Reviews
Matt Wolf
That old canard about there being no good roles for women needed revising time and again in the theatre year just gone, so much so that end-of-year judging panels for the year's best faced far more competition among the female contenders than they did among the men (such supreme all-male ensembles as the My Night with Reg team notwithstanding). Whether it was the Massachusetts class warrior brought mightily to life by Imelda Staunton in the Broadway export Good People or Eve Best letting down both her hair and her defenses to suggest a newly sensual if ever-intelligent Cleopatra at Read more ...
theartsdesk
From the clubs of Berlin to the pubs of Birmingham, via Somerset and New York, our new music writers select their most memorable gigs of 2014. Drenge, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, FebruaryIn February, teenage drum and guitar two-piece Drenge were basking in the unexpected media glare caused by Tom Watson MP. They were also touring their self-titled debut album of high-octane rock ’n’ roll, and those curious enough to see them in a room above a pub in South Birmingham were treated to a spectacle of raw music and snotty attitude. Fiery tunes like “Gun Crazy”, “I Wanna Break You In Half” Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Every Nutcracker has its day, and every day has its Nutcracker. But sometimes history repeats itself, and so it was that I found myself last night in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, scene of my own childhood encounters with ballet, preparing to watch Peter Darrell’s Nutcracker, the very same production that I and thousands of other Scottish children were raised on between 1973 and winter 1996-7, when the (by then rather battered-looking) Christmas favourite by the company's founder was last performed.The company was Nutcracker-less for the next few years, a turbulent time in which it struggled Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: I'm Just Like You – Sly's Stone Flower 1969–70Although a fixture on America’s mainstream charts since 1967’s “Dance to the Music”, Sly and the Family Stone’s August 1969 appearance at Woodstock changed things forever. After seizing the attention of a massive white audience at the festival, Sly Stone would move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. The band then gradually fell apart. The greater success brought chaos yet also offered Stone the opportunity to stamp his personality on a new record label where he would be the house producer and writer. The appropriately named Read more ...
David Nice
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.Fortunately I didn’t need to lean too hard on my Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“But I do want to be stuck with you.” Five series and five Christmas specials down, Downton fans heard a line of dialogue they had no idea they’d been waiting for all this time. Never mind that the scenario was a straight lift from The Remains of the Day, in which the stuffy old butler proposes to the starchy old housekeeper. Stone the crows and knock us all down with a feather, Carson popped the question to Mrs Hughes. And what, of all the wonderfully blindsiding things, did she say in reply? “I thought you’d never ask.” Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan, the show’s gnarliest pair of troopers, Read more ...
Simon Munk
The best games of 2014 were often to be found not from the "AAA" videogame equivalents to Hollywood, but, of course, bedroom coders and small, independent teams. These are the best of the wild and weird "indie" games of the year…Minecraft Pocket EditionNot strictly a 2014 release but the updates that arrived in June/July finally turned an amusing diversion into a proper game, almost the equal of the fantastic desktop edition. For beginners – this is a collaborative and hugely powerful virtual Lego-a-like. Stuart HoughtonJazzpunkThe spirit of Hunter S Thomson haunted this surreal noir-on-acid Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Christmas scoop was the first appearance of the authorial voice, Vanessa Redgrave, playing Jennifer Worth, writing Christmas cards, looking at the photographs of herself with her two midwife friends and plunging us into memory from 2005 to 1959. She tells her husband Philip (Ronald Pickup) with tender affection how different it was, but "once a nurse, always a nurse," he responds. Bookending this episode were her words as she and Philip finished Christmas preparations, that if we are lucky we find love, and even its meaning. Philip then persuades Jennifer to write her memoirs, and the Read more ...
ellin.stein
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu,Birdman is the story of a fading star’s search for professional rehabilitation and personal redemption that perches adroitly between dark humour and darker despair and injects a familiar story of mid-life crisis with fresh vitality and emotion thanks to vivid flights of an intensely cinematic fancy.Michael Keaton, a leading man in light comedies before rising to the big leagues by playing Batman in the Tim Burton original and first sequel, has been cast for maximum meta-value as Riggan Thomson, an actor who found fame by playing Birdman, the superhero Read more ...
emma.simmonds
This year's award-courting survival picture (after 2013's All Is Lost, and 2012's Life of Pi) is based on the genuinely remarkable story of Olympian Louis Zamperini. It's a tale of heroic resilience in the face of an onslaught of adversity, helmed by someone who, in a very different way, is pretty unstoppable herself – Dame Angelina Jolie.We first meet Louis (Britain’s Jack O’Connell) during an exciting WW II aerial assault, where he’s the picture of helpfulness and cheery stoicism. Leaving the men suspended in peril, the film flashes back to his childhood as the rebellious son of Read more ...
David Nice
While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally culminates in two great works for chorus and orchestra. Over the past three years I’ve reeled at the best of Messiahs, four cantatas out of the six making up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – and now that God of music’s ultimate demonstration of his omnipotent range.The B minor Mass may seem even less seasonal than two-thirds of Messiah, but it has its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I wish Mel Brooks had directed this, but instead we've got the sort of stodgy techno-epic that has become all too common from the auteur-ial hand of Ridley Scott. Ridley's 150-minute rehashing of the Biblical story of Moses is often a feast for the eyes (especially in 3D), with its vast Egyptian panoramas and stunningly mounted action sequences, but the characters are largely cardboard, the dialogue is dire and a lot of very good actors are given nothing of any consequence to do. Did somebody mention Kingdom of Heaven?And yet there really ought to be plenty to chew on here. The story of how Read more ...