Bono: Stories of Surrender review – megastar tries out humility in likable one-man show

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Cannes film festival The U2 singer’s solo stage appearance sees him reflect on his anguished family past and have a decent go at being an ordinary Joe The stadium-conquering rock superstar Bono finds a smaller arena than usual for this more intimate and much acclaimed “quarter-man” show, performed solo without his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed live on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz. Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Surrender, starting with his recent heart scare and going back to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to global fame, his post-Live Aid charity work on poverty and famine relief (though no discourse on the question of whether Live Aid w...
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The Whisper of Silence review – coffee-taster drama makes most of stunning locations

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Alfonso Quijada’s feature follows a young woman gifted with an extraordinary sense of smell. It looks great, but fails to satisfy

This drama from El Salvador has several commendable features, starting with a tender, sympathetic central performance from Laura Osma as Josefina, a sweet young woman who discovers she has an exceptional sense of smell. However, something doesn’t quite smell right about the way the film clumsily layers uplift and violence, served up with excessively stylised visuals and sound. It’s as if writer-director Alfonso Quijada, better known hitherto as an actor and producer, doesn’t know if he wants to make a telenovela-style melodrama or something more elevated and arty – in the tradition of Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow or Lila Avilés’s films The Chambermaid and Tótem – with long takes and oblique storytelling strategies. In the end, it fails to satisfy either ambition.

Josefina and her younger brother Alfredo (William Castillo) lost their mother not long ago and seem to have no father in the picture; they live with their godmother in a rural part of El Salvador. Josefina picks coffee on an estate owned by Don Villagran (Boris Barraza) while Alfredo is supposed to be going to school. However, he has taken to bunking off with some bad boys, as Josefina’s friend Dalia (Emy Mena) describes them.

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