‘It needs to be loud’: Jozef Van Wissem’s one-man mission to make the lute rock again

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The Dutch ex-punk and Jim Jarmusch bandmate talks about his passion to free up a hidebound repertoire and make its strings ‘a real pop instrument’ Nobody can accuse Jozef Van Wissem of doing things by halves. The musician, very likely the world’s most notorious contemporary lutenist, owns a sonic arsenal of eight of the string instruments: some bespoke, and all boasting remarkable features. With them he has created a huge body of work, nearly 50 titles to date. Another album, This Is My Blood is released this May. Each Easter, Van Wissem settles down to compose a new record. He finds the peace of Warsaw, where everyone has “gone away for the holidays”, more amenable for work than “noisy” Rotterdam, where he also has a flat. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/lIktvjD via IFTTT
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The Locksmith review – Ryan Philippe holds the key to straight-ahead noir thriller

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Philippe’s newly released con faces heavy pressure not to go straight as his family grows ever more estranged and the film runs low on fresh ideas

The plot manoeuvres in this léger noir are so boilerplate and predictable that viewers are likely to find themselves expecting much bigger twists than are actually delivered. Surely that nice guy will turn out to be a double-crosser, you assume? Or you might imagine one of the vampy women will turn out to be a triple-crossing femme fatale. But no, it’s all pretty much on the level, which makes the snippets of classic Hollywood crime thrillers such as Touch of Evil, just glimpsed on a TV set, feel seriously undermining, gesturing as they do towards much more sophisticated works of cinema than we have here.

Ryan Phillippe stars as Miller, the titular locksmith, who in the opening scene has been forced into doing a heist that goes very wrong and ends up sending him to prison for 10 years. When he gets out, his now-ex-wife Beth (Kate Bosworth) is a rising police officer and his daughter Lindsay (Madeleine Guilbot) barely knows him. At least old friend Frank (Ving Rhames) offers him a job, but it’s only a matter of time before the past comes round again with Miller under pressure to atone for past crimes by committing entirely new ones. Gabriela Quezada is on hand as a battered sex worker, the surviving sister of a man whom Miller got killed years back. There are good cops and dirty cops, and shootouts at motels that puncture the eerie quiet of what looks like a barely populated desert town.

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