tragicomedy

Tragedy and comedy are perfectly paired in this latest jet-black offering from Martin McDonagh, which, like the writer-director’s previous film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2018), seems a strong contender for the Oscars’ best picture race. Reuniting the two stars of McDonagh’s 2008 debut feature In Bruges, it’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.It’s 1923, and on the fictional island of Inisherin the sounds of the…

Rebecca Wait’s new novel invites inevitable comparisons to Meg Mason’s runaway success Sorrow and Bliss. Both are about a pair of sisters; both grapple with madness, mad women and intergenerational trauma. Both are actively funny – because of, rather than in spite of, their subject matter. And both are sharp and wry, written with a clever and unusual clarity. To fail to make the connection would be to miss the obvious – and yet both books rather suffer in the comparison. To dwell too hard on the similarities renders them…

Running in tandem with the messy millennial women of TV – from Fleabag to Insecure to Everything I Know About Love – has been a similar strand of R&B, where artists such as SZA and Summer Walker sing proudly and amusingly about their flaws, though still with plenty of self-belief and a withering regard to men.Yaya Bey: Remember Your North Star album coverContinuing that style with abundant charisma is Washington DC singer Yaya Bey, though she uses much more than R&B to express it. Meet Me in Brooklyn is…