MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Film round-up: April 29, 2022
MARIA DUARTE of Downton Abbey: A New Era, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and Your Mum and Dad: A Devastating Truth
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Downton Abbey: A New Era (PG)
Directed by Simon Curtis
★★★★
DOWNTON Abbey returns with all its cinematic glory and Upstairs-Downstairs intrigue as it continues where the 2019 film left off, but with the Crawley family now heading to the south of France on a fact-finding missing to uncover the mystery of the dowager countess’s newly inherited villa.
Written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Simon Curtis, the film, set in 1928, deals with Downton having to confront the modern world as Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), to the horror of her father Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), agrees to allow a film company to shoot their silent movie at the estate in order to pay for much-needed roof repairs while he is away in the French Riviera.
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