Italy
Marina Vaizey
Not a ray of sunshine illuminated the landscapes that were explored in this stormy programme, the first of a three-part history of the Celts. It aimed not only to show the latest investigations into the Bronze and Iron Age tribes who inhabited Europe from Turkey to Britain but to suggest their culture was richer than the simple cliché of barbarians at the gate.That last claim though was slightly vitiated by roaring reconstructions of the Battle of Allia near Rome, about 387 BC. The Romans were defeated by the charges of numerically much inferior forces in that encounter, their then amateur Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce.The Son's Room dealt with the raw anguish of the sudden, violent demise of a child that rips through a happy family like a tornado. Mia Madre, on the other hand, is a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antonioni’s celebrated trio of films, L’Aventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, established the Italian director as a major and influential force in world cinema. All three of the works deal with the failure that resides at the heart of human relationship, offering a Mediterranean mirror to the Nordic angst associated with Bergman’s films of the same era.The women in Antonioni’s films – often played by Monica Vitti, his wife and muse – invariably upstage the men. Vittoria, in L’Eclisse, leaves her rather limp boyfriend Riccardo (Francesco Rabal) and drifts away from the wreckage of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape first witnessed by author Iris Origo in 1923. From a barren wilderness, the valley was transformed by Origo and her husband into a thriving farm, crowned by one of Italy’s loveliest landscaped gardens, where now, some 80 years later, Origo’s children and grandchildren continue the family legacy. But while Iris and husband Antonio brought water, life Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Sunlight bounces off Derbyshire stone, buskers strum on the Pavilion Gardens bandstand and there’s improvised Shakespeare on the streets: it’s Festival time again in Buxton. Frank Matcham’s Opera House doesn’t present a particularly festive appearance to the street – he had to squeeze it in next to the Winter Gardens, after all – but once you’re inside, it’s a positive confectioner’s shop of ceramic tiles, coloured glass and swirling gilt, quite as breezily ritzy as any of Matcham’s West End creations. Painted cartouches on either side of the stage proclaim the twin gods of the British Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The best that can be said of The Face of an Angel is that it’s based around an interesting idea. Instead of dramatising the story of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia and what surrounded the case, director Michael Winterbottom has instead fashioned a film in which serial director of flop films Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) has arrived in Siena to scope out how to adapt a book on the case, then in its court appeal phase, by American journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale). For the purposes of The Face of an Angel, Kercher has been renamed Elizabeth Pryce, the accused and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. The Wonders is told from her point of view: the perspective of a child with three younger sisters forced to grow up and take on responsibilities for which she has no training. Gelsomina has to deal with what Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The gable end of Martin Graham’s converted barn opera-house at Longborough is surmounted by statues of three composers: pride of place, not surprisingly, to Wagner – the festival’s raison d’être – and with Verdi and Mozart on either side. It’s true one approaches Italian opera here with somewhat less confidence than Wagner. But it’s refreshing to have it at all, and the new Rigoletto, though patchy, has enough good points to make it worth the visit, if not the detour.Caroline Clegg’s production, it’s true, struggles to achieve the pace and tension that can always give Verdi the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press. In this entertaining romp through the opera's history, presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery drooled over the juiciest bits from some of the reviews from La Traviata's London debut in 1856 – for instance The Times of London deplored "an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage", adding that this was "the poetry of the brothel" – before splitting up to examine the musical and historical background of the piece.Once you'd got Read more ...
David Kettle
"The darkness deceived me," sings Leonora in Act I as she mistakenly rushes into the arms of the Count di Luna, rather than those of her beloved, the mysterious troubador Manrico who’s been serenading her for nights on end. Seeing Robert B Dickson’s sepulchral lighting in Scottish Opera’s semi-new production of Verdi’s melodramatic shocker Il trovatore – an updated version of the company’s 1992 staging – you can understand why. The production’s Caravaggio-esque gloomy depths and ominous, looming shadows (used to particularly grotesque and unsettling effect in the famous "Anvil Chorus") soon Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You might think you know what you’re in for with a play by Anders Lustgarten, winner of the inaugural Harold Pinter Playwright’s Award and current go-to political activist for the Royal Court and the National. Listed alongside the plays on his CV is the boast that he’s been “arrested in four continents”.But if Lampedusa was merely an angry rant, you’d switch off before it had run its course, short as it is at 65 minutes. It’s hard enough being eyeballed by the two actors, each of whom starts out sitting inconspicuously among the audience on benches in the round, and subsequently monologues us Read more ...