Reviews
peter.quinn
The band's Facebook page states “Dirty Soulful Groovin Dancey Sweet” under genre. To which I'd add “Dramatic Playful Intense Voluptuous Transporting”. Performing last night as part of the London A Cappella Festival, The Boxettes swept away any residual festive cobwebs and dazzled a packed Kings Place. “Loosen your shirt, loosen your bow ties,” we were told. I have to confess I didn't actually see any bow ties, but, metaphorically speaking, we got the point.
The all-female, London-based vocal quintet comprises Belle “Bellatrix” Ehresmann - currently the female world champion beatboxer - plus Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and opened in London last night. For about 90 minutes, we watch the ups and downs of the marriage of Maggie and Billy across four decades and through several leaps into the unknown. In its ambition, beauty and delicacy, this is a ravishing piece of work.The plot is very simple. In the 1960s, a British couple meet, fall in love and marry. They emigrate to the United States; he then borrows money from the bank to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shock, horror. London audience keeps quiet. And in Shoreditch too, under a railway viaduct. Newcastle’s Lanterns on the Lake did something virtually no band achieves – directing the focus onto them. London audiences will babble through anything and everyone, but this sold-out show cast a spell.The audience reaction wasn’t the only surprise. Last time round, at the Royal Festival Hall before John Grant, Lanterns on the Lake were tentative. The performance didn’t hang together. The concert hall setting did them few favours as it must have been the largest place they’d ever played, but even so Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel. Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company looked beyond predictable partners for Purcell’s inconveniently short Dido and Aeneas, lighting on Charpentier’s Actéon, another miniature tragédie en musique. With rather more emphasis on the musique and rather less on the tragédie, the work may not be quite the equal of Purcell’s concise emotional epic, but as an evening’s musical dialogue this was harmonious indeed.Near contemporaries, Charpentier and Purcell have both Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Much has been made of the quality of drama currently or recently on British television - Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Cranford, any number of Dickens adaptations we are about to see during 2012 - and rightly so. But as The Good Wife starts its third season on More4, it's worth noting that when it comes to modern-day serials, the Americans are more than a match for British bonnets and book adaptations.And so it proved in last night's opener; a show that can start a new season by letting two of its stars finally get to tango after two series of meaningful looks across the open-plan office, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Empty vessels make the most noise. That pithy old aphorism floated into my head a scant few minutes into the much-heralded new work by the undoubtedly talented, but here way off-beam, Hofesh Shechter. And again, a few minutes later. And again, and again, as something like 200 drummers filled the stage and bashed away in earnest polyrhythmy. At the end of the 80 minutes my watch was worn with checking.Survivor is its name, and I absolutely don’t mind being asked to survive din if it’s worth it, if it changes you. We had been kindly offered the option beforehand of earplugs but it’s surprising Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon, a successful thirtysomething New Yorker. His screen presence is so appealing that one could ogle him for hours and if, indeed, that is his body sauntering naked past the camera, he is well hung as well as handsome. Like Hunger, Shame explores bondage, but of a different kind: Bobby Sands was in prison, while Brandon is free but imprisoned by his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The recent suicide of Wales's football manager Gary Speed prompted angstful outpourings about the hidden menace of depression in top-level sport, even though there was no evidence that Speed was a sufferer. But depression clearly is an occupational hazard among sportsmen, with cricket incurring a disturbingly high rate of player suicides, and in this film former England superstar Freddie Flintoff (real name Andrew) probed into some high-profile case histories.Boxer Ricky Hatton recalled how he'd been traumatised by being knocked out by Manny Pacquiao in 2009, and fell into a deepening spiral Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Richly nuanced in its sideshot view of Uruguay’s film world and Montevideo street atmosphere, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is a small film that picks up on suppressed emotions which are only released in its second half. Its black-and-white images (actually transferred from colour, in a manner consciously evoking previous eras) recalls something of European cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. The three non-professional leads live rather than play their parts, but it’s atmosphere, conveyed especially through its score, that gives the film its charm.Central character Jorge (played by real-life Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play. Those nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done will find their prejudices confirmed, preferring the imaginative reach infinitely more easily arrived at by the use of puppets on stage. On the other hand, no one does epic screen moments quite like Spielberg, which on occasion means wincing through various passages while you await this director's long- Read more ...
josh.spero
You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much as possible.We had the overly mannered Miss Havisham and Burberry scowls of a new Great Expectations on BBC One and an ever-so-mysterious and oddly adapted Tale of Two Cities on Radio 4 (I like to believe they wear costumes in the studio). Last night came The Mystery of Edwin Drood, about which the biggest mystery was what sort of ending would be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near. Scripted and shot by first-time writer-director JC Chandor, it was made on the very stringiest shoestring – a snappy little irony given the numbers its characters bandy around in the course of its Read more ...