Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
A rum aspect of the Oscar nominations has been the inclusion of two films that concern American slavery, and which could not be more different: in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino gives the American slave exactly the sort of empowerment he offered the Jews in Inglourious Basterds – blood-splatter violent and fantastical; in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg is happy to lean on the history books, for a respectful biopic. Lincoln might not be as inventive, or as much fun as Django, but its seriousness and maturity are a welcome alternative to Tarantino’s excess.Spielberg is no stranger to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
My only real complaint about the ever-excellent Good Wife is that they cram so much into every episode that it's notoriously difficult to keep track of all the plots, subplots, new names and cunningly tangled relationships. It's a bit like a televisual zip file, where you have to unpack it before you can extract all the contents.Anyhow, after some diligent pausing and rewinding, I can confidently declare that this first episode of series four was a sizzler, picking up where series three left off with no pause for breath. Screenwriters Robert King and Michelle King had reprised one of their Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Fronting her four piece band - pianist Peter Edwards and saxophonist Binker Golding among them - the young jazz/soul singer Zara McFarlane performs a mix of new songs and tunes from her album, Until Tomorrow. Among the former, “Woman in the Olive Groves” is inspired by a midnight taxi ride through southern Italy, passing an African woman by the highway, among the olive groves, trading her sex.This is set beside “Chiaroscuro” – what a word to get your jazz chops around – which gives Golding the chance to demonstrate the effect of light against dark in sound. There's a fine version of Read more ...
Helen K Parker
The news that Studio Ghibli were making a computer game was met with resounding excitement when it was announced way back in 2010. Right from the off the possibility of being able to adventure through the dark and mystical worlds of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke was tempered with the fear that we might end up skipping through the candyfloss Disney/Ghibli worlds of Ponyo or Arrietty instead. Unfortunately with Ni No Kuni, it’s clear to see which school of Ghibli has won out.Oliver lives in the idyllically bland town of Motorville, a 1950s Americana vision of new cars, ice cream parlours Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For a decade these two outfits, the Hammer & Tongue poetry collective and the Slipjam:B crew of hip hop MCs, have been taking each other on. They both run their own successful nights but this evening is their yearly face-off. As it reaches its climax, after a series of rounds, the two units are onstage together, MCs stage right, poets stage left, taking turns to front up, laying into each other, riding a thin line between affable digs and bawdy insult.Poet Michael James Parker heads to the front. Flick-haired, 6’ 4” and wearing a blissed grin, his verse goes for the existential nub of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zero Dark Thirty could have easily gone by the name of the Danish thriller from last year, The Hunt, it’s so furiously single-minded. As it is, the film's striking title is a military term for half-past midnight - the timing of the Navy SEAL raid which shot dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The shadowy, nail-biting recreation of that infamous operation forms the film’s finale and is its pièce de résistance. But Zero Dark Thirty also gives us the undisclosed story of the 10-year search for bin Laden: the moments of discovery and revelation, as well as the frustrations and deadly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When feminism was really cool, female playwrights would write flatshare dramas about a group of women, each of whom was representative of a certain way of life. The play title would just be a list of their names. The classic example is Pam Gems’s Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi from 1976. Does this mean that Amelia Bullmore’s new play, which also has a title listing its female characters, is a trip down nostalgia lane?Well, you certainly can’t complain about its star cast: Gina McKee, Tamzin Outhwaite and Anna Maxwell Martin — they play Viv, Di and Rose, who meet at university at the age of 18 in Read more ...
David Nice
“It looks like the Coconut Lounge,” remarked John Adams as he stepped up jauntily to introduce the first of two big string pieces composed 30 years apart. The folk with their drinks at the candlelit tables, though, were never allowed to sit back and let it all wash over them.The seminal Shaker Loops of 1978, heard here in its string-orchestra incarnation of five years later, buffets and charges you as it flies or coasts through space, the polar opposite of the more placid minimalism which inspired it. That was nothing, though, compared to the strange adventure of Adams’ recent String Quartet Read more ...
philip radcliffe
On 1 July 1916, the battalion of Lancashire volunteers recruited from Accrington was all but wiped out in about 20 minutes as they took on the task of attacking the village of Serre on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. Out of 700 men, 235 were killed, 350 wounded, “mown down like meadow grass”. Such was the fate of the Accrington Pals, formally the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) of the East Lancashire Regiment. Some of the lads were as young as 16, inspired by local pride and national patriotism to fib about their age in order to join their mates.Accrington was the smallest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As political campaigns go, Bob Servant's bid to win a by-election in Broughty Ferry (a real-life seaside suburb of Dundee) looks more like a drunken practical joke, or the result of an ill-judged bet. A fluent and shameless liar whose only credentials are a lifetime of dodginess, Servant's motives are venal and his ambitions entirely self-centred. He knows nothing about politics or, apparently, anything else, expect perhaps selling hamburgers, which he has done for many decades.Adapted from Neil Forsyth's books, Bob Servant Independent is low-key and low budget, but looks capable of building Read more ...
fisun.guner
We love the snow but hate the cold, and for almost 300 years Northern European winters were bitterly, catastrophically cold. Crops failed, there were famine riots and people died of hypothermia during the Little Ice Age. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries. Winters were long, life was harsh, but in Brussels Pieter Bruegel the Elder was singlehandedly inventing the winter landscape of our imaginations.Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, during the coldest winter for a century. At first Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's not an easy trick for an outsized action hero to grow older gracefully or credibly, but Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a shrewd choice of vehicle with which to launch his post-political film career. The way he tells it, being Governor of California was only ever intended to be a temporary time-out from Hollywood. Back in his first leading role since 2003's Terminator 3, he has little difficulty in seizing control of the screen.However, he has carefully scaled down his ambitions. Playing Ray Owens, sheriff of the small town of Sommerton, Arizona, Arnie has adopted a laboured senior Read more ...