Reviews
Marina Vaizey
There is a 1953 Volkswagen parked in the Great Court of the British Museum, and we are reminded that Hitler persuaded Frederick Porsche (who gave his name of course to a hideously expensive luxury automobile) to design a people’s car. The postwar economic miracle of the defeated Germany finally allowed the Beetle to go into mass production; 21 million of them in fact – the largest number of a single model ever produced, until its hugely successful run ended in 2003. Here is a neat paradox: how an idea of one of the monsters of history became a protagonist of effective technological advance Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Director Christian Petzold avoided Germany’s grim version of heritage cinema – the war, the Wall – until last year’s Cold War hit Barbara. His fascination with his country’s present suppressions, though, helps him peel away its past’s familiar veneer. Phoenix uses a melodramatic film noir plot – Hitchcock’s Vertigo, mostly – to make a stylistically and emotionally spare masterpiece about how it felt to still be alive in Germany just after the war.Cabaret singer Nelly (Nina Hoss) returns to Berlin with a bandaged face battered in a concentration camp. Plastic surgery almost restores her old Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
First the good news. At 73, is Plácido Domingo anywhere near retiring? Er, no. When the question came up in an interview on Sunday (on video below), he answered : "The reason I don't retire is because I can still sing." And then with a glint in his eye: "I still feel I have to know the the right moment. Not to sing one day more.... nor one day less."And more good news: Domingo does give an affecting performance as Francesco, the aged Doge of Venice in I Due Foscari, in a rather staid and conservative globe-trotting production of Verdi's early opera, which has also also been seen in Los Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre's new Dorfman auditorium gets off to a kick-ass start with Here Lies Love, the Off Broadway musical transplant that does for the closing months of Nicholas Hytner's tenure as artistic director what Jerry Springer the Opera did for the early days of his regime a decade or more ago. An ongoing hit at New York's Public Theatre, David Byrne's maiden foray into the often-treacherous waters of musical theatre remains an experiential triumph, its undeniable kitsch factor wedded throughout to a witty, sometimes wounding trawl through the life and disco-intensive times of none Read more ...
Russ Coffey
From David Attenborough’s spoken introduction to the blonde, robed backing singers, Biophilia Live sees Björk in full experimental flow. Sometimes the film seems almost as if documenting the ceremonial workings of a science-based cult rather than covering an avant-garde pop show. Musically it is reverent, the atmosphere is cerebral, and, above all, Björk’s persona is shamanistic.Biophilia (literally love of nature) was released in 2011 as a conceptual, multiplatform project. In addition to the CD the diminutive singer oversaw a series of interactive educational IPad apps. In Iceland the Read more ...
David Nice
What Anne-Sophie Mutter is to the violin, Alison Balsom to the trumpet and Sabine Meyer to the clarinet, so is Sioned Williams to the harp. Though Meyer had the glass-ceiling distinction of being the first woman in the Berlin Philharmonic, Williams’s service to the BBC Symphony Orchestra has been longer (nearly 25 years so far as principal harp). And while all four artists have had major new works composed for them, the harpist’s commission of six pieces to celebrate her 60th birthday would seem to be a record. And who else would have part-remortgaged her home to pay for the enrichment, an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's on later in the year than usual, but The Apprentice is back. Yippee! For the tenth series Lord Sugar and his producers have done a little tinkering with the format - enough to keep it fresh but without upsetting its dedicated fans, of which I am one - and last night 20 hopefuls lined up in the boardroom (instead of 16, as previously) to hear him run them through their paces.The personal statements from the deluded fools – do they really think Sugar would invest £250,000 in them? - contained many laugh-out-loud moments as they spouted business clichés and puffed-up self- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera; he stands up and balances precariously as the boat bobs up and down on the swell; he falls overboard, climbs back on and stands silhouetted against the blue sky, grinning down at us.With his lithe young body, bleached dreadlocks and disarming smile he seems very amiable and laid back; it's impossible to imagine him in any sort of trouble. And Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Indie actress Brit Marling takes aim at a rigid power structure in this tense and pared down female-led revisionist Western from British director Daniel Barber. Set towards the end of the American Civil war three women are grappling to survive and make sense of it all whilst the men battle it out and the world around them is burning to the ground.Louise (Hailee Steinfeld), Augusta (Brit Marling) and Mad (Muna Otaru) make up this brave brood, two sisters and their slave, who are forced to come together to fight against a couple of rogue soldiers intent on taking them down. All the women Read more ...
fisun.guner
All human life, as they say, is here: we witness displays of warmth and tenderness in virtuous matrimony; reflection and contemplation in quiet solitude. We respond to the soft seductions of the flesh in its yielding ripeness, and we feel the pathos of the withering of the flesh in age; there’s even the mocking of the aged flesh still lusting for the piece of the old action. There’s civic pride and intellectual curiosity. And then there’s simply being; being in a fully conscious, thinking and feeling sense – don’t we get exactly that when we stand before a Rembrandt self-portrait? Here is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Few films this frightening are also so kind. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature starts with a pretty teenage girl suffering inexplicable, bone-snapping terror. He makes us wait to find out why, lingering in the lives of 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends in their deliberately timeless, golden, Spielbergian suburbs. This is a world where the sun always shines, black-and-white science-fiction is usually showing on TV, and only Disasterpeace’s John Carpenter-esque electronic score reminds you something awful is looming. Mitchell’s sensitivity to teenage lives, and intimate Read more ...