MARK TURNER wallows in the virtuosity of Swansea Jazz Festival openers, Simon Spillett and Pete Long
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A brilliant performance
LOUIS BAYMAN admires Mike Leigh’s bleakly comic take on a black woman’s experience of depression that offers no easy answers
TOUR DE FORCE: Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths
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PAUL DONOVAN recommends three new books that explore the human relationship with nature
Doomed adolescents, when the missing person is you, classic whodunnit, and an anti-capitalist eco-thriller
WILL STONE takes a ticket to indie disco heaven, but misses the rarely performed tunes
Reviews of new releases by Jens Lekman, Big Thief, and Christian McBride Big Band
TOM PIERSCIONEK recommends a remarkable series of interviews with those few and brave Israeli citizens who refuse to do military service
IF you were to ask a computer programme to come up with a title for a new Mike Leigh film it could do no better than Hard Truths.
Echoing the title of his very first film in 1971, Bleak Moments, Hard Truths represents a variation on the veteran British director’s recurrent theme of the delusions that keep us a step away from despair.
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