China
Marina Vaizey
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. In this second instalment of Neil Brand’s brilliant three-part history, he looked at the genre from the 1940s to the 1960s, from the USA to the UK, as well as voyaging to India and China and dropping in a salut to France.These two decades are labelled the “Second Golden Age”. We bounced straight in with images of New York accompanied by Leonard Bernstein’s euphoric post-war “New York New York”, emblematic of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seeming to spend an interminable amount of time wandering around in a daze and blundering up blind alleys, Strangers finally gathered its wits and cantered towards the finishing tape with a renewed sense of purpose in the final two episodes. One couldn’t feeling that if two or three of its eight instalments had been surreptitiously hidden behind the dustbins round the back of ITV Mansions, few would have been any the wiser.In the end, university professor Jonah Mulray (John Simm, revealing an aptitude for morbid dullness which he’d previously kept to himself) got most of the answers he’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old trap. But it gives it a helluva good try, and even its less successful portions offer much to enjoy.Perhaps they shouldn’t have opened with the titular story of Buster Scruggs, because it’s so outrageously laugh-out-loud brilliant that the viewer is apt to suffer a kind of bereavement at the realisation that Scruggs won’t be reappearing in later Read more ...
Katherine Waters
I’ve forgotten my wallet. This is both embarrassing (where did the fun lush part between callow youth and irrefutable senility disappear?) and upsetting because by the interval of the Finborough Theatre’s revival of French symbolist writer Paul Claudel’s immensely prolix, indulgently semi-autobiographical, astonishingly declamatory and undeniably self-flagellatory play Break of Noon, I'm in need of a drink as stiff as the acting.How many adjectives can fit into a sentence? How many words can be used when one will suffice? Why say “fearful” when being “scared” and harrowed to the “pith” of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Whatever you do in the next couple of days, be sure to grab a ticket for this wonderfully atmospheric production. A glorious fusion of athletic dance, creative visuals and intoxicating sound, the piece pays tribute to the island of Taiwan, named Formosa ("beautiful") by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century, and home to Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.It is a historic moment, since this is Lin Hwai-min’s final production as leader of the company he founded in 1973. When he steps down next year, he will leave behind an impressive legacy that has won him countless accolades and comparisons with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sutra is back, 10 years after its premier at Sadler’s Wells. This is, in fact, the fourth time it has returned to London and such is the amazing popularity of this beguiling show that, in the past decade, it has been performed more than 200 times in 66 cities in 33 countries. You can see why it is so successful. The production is clever, funny, skilful and endlessly inventive. Initially the choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui performed in it himself; he played the role of an outsider trying to engage with the beliefs and practices of Buddhist monks from the Shaolin Temple in China, who Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Lord Clark – “of Civilisation”, as he was nicknamed, not necessarily affectionately – presented the 13 episodes of the eponymous series commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1969; it was subtitled “A Personal View”, and encompassed only Western Europe (from which even Spain was excluded). The whole guide, narrated in that upper-class accent, wrapped in bespoke suiting and accompanied by full-scale orchestral throbbing, was the kind of documentary that families stayed home to watch. It proved, said those rightly enthralled by that authoritative patrician presence, that the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an injection of reality of political, economic and historical analyses.”The central plank of Maçães’s argument is that China and Russia will in the near future be recognised as playing pivotal roles in the way “people, goods, energy, money and knowledge” flow. These flows cross a space he terms “Eurasia” characterised less as a geographic entity than a conceptual space governed by political, economic, and to a far Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Soaring over an expanse of blue sea, a white bird traverses the screen diagonally. Gliding unhindered through the air, it is the embodiment of freedom; by contrast, the movement of people down below is constrained by border crossings and passport controls. The perfect tranquility of this opening shot is the calm before the storm; prepare to spend the next two hours witnessing extremes of human misery and, by turns, feeling horrified, angry and deeply depressed.A boat comes into view, chugging in the opposite direction. Overloaded with refugees making their way across the Mediterranean to the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by an embattled prime minister, bruised by the Maastricht Treaty (remember “the bastards”?). Neil Kinnock had been expected to win, Labour ahead in the polls until the last. Party chairman Patten orchestrated the campaign so perhaps the exigencies of the role left little time to attend to his own constituency. In any event, to those disappointed that the Tory order was not overturned, Patten’s defeat was a cheering moment in a grim night.He felt “sick at the humiliation” but a consolation Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years while the author battled serious mental health issues.Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life – a quote from Katherine Mansfield’s personal journal – is not actually a memoir even in the most broad-brush sense of the term. Rather it’s a collection of essays – meditations one might call them – on depression and life and what makes it worth living. Reading this book you wonder, so don’t Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s rich irony in the timelining of 1940s Chinese blockbuster The Spring River Flows East. Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli’s melodrama dates its 14-year timespan – events unroll from 1931 to the end of the war in 1945 – with reference to the Chinese revolution of 1911 (titles read, “20 years after” etc), but the film’s social commentary is so acute that it’s no surprise that another, more far-reaching turmoil would hit the country, transforming it into the Communist People's Republic, just two years after the film's 1947 release. With hindsight, they should have been dating it in terms of “ Read more ...