes off as an uptight scold. On Hips Don’t Lie, he stares at a woman’s groin as she dances and warns that she’d better not be wasting his time. “I hope your hips don’t lie unless they’re lying with me,” he sings, a conclusion so deathly it feels like a funeral for reproduction. The thrumming Rude Hours finds him inviting a lady to a “parking lot”. “Might be a bad idea,” he admits, … [Read more...] about Liam Payne: LP1 review – beware! Former 1D member on the prowl