Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Wayne Cochran: Goin’ Back to Miami – The Soul Sides 1965-1970With his dyed-blond pompadour, Wayne Cochran looks bizarre enough. But once he opens his mouth, the weirdness level is kicked into orbit. He sounds exactly like a wild cross between James Brown and Otis Redding. Although white, his soul music is not the smooth or sweet blue-eyed fare of a Len Barry or a Righteous Brothers. Goin’ Back to Miami convincingly makes the case for Cochran as a soul great.The compilation opens with the self-penned 1966 single and title track (watch a slightly fuzzy looking TV performance on the next Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel last did solo stand-up in 2004, when he walked out of a corporate gig after calling a bunch of bankers the c-word. Since then, he's spent his time mostly writing novels and doing some television and radio projects. It's his general absence from TV, he tells us in Fame: Not the Musical - an intelligent, witty and thoughtful examination of modern celebrity - that arouses pity in some members of the public who recognise him. If he's not on the telly, his career must be on the skids, right?Baddiel first became famous as one half of two immensely successful double acts, firstly with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Zac Efron has well and truly left behind his cute High School Musical persona. First he bared all in That Awkward Moment and now in Bad Neighbours he plays his first unsympathetic role – but his fans will be delighted to know that he gets lots of opportunities to show off his six-pack again in Nicholas Stoller's winning comedy.Efron plays Teddy, president of a college fraternity who move in next door to Mac and Kelly (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, pictured below), a thirtysomething couple with a new baby. At first Mac and Kelly, who used to be party animals themselves and reminisce Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus doesn’t pull any punches (or stabbings, smotherings and throat-slittings, for that matter). Bursting into a Globe smoky with incense, with shouts and drums, forcing itself at us and on us, this is a production whose physicality is its true language. But while anyone going for the gore will get their money’s worth – the opening night added a few more to the tally of fainting audience members – they’ll also get something better: a show that’s shocking, certainly, but whose provocations are never empty.Much is made of Titus as an early play. Criticism has Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Reason, tolerance, liberalism…these are the qualities that defined the Georgian Age, and for which it deserves to be better known, and more widely admired. Lucy Worsley stated her argument with admirable clarity in the opening moments of the programme, and her intellectual confidence and rigour made this one of the most informative and enjoyable of the many recent BBC history series. Worsley breezed through the historical landscape of the age, uncovering crucial aspects of politics, religion, art, satire, and finance. She span a fascinating web of connections and created a vivid portrait of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Kinks’ music deserves more than another jukebox musical. Joe Penhall has instead collaborated with Ray Davies on a show about the pain and compromise musicians go through to fill those jukeboxes. Most of The Kinks’ biggest hits are here somewhere. But, in the Hampstead Theatre’s first musical, they’re used in a way reminiscent of the site of two previous Davies productions, Theatre Royal Stratford East. The songs joyously reach out to the audience, even as they are shown to be rooted in a wider, difficult and daft world of class, family, professional struggle and private agony.The basic Read more ...
Simon Munk
There are many admirable things about Child Of Light. It's the game that the core team behind Far Cry 3 – the mega-action, gnarly dude first-person shooter ‑ went on to work on next. Yet, it's difficult to imagine two games further from each other.In Child Of Light, you play Aurora – a princess who falls into a deathly sleep to wake up in a dreamworld dominated by darkness. To return to her grieving father in the real world, she must defeat a wicked queen there. Able to fly, followed by a glowing, controllable orb of light and floating her way through a beautifully detailed landscape of giant Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Bigfoot legend rests on something close to found-footage: 1967’s grainy film of a large ape-like creature loping through the remote American North-west. The Patterson-Gimlin expedition’s reels are the Sasquatch conspiracy theorists version of the Zapruder footage. The provocative and prolific writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait took a small crew to the expedition site, the remote epicentre of a tourist trade and local sub-culture built on Bigfoot. Willow Creek’s mixture of quizzical documentary and gripping horror film is the effective result.We are entirely in the company of Jim (Bryce Read more ...
David Nice
Under what circumstances can Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, the most (over)played of the 15, sound both as harrowing as it possibly can be and absolutely fresh? Well, the context helps: hearing it at the breaking heart of the fourth concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle gave it extra resonance with the works on either side of it. But above all this is a team that plays with a degree of nuance, weight, beauty and commitment that I’ve never heard even the composer’s preferred foursome, the Borodin Quartet, surpass either live or in their numerous recordings. Even if I Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A move from E4, where sketch duo Cardinal Burns's debut series was shown, to Channel 4 is a significant jump. A bigger budget (one presumes), a broader target demographic and the confidence of your employers should act as a fillip to performers; on the evidence of last night's opener to their second series, that confidence was well placed.Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns have developed their craft since 2012 and a Bafta nomination; they've kept a few favourites – the Office Flirts, Banksy the suburban dullard who tries to daub walls by night, Yumi (pictured below) the giggly Japanese girl Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Best known for the Mortal Kombat twosome, the Resident Evil franchise (one of the DVD extras noted how the zombie dogs constantly ate off their zombie makeup) and big, bulging swipes at other genres with Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs Predator and The Three Musketeers, director Paul W S Anderson’s Pompeii has been neither a critical nor box office hit in America. It is not, however, without charm. Call him old fashioned but Anderson knows how to stage a fight and pace a story. We may well be seeing his work decades on, shown in museum retrospectives.Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) is "The Celt Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Who knew the human spirit needed such bureaucratic care? The celebration of International Jazz Day, founded by UNESCO in 2011, at King’s Place last night was nothing if not well cared-for. Sponsored SGI-UK, an arm of the global Buddhist movement, who were raising funds for UNICEF, proceedings are guided globally by legendary pianist Herbie Hancock, a UNESCO Ambassador for Intercultural Dialogue and Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. It bore the warning signs of art designed to appease a committee, and that’s a very different thing from making the spirit leap and the heart Read more ...