An American soldier, the kind you really don’t want to mess with, trains his gun on a pair of quivering, cringing targets. “Hey, there’s some kind of misunderstanding here,” one of them pleads desperately. “We’re American.” “OK,” comes the reply, very slowly; the soldier’s eyes are still murderously narrowed. “But what kind of American are you?”
It’s a scene from Alex Garland’s new action movie Civil War, which imagines a US ripped apart by fully weaponised conflict, state against state, liberals versus conservatives. In this election year it’s sure to be hotly controversial on its April release, and even has a terrible ring of inevitability about its premise. Kirsten Dunst is among the stars who negotiate a very near future in which 19 states secede from the Union, there are government air strikes against civilians, journalists are shot on sight in the Capitol and battlefront players include the Florida Alliance and the Western Forces (California and Texas). There seem to be no heroes.
Elsewhere among 2024’s movies, the usual array of sequels includes Joaquin Phoenix’s return as DC Comics’ clown-faced villain in Joker: Folie à Deux, and the second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune, with Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya starring.
Even the auteur film menu offers up some unlikely starry fare: take The Way of the Wind, in which Terrence Malick takes on the life of Jesus and casts Mark Rylance as Satan alongside Géza Röhrig’s Christ. But I’m more eagerly looking forward to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, which stars Marisa Abela.
If cinema has relied on the star system since its inception, it’s a more recent phenomenon for live theatre to import big names from other genres. But celebs-in-everything seems to be the panacea as theatres are still battling post-pandemic budgetary black holes and reduced audiences, and 2024 in London sees a real array of big names. There are currently two Macbeths stalking the land, each with starry pairings: Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma in Simon Godwin’s touring production, which is heading for Edinburgh, London and the director’s home in Washington, DC, and from the Donmar, David Tennant with Cush Jumbo as Lady M.
Released from Succession, Brian Cox is back on the West End boards in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the semi-autobiographical epic that won its writer a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Meanwhile, Shiv Roy, now reinstated in real life as Sarah Snook, flaunts her new pulling-power in a version by Kip William of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a one-woman show at London’s 900-seat Theatre Royal Haymarket: quite a bold move.
And while Sex and the City’s other three players — Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davies — have all performed on the London stage in the past, Sarah Jessica Parker is about to make her West End debut. She and real-life husband Matthew Broderick play Karen and Sam, a long-married couple trying to pull their raggedy relationship back from the brink, the vehicle being Neil Simon’s 1968 comedy Plaza Suite.
Celebrity of a different sort hovers around the more reclusive Jez Butterworth, theatrical royalty since 2009’s Jerusalem, who drops a new play now and again just to keep us keen. Next year’s, which is opening in January at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End, is The Hills of California, with Sam Mendes directing. It has nothing to do with either hills or California, apparently: it’s set in Blackpool in the hot summer of 1976, and involves (in distant shades of Chekhov) two sisters and a boarding house.
The furious pace of visual art exhibitions across the world shows no sign of letting up. During the Covid years, the end of the blockbuster was confidently predicted (too expensive, too cumbersome, too un-green), but this has proved to be way off the mark. In the coming year, the scale of things is as ambitious as ever. The 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist show gets a transatlantic celebration with Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, a joint project of the French capital’s Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It aims to recreate that historic show at the studio of photographer Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines, using mixed media as well as original works by the great names.
At Tate, meanwhile, Yoko Ono (now 90) gets a full retrospective: it will be an interesting chance for a proper assessment of an artist whose own work was cast into the shade by the blinding glare of being Mrs Lennon. In Music of the Mind she launches ideas, confrontations and performances as much as installations: we’ll have a chance to see “Cut Piece” (1964), where people were invited to cut off her clothing, and her once-banned Film No 4 (Bottoms) (1966-67), a “petition for peace”.
More centenaries at London’s National Gallery: itself 200 years old, it’s marking 100 years since its acquisition of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” with a whopping exhibition — amazingly, its first for the artist. Although it’s safe to say that the sun never sets on shows of this painter, and 2023 had several excellent examples, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers looks set to be special.
Coming in at a more modest 50 years is the New York-based Dia Art Foundation, a unique institution created on what now seem very forward-thinking principles, putting artists and studios ahead of conventional museum spaces. Across its two New York sites in the coming year will be the prolific Steve McQueen, with a new sound-and-light piece upstate in Dia Beacon (Marcus Miller and other hot musical names collaborate) and his brilliant state-of-the-nation multimedia work Sunshine State in Dia Chelsea. Oh, and he also releases not one but two films in 2024: his mighty four-and-a-half-hour documentary Occupied City, about Amsterdam under Nazi rule, opens in cinemas in February, and later in the year a new feature, Blitz, again second world war-set, focuses on Germany’s bombing campaign against Britain.
And the big daddy of them all, hitting its 60th edition, the Venice Biennale of art returns in 2024: it’s an event that just gets bigger and bigger. This time it’s curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who has chosen as his rather puzzling theme Stranieri Ovunque — meaning Foreigners Everywhere, or perhaps We’re All Strangers. The focus on artists who are “foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diaspora, émigrés and refugees, as well as those who are outsiders in other senses, such as queer artists and folk or outsider artists” is no surprise (outsiders are the new insiders across the art world). The puzzling part is how that chimes with an event that almost uniquely celebrates nationhood, if not actually nationalism, in its very structure. As awkwardly and even embarrassingly outdated as that seems, with each edition more countries set up their national pavilions.
The surrounding shows appear more resplendent than ever, too: look out for Pierre Huyghe, Berlinde De Bruyckere and Gerhard Richter among a host of others.
Most people have given up counting anniversaries and decades for the Rolling Stones: enough to say that both Mick and Keith have turned 80. Undaunted, they’re touring the US this coming year, while Bruce Springsteen (a mere 74) is resuming the world tour he began in ’23; Madonna (just 65) is continuing her Celebration tour. In rock music, it seems, you either die young or live a long, long time.
Finally, talking of ageing celebs, it’s a big moment for the world’s favourite nonagenarian rodent. Mickey Mouse first appeared in Steamboat Willie (1928), and on January 1 the US’s draconian 95-year copyright period comes to an end. When vintage works — stage, screen, music, literature — move into the public domain, it can be a boon for the life of the various art forms: not only are they free of royalties, but creatives and producers can reinterpret them for today’s concerns and today’s audiences. But it can be cruel: will Mickey suffer the same fate as poor Tigger, AA Milne’s creation, who is similarly liberated this year, only to find himself wafted straight from The House at Pooh Corner into the horror flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2?
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