Interviews
Pamela Jahn
Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.Set in Mexico and originally to be filmed there, but made eventually (with virtual Mexican backdrops) in a studio near Paris, Emilia Pérez has a telenova plot, features song and dance numbers, is Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-scares and gore. It was first used to describe a crop of horror films released in 2014, including Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walk Home Alone at Night, but it has also been used to describe some of the most recognisable horror films of the decade by directors like Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, and Ari Aster. To some this is an innocent enough Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.In the history-hopping romantic comedy-thriller, Lowe portrays an obsessed heroine in pursuit of her dream lover – whether he cares or not. From the Stone Age and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The high level of entries for this year’s Leeds Piano Competition – 366, almost twice the number who entered in 2018 – is just one reminder that any young pianist wanting to make their name today is negotiating shark-infested waters. Technical excellence is a given – if you want to make a living, you need to have something extra to win the support of concert halls and critics.When I first see the 25-year-old Lithuanian Ignas Maknickas (the ‘c’ is pronounced ‘ts’) in St James Park, he doesn’t look as if he’s suffering too badly from the pressure – he’s tapping idly on his phone while surveying Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film. Carol Reed’s noir classic uses bomb-ravaged Vienna as an index of the aftermath of World War Two. It’s a city divided between the Allies and the Russians, stranded in a murky limbo between the old pre-war Europe and the divided continent that’s painfully starting to take shape. It’s a city of secrets, lies and shadows – and very haunting Expressionist-style shadows they are Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Dalia Stasevska is a persuasive advocate for new music, as presented on her new album Dalia’s Mixtape. She combines a puppyish enthusiasm with a salesman’s eloquence – beneath which sits a steely self-confidence in her own artistic vision. The Mixtape is a collaboration between Stasevska, the BBC Symphony Orchestra (of which she is Principal Guest Conductor) and Platoon, an artist-led label that is part of the Apple Music family. I visited their studios in north London last week to speak to Dalia about the project and what it means to her.Dalia’s Mixtape (reviewed below by Graham Rickson) Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'
Adam Sweeting
Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre in his home town of Liverpool (where he was born in June 1964), Morrissey has amassed a huge list of credits on stage and in TV and film, and if you can judge an actor by the writers, directors and fellow-thesps he’s worked with, Morrissey has achieved triple-A status. Mind you, one of his proudest achievements was being invited by his beloved Read more ...
David Nice
It seems like only yesterday – the date in fact was 22 December 2016 – that 17-year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason, fresh from his win as BBC Young Musician of the Year, played the Haydn C major Cello Concerto in a Pimlico church with a group of young players known collectively as the Fantasia Orchestra and conducted by Tom Fetherstonhaugh (Sibelius’s Second Symphony followed).In the orchestra was the cellist's 18-year-old violinist brother Braimah. The constitution of the players wasn’t something I knew at the time. Braimah (pictured below by Ron Milsom in a Fantasia concert at the Guiting Festival Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dave Clarke (b. 1968) is, arguably, Britain’s greatest techno DJ. Although, in fact, he has lived in Amsterdam since 2009. He is also a producer of repute. His Red singles of the mid-Nineties are regarded as groundbreaking productions.He followed these with the albums Archive One in 1996, Devil’s Advocate in 2003, and The Desecration of Desire in 2017. The Red Series and Archive One have recently been reissued.Clarke was born and raised in Brighton, the offspring of a technology-loving father and a disco-loving mother. He would not characterise his childhood as especially happy. He ran away Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucie Shorthouse is enjoying some high-profile TV action with her roles in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts, about the adventures of an all-woman Muslim punk band, and in BBC One’s reincarnated Rebus. In the former, she plays the band’s niqab-clad manager Momtaz, while the latter casts her as rookie cop DC Siobhan Clarke, trying to cope with the maverick behaviour of the titular John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin. Both shows have enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and have pulled healthy audiences, which must surely have got the phones ringing in the office of Shorthouse’s agent. And that’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Viggo Mortensen has parlayed film stardom into the life of a hard-working, bohemian-minded gentleman scholar. His Lord of the Rings fees financed Perceval Press, which publishes books of poetry, photography and anthropology by himself and others, and Mortensen’s extensive discography as a musician.The company is named after a favourite knight in the legend of King Arthur, and there is something honourably chivalric in Mortensen’s life and work, filtered through socially open-minded acceptance of the modern world. His hard-riding, brooding Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of employability that must make many of his fellow-actors green with envy, Modine has been clocking up a stream of memorable performances for 40 years on both the small and big screens.The title role in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984), where he played opposite a fledgling Nicolas Cage, signalled the shape of things to come. His performance as Private “Joker” Read more ...