Communism
Matt Wolf
"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other starting point. There's talk later in Wesker's three acts (taken here with only one interval) of seeing people in the round, which is exactly what the writing, not to mention Cooke's superlative ensemble, manages to do: the political and the personal conjoined in a compassion that one might describe as clear-eyed if only it didn't prompt from an audience Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If there's one thing Hollywood hates more than people bootlegging its latest blockbusters on mobile phones, it's letting a lucrative franchise go to waste. Thus, after the initial three X-Men films and 2009's Wolverine spin-off, you are invited to roll up for the prequel, skippered by Brit director Matthew Vaughn, of Layer Cake and Kick-Ass fame.The young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is a bright and breezy telepath, schmoozing the girls with his amazing intuitive powers in a supposedly 1950s Oxford University. By contrast, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), whom the world will come to know Read more ...
fisun.guner
This remarkable 1988 adaptation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice addressing the audience. “This is a story for children,” she tells us, before adding a teasing note: “Perhaps.” And that “perhaps” is worth noting, for Jan Švankmajer’s Surrealist Alice is full of cruel and violent incident.Paring the story down and dispensing with many of its most memorable characters – the Duchess, the Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat among them – the story becomes a disturbing duel between Alice and the White Rabbit. We first encounter the creature not hurrying across the lawn, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Midway through Farewell, a civilian who is aiding a KGB spy is told by his nervous wife, “I married an engineer. Not James Bond.” In other films, this might be a cheap line, a postmodern quip; here it is spoken in earnest, and reflects the many nuances of a wonderfully retro spy drama. Farewell is a throwback to the purest of Cold War yarns, notably from the Sixties, in which psychology was more important than action, and characters struggled painfully with loyalty and betrayal in grimy rooms and wintry locales. Goldfinger in 1964 may have excelled with the Martini school of spying, but a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963-64. As well as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Asti, who's still acting, had appeared in the pimp's tale Accattone, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who employed Bertolucci as an assistant director. (Bertolucci made his directorial debut on the 1962 serial-killer drama The Grim Reaper, written by Pasolini and about to be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Czech New Wave sprouted out of a fertile collaboration between film and fiction. Milan Kundera started out as a lecturer in film, lest we forget; one of his pupils was Miloš Forman. Both flew the communist nest to live and create abroad, which is why their names reverberate down the decades much more than those of the director Jiří Menzel and novelist Bohumil Hrabal, whose collaboration on Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967. They followed it with the delightful Larks on a String but, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia having put an end to the Prague Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roman Polanski’s The Ghost won five of the seven European Film Awards it was nominated for last night. It was a display of the sort of sentimental herd mentality familiar from the Oscars which the European Film Academy’s voters like to feel they are better than. Polanski himself loomed from the big screen via Skype, kept from the ceremony in Estonia’s capital by the US arrest warrant which was surely the reason for the Academy’s largesse. The director looked down on the spectacle from his book-lined study with an unlined, unmoving face, detached by more than geography, a man who had Read more ...
David Nice
Events surrounding the birth of the unrepentantly "un-American" Marc Blitzstein's early (1936-7) shot at socially aware music-theatre prove much more interesting than the show itself. Heck, I got more out of reading the programme than I did sitting through the whole darned thing. Let's face it, Blitzstein's mostly foursquare marriage of words and music sucks. Not that the dynamic Mehmet Ergen's latest Arcola team didn't give it their best shot.
The Cradle Will Rock, you see, has as fascinating a history as its classically trained, pianistically gifted and homosexual creator (and you may Read more ...
josh.spero
If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a webcam, with Yentob sitting in the dark, like some spymaster of the arts.This was even before Ai had been put under house arrest to prevent him from attending a party he arranged to celebrate the demolition of his studio in Shanghai (a studio which the Chinese Government had asked him to put up in the first place...). All of which prompts the question Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of all the schools of film which were allowed to sprout behind the Iron Curtain, it was in Czechslovakia which contrived to export its work most successfully to the West.Poland had Andrzej Wajda. Hungary had István Szabó. But Czech cinema seemed to sprout out of a fertile collaboration with its national literature. Before he wrote The Joke, lest we forget, Milan Kundera was a lecturer in world literature at the Film Faculty of Charles University in Prague. There are certainly other ways to measure these things, but Jiří Menzel won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967 with his magnificent Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A metallic shower rained down upon us as five percussionists of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's percussion sextet unleashed the meteoric potential of five huge metal thundersheets on our unsuspecting ears, and percussionist number six, a pianist, encouraged her muzzled instrument (a metal brace lying across its stringed body) to gnash away rhythmically and to dance amid the downpour. 1939 was when John Cage came up with this breathtakingly original, endlessly exhilarating work, First Construction (in Metal), that opened this late-night Prom. It was the most invigorating 10 minutes I've Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I once witnessed Corin Redgrave, who died last week, terrify a member of the audience at the National Theatre. He was playing an old beast of a journalist in Joanna Murray-Smith’s play, Honour. It opened with Redgrave in mid-rant, so when a mobile phone trilled about five seconds after his entrance, Redgrave was already in the zone. This was a traverse staging in the Cottesloe, and the woman rummaging in her bag was in the second row, so he was practically on top of her when, without slipping out of character, he swivelled and yelled, “Turn it off!”For a long stretch of his life, Read more ...