Film
Nick Hasted
My highlight was the sudden, last-gasp chance to see Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, on its unexpected return to the West End. A cheap weekday matinee ticket found me in the front row, Rylance looming over me from the high stage, spewing alcohol; an unsteady, limping Lord of Misrule and, if he only could pull himself together, of a new Peasant’s Revolt against the unjust times we’re suffering. It seemed unbelievable he’d go through the whole thing again that night. Like Dominic West as McNulty in The Wire, I don’t want to spoil the spell by seeing him as anyone Read more ...
emma.simmonds
One of film’s most inspiring artists, Walt Disney, once said, “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” With the seemingly anachronistic The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius proves this to be as true as ever - even in this technologically adventurous age with its all too frequent bombastic sound. Hazanavicius boldly strips cinema back to its wordless, monochrome days and, boy, does the end result sparkle.More than 50 years after the French New Wave both celebrated and defied the Hollywood filmic formula, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
We have, thankfully, long since moved beyond the point where there's any need to delineate or categorise works of art according to gender. However, looking back at 2011 it's hard to escape the conclusion that the most compelling music emerged from the mouths and minds of women.Mara Carlyle’s Floreat is simply a triumph. Her songs depart from points as varied as John Dowland and Hot Chip to encompass music hall, jazz, classical and peppy electronic pop, all strung together to create something unified and entirely her own. There’s nothing clever-clever about any of it, and while at times deeply Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Although now a major figure on the world stage, Aung San Suu Kyi began as a reluctant dissident and figure of protest against the military regime of her native Burma. Recent months have seen her finally released from house arrest and set to play a considerable role in the future politics of her benighted country. Such latest developments are beyond the scope of Luc Besson’s film The Lady.Instead we see her path from Oxford housewife through to leadership of the National League for Democracy opposition party that won a huge victory in the 1990 elections, only for it to be overturned by the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That’s Tempest, not The Tempest. It’s not the only thing askew with Julie Taymor’s visit to Shakespeare’s island of exile. Prospero has become Prospera, the banished Duchess – rather than Duke – of Milan. Taymor has transfigurative form, so much so she could be written into Shakespeare. She transmuted The Lion King into a stage show. She brought Spider-Man to Broadway, turning her book into a musical with songs by U2’s The Edge and Bono. Whatever level of adept she is, the alchemy hasn’t worked with Tempest.She’s got form with Shakespeare, having already brought Titus Andronicus onto screens Read more ...
theartsdesk
Competition alert! Start 2012 with a surprise arts trip. On theartsdesk we love crossing the borders - "Surprise me," was the edict of the great impresario of theatre, music, art and dance, Serge Diaghilev, and it's one we hold to here, because we believe in the pleasure of surprises. So please enter our competition, and a pair of tickets to one of the splendid events listed below could be coming your way, but you will take pot luck with which one you win, and who knows? You could discover a new passion.We will email winners on Sunday 1 January - New Year's Day - with details of how they Read more ...
hilary.whitney
This is probably cheating - because it was released in 1980 - but one of the cultural highlights of my year was the opportunity to revisit the film Bad Timing, which was screened as part of director Nicolas Roeg’s retrospective at the BFI in March.The story of a doomed relationship between the sexually liberated but emotionally vulnerable Milena (Theresa Russell) and cold, clinical Alex (Art Garfunkel) bears all the hallmarks of a Roeg production - the flashbacks and flashforwards, the lush cinematography – and hasn’t dated in the least although, admittedly, it’s not to everyone’s taste. An Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how. That was literally so in the case of Michael Sheen's astonishing Hamlet at the Young Vic, a life force that wouldn't go quickly or gently into the good night, as the final image of Ian Rickson's production asserted to controversial effect: no problems in this corner whatsoever Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From his early establishing hit which located them on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Almodóvar has always displayed an obsessive interest in the inner world of women – mothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends. That obsession takes a striking swerve to the left in The Skin I Live In, whose release on DVD comes opportunely along as the French government is having to cope with a round of botched implant procedures.Although it features a wealthy, ground-breaking plastic surgeon played by an icy, poker-faced Antonio Banderas, this is rather more than a disquisition on the tyranny of body image. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The surprises linger longest. The things you’re not prepared for, the things of which you’ve got little foreknowledge. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes was amazing, and she was equally astonishing live, too. Fleet Foxes's Helplessness Blues was more than a consolidation on their debut and The War On Drugs’s Slave Ambient was a masterpiece. But you already knew to keep an eye on these three. Things arriving by stealth had the greatest impact.This year, music again proved it has the power to surprise. Terrific albums from unknown quantities (of varying degrees) like Rayographs, Huntsville (from Norway Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We’ve been here already: with Stieg Larsson’s three posthumous Millennium books and the Swedish films based on them; and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and its scrupulous, instant US remake. Though Hollywood assimilates global talent, American audiences won’t, it seems, sit through foreign-made or, worse, foreign-language films. So a release which seems redundant here, barely a year after large British audiences saw Niels Arden Oplev’s original, may be seen on its own terms across the Atlantic – as David Fincher’s follow-up to The Social Network, and return to Se7en and Zodiac’s Read more ...