CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Werner Herzog isn’t visible in his documentary Lo and Behold but he’s a constant throughout, his sonorous, quizzical tones an ideal counterbalance to some of the more scary talking heads he encounters. In essence the film doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already suspect already: that the constantly evolving internet could either ruin us or offer salvation.Subtitled "Reveries of the Connected World" and organised in 10 short sections, the film’s title is explained in the first few minutes, an excitable academic breathlessly showing us the room in UCLA where one of the first attempts to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the late Leonard Cohen once growled, “Everybody knows that the war is over/Everybody knows that the good guys lost.” That’s how 2016 felt. Perhaps the moment that encapsulated my year was standing in a very muddy Somerset field, two days after the Brexit disaster, part of an exhausted but defiant Sunday night crowd, singing along with LCD Soundsystem for all we were worth; “So it’s us versus them, over and over again.” That repeating chorus, circling and circling, summing it all up.In 2016 the scales tipped when we weren’t looking. The “good guys” suddenly became the minority. Meanwhile, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
For those of you who aren’t parents, or a member of theartsdesk’s burgeoning under-5 readership, Mr Tumble is the comic creation of Justin Fletcher a children’s entertainer and TV presenter. Among his CV highlights is providing the voice of Jake, one of the the Noughties, pre-school phenomenon the Tweenies, and a character who made Joe Pasquale sound like Richard Burton after a packet of woodbines and half a bottle of decent Scotch.I’m not joking, compared to that voice, nails down a blackboard seems like a decent option for guided meditation, so I’m genuinely terrified going into this. I’m Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It says a great deal about how very bad this film is that the pre-title montage of viral cat videos clawed from the internet is the most amusing sequence in it. This is one of the most cynical "family entertainment" movies to come out of the Hollywood machine in a long time. It has all the charm of smelling an atrophied mouse left behind the sofa by a vindictive moggy. Kevin Spacey plays a Trump-esque mogul, Tom Brand, who is determined to build the tallest skyscraper in New York. He plasters his face all over his business in various heroic poses, but is loathed by all his investors Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Another day, another country Christmas album. Yesterday, on theartsdesk, Kacey Musgraves’s A Very Kacey Christmas was given the once-over. Today, it’s the more storied, more venerable Loretta Lynn and White Christmas Blue, her second-ever Christmas album and the belated sequel to 1966’s Country Christmas. Fifty years ago, that album opened with its self-penned title track. In 2016, a remake becomes the second song on the new White Christmas Blue.“Away in a Manger” was on Country Christmas and it crops up again on White Christmas Blue. The same with “Blue Christmas", “Frosty the Snowman", “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Another day, another country Christmas album. Yesterday, on theartsdesk, Kacey Musgraves’s A Very Kacey Christmas was given the once over. Today, it’s the more storied, more venerable Loretta Lynn’s White Christmas Blue, her second-ever Christmas album and the belated sequel to 1966’s Country Christmas. Fifty years ago, that album opened with its self-penned title track. In 2016, a remake becomes the second song on the new White Christmas Blue.“Away in a Manger” was on Country Christmas and it crops again on White Christmas Blue. The same with “Blue Christmas, “Frosty the Snowman", “White Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anthologie 1953–2002 is a monster. A 20-disc set spanning almost 50 years, it tracks one of France’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Gilbert Bécaud died in December 2001, but songs from his posthumously released Je Partirai album are included. Fitting, as his music lives on and the release of this box set marks the 15th anniversary of his death.Outside France, Bécaud is less well known. Though his “A Little Love and Understanding” single charted in Britain in 1975, he did not make a Charles Aznavour-style crossover to mainstream recognition in the Anglophone world. He’s never been given Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Slade. McCartney. Jona Lewie. There’s a reason that every festive compilation album released since the mid-90s has featured exactly the same songs: the human race has lost the ability to write a Christmas-themed track that is just the right combination of schmaltz and saccharine to become an instant Mariah Carey-level classic.It’s not for lack of trying: almost every Christmas cash-in that arrives with us at theartsdesk includes at least one, usually more, self-penned number amongst the usual selection of classic covers. Sometimes, they come close to working (although I confess to having not Read more ...
Matthew Wright
TV’s Gareth Malone has been pounding the pavement from the Perranarworthal Handbell Ringers in Cornwall to the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band in West Yorkshire to curate a national expression of Christmas. Each group gets Malone’s motivational treatment, and the result is a shiny bauble of an album, ideal for engaging a broad family taste. Malone’s “British” selection of songs has an admirably cosmopolitan slant, embracing nationality in the sense of adopted experience rather than origin. From “Silent Night”, to the choral suite from the Disney hit Frozen, these pieces are part of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
William Friedkin’s super-stylish bad cop/bad villain thriller was his return to form after the disasters of Cruising and Sorcerer. To Live and Die in LA didn’t achieve the instant classic status of The French Connection when it was released in 1985, but it's enjoyed a cult following ever since, and this new edition in a restored print is a treat. It’s a familiar story of amorality and betrayal – the most effective cops are those who think like criminals themselves and are willing to cross the line to nail their target – but told with such slick energy that all clichés are forgiven.Based on Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” makes you want to burn the nearest decorated pine tree and Michael Buble’s Christmas croons give you the urge to shove brussel sprouts in your ears, Pentatonix’s new festive album could be the perfect antidote to Xmas crabbiness.Known for their Christmas album of 2014 (in particular a hyper-hip version of The Nutcracker), this five-piece a capella group from Texas (Kirstie Maldonado, Mitch Grassi, Scott Hoying, Avi Kaplan and Kevin Olusola) offer up a few more festive songs with an unexpectedly cool twist. They sing in close harmony, combining Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have described the budget on which they made their latest film Theo & Hugo – the French directors have been collaborators, as well as partners, since the mid-1990s – as a “pirate” one, its restrictions imposed not least by the fact that they had written a first sequence so sexually explicit that they believed it closed access to the usual public funding sources even in France. The film’s opening 20 minutes certainly have a bracing explicitness that put it almost on the boundary with pornography, although what follows morphs into a rather tender gay Read more ...