1990s
Daniel Baksi
Rounding out a decade of personal success – beginning with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning The Puppetmaster (1993), followed by a best director award for Good Men, Good Women (1995) – the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien travelled to the Japanese harbour city of Hirado as part of his research for Flowers of Shanghai (1998). An unexpected work, the film emerged out of the ashes of a failed project to shoot a biopic of Zheng Chenggong, otherwise known as Koxinga, a Chinese Ming loyalist who fought against the emergent Qing Dynasty. Set at the close Read more ...
Robert Beale
Tabita Berglund is that rare species, an up-and-coming orchestral conductor attracting enough attention to secure repeated international bookings in even these straitened times. She also happens to be female and young, which until relatively recently would have been seen as another major handicap to success. But this was her return to the Hallé, having conducted a set of concerts in late 2019 with them - and she’s no stranger to the north west of England, either, since she took part as a young cellist in Lake District Summer Music’s masterclasses 10 years ago.Berglund is a more mature, but Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Limbo, in Jack Thorne’s latest play, is a room lined ceiling-high with drawers, a sort of morgue rebooted as a vast filing system. It apparently provides comfy accommodation for the souls waiting to pass over, and its activities are run in tight bureaucratic fashion by Five (Kevin McMonagle), a crisp but likeable Scot with a nice line in candour and a squeezebox on which he plays Gershwin melodies. Balloons erupt through the floor of the National's Dorfman auditorium; cherry blossom petals (“made by three little ladies from Northampton”, the operative named Four notes) drift down from the Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
There is an irony in the fact that the most celebrated of auteurs to emerge during Hong Kong’s "Second Wave" of directors in the 1980s did not originate from within the bounds of the administrative region. Born in Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai was the son of a sailor and a housewife. It was only on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, as Mao Zedong sought to strengthen his grip on Chinese society, that Wong's parents took the bold decision to emigrate to British-ruled Hong Kong.For Wong, the journey was a success. Less so, however, for his two older siblings, whom Wong would not see for a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thirty years since its original release, Jungle Fever appears on Blu-ray for the first time, courtesy of the British Film Institute. Some aspects of the movie have aged well – it’s electrifying to revisit Samuel L Jackson’s breakthrough performance as a crack addict plumbing new depths to feed his habit. But other aspects haven’t fared so well, primarily the script’s sexual politics and the casting of Wesley Snipes as the (anti) romantic male lead.Racial politics are the overt subject of Jungle Fever, a cautionary tale of a black man and a white woman having an affair. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This pallid chick flick limps out on release having changed its title since its Berlinale 2020 debut; in the US it's known as My Salinger Year, but perhaps market research in Blighty decreed that name-checking the author of The Catcher in the Rye wouldn't play as well here. Based on novelist Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 auto-fiction, it’s an account of the period she spent working for a legendary literary agent in Manhattan in the mid-90s. While Rakoff’s book has some appeal for readers interested in publishing or nostalgic for accounts of ambitious young graduates trying to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lazer Guided Melodies was great. It still is. Spiritualized’s debut album built from what was already there in Jason Pierce’s previous band Spacemen 3 and took it into newer, more textured territory. While softer-focussed and more dynamic than Spacemen 3 there was still an edge, a brittle carapace which ensured Spiritualized was its own thing. There was also a gospel-informed sense of drama. What came together on Lazer Guided Melodies became the endlessly malleable raw material which Pierce is still redrafting. Indeed, his last album, 2018’s And Nothing Hurt, was recognisably one by Read more ...
John Bungey
“I'm growing old,” laments Tom Jones as his 40th studio album draws to a close. Sir Tom is “growing dimmer in the eyes” and “drowsy in my chair”. These blunt observations are not sugared with the mordant humour that, say, Randy Newman or the late Leonard Cohen might apply to a bad case of codgerdom. The only apt listener response to the song "I'm Growing Old" is: “Well you're 80, I guess you are.”Jones's days as a hip-swivelling knicker magnet are fast receding in time's rearview mirror. However, elsewhere on this album Jones does everything in his power to contradict the notion that he'll be Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If there’s someone who could claim to have proved Arnold Schoenberg’s pithy phrase “If it is art, it is not for all” it was Alan Vega. His and Martin Rev’s abrasive synth-punk duo, Suicide were famously detested by fans of the Clash, one of whom even threw an axe at him on stage when they supported Strummer’s more straightforward punk rockers in the late 70s. Yet, he was also worshipped by the Sisters of Mercy, Andy Weatherall and, somewhat surprisingly, Bruce Springsteen, among plenty of others. In fact, Suicide may even rival the Velvet Underground as largely ignored prophets of a new way Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I See Your Face” opens with a short burst of Phil Spector-ish tambourine rattling. The sort of thing also employed by the early Jesus & Mary Chain. Then, a cascading folk-rock guitar paves the way for a disembodied voice singing over a spooky one-finger keyboard line and chugging, reverbed guitar. Occasionally, what sounds like a syn drum goes “pff.”“Gorgeous Weather” is equally remarkable, equally other-worldly. A spiralling, distant-sounding creation, its subterranean feel suggests an oncoming storm rather than what’s usually thought of as gorgeous weather.Then there’s “There's A...” “ Read more ...
India Lewis
In Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic's third book, everything is purposeful, each loaded gun introduced just waiting to go off. It has something of the lightness of Rachel Cusk, but is loaded with the weight of Balkan history which cannot be suppressed. As the book progresses, it evolves and twists, each certainty shifting and dropping out of sight.Asylum Road begins melodramatically, with the banal act of listening to true crime podcasts dripping with potential violence. Anya (the protagonist and narrator for all but a small section of the book) and her boyfriend, Luke Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music year draws to a close and theartsdesk on Vinyl presents its festive selection. We go easier on the cheesier at this time of year, but there are also gold nuggets in there too. Time to buy the vinyl lover in your life a little something? Here's a vibrant cross section of many, many kinds of music on plastic, running the gamut from Neil Diamond to a feminist concept album about mermaids. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHTiña Positive Mental Health Music (Speedy Wunderground) + Tom Sanders Only Magic (Mosho Moshi)Usually December’s Vinyl of the Month is a Christmas album but this year, for Read more ...