Reviews
Steven Gambardella
Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure. It is lurid and fussily composed – an ugly streak of red, blue and yellow terminate in a smudge of black. But in it we detect the desire behind Lichtenstein’s innovative aesthetic achievements: it’s too bold and too vibrant.It was in 1961 when Lichtenstein found his signature style of mimicking comic book images. By using a method of painting Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brilliantly played by Saskia Rosendahl, the eponymous teenage heroine of Lore (full name, Hannelore) faces a demanding double journey: both the physical slog through end-of-war Germany, a country fallen into chaos, and the more complicated process of acknowledging, like the nation itself, past Nazi complicity. On the cusp of adolescence, she's forced into adult responsibility for her younger siblings, just as her inner world of sexual feeling is awakening - everything pushes her towards maturity, and she must cope or perish.Australian director Cate Shortland’s second feature combines a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. The channel turns its attention to Aylesbury, a young offender institution heaving with the sort of hoodies the Prime Minister may not after watching this first episode feel quite so inclined to hug.Aylesbury Read more ...
fisun.guner
It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not quite the whole picture. Of course, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other goliath of Modernism, Matisse. We would never have had Abstract Expressionism were it not for these two vying giants of European painting. We would never have had the art world’s big leap across the Atlantic from Paris to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In Yo Picasso!, a self-portrait from 1901 (pictured below, Private Collection), the 19-year-old Picasso is already projecting an inimitable bravura, emphasised by his dashing orange cravat. He looks out at us with that mesmerising and legendary, unwavering and intimidating stare he made his own. Even at the time, critical responses noted his courage and confidence. He had made the first of his several moves to Paris in the spring of that year. And here Picasso undertook perhaps the most significant of his many metamorphoses. (Self-Portrait, pictured below, Private Collection)The 18 paintings Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the moment when we learned that Sergeant Nick Brody really had been converted into an Islamist agent that the spring went out of Homeland's step. Complicit doesn't make the same mistake. Skilfully spun out over its movie-length span, it's a probing examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties that bedevil intelligence work. It won't make you sleep any easier at night.Screenwriter Guy Hibbert has avoided shoot-outs and political grandstanding and instead approached his subject through the narrow perspective of a single MI5 operative, Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo). For three years, he Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t have to live under a totalitarian regime to write music of profound anguish. I was driven to argue the point at a Shostakovich symposium when an audience quizzer took issue with my assertion that Britten could go just as deep as the Russian. Much as the works of the two composers in this programme, Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto and Britten’s Spring Symphony, revealed their lighter sides to varying degrees, it was our anniversary composer who scored highest with his darker undercurrents. Conductor Edward Gardner’s further touch of class was to avoid giving one of what will Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Are films for the senior demographic the new rock’n’roll? As the population ages and people keep their marbles for longer, entertainments for the grey pound, as it’s charmingly called, must be laid on. The job of films like The Last Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and now Song for Marion is to tend towards the cheerful and the redemptive. Age is a bugger, they all accept, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings – or in the case of Song for Marion, till Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp have given their leathery larynxes a public work-out.In this case old age really is flirting with age- Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“Work, more work and six foot of earth in the end. That’s life,” says John Rutherford. That single-minded work ethic is what drives him on and drives his family to despair and desertion. As head of the century-old family glassworks business going through hard times (the banks won’t lend money), he bullies his way out of a changing world that threatens his control (“I’ve a right to be obeyed”). But he has a messianic mission to preserve a dynastic destiny at all costs.Githa Sowerby’s 101-year-old play seems an unlikely choice to bring Sir Jonathan Miller out of directorial “retirement” and to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Family: Once Upon a TimeFamily were always difficult to place. This lavish box set doesn’t make getting a handle on them any easier. They were as idiosyncratic as Jethro Tull and, in Roger Chapman, had a vocalist as offbeat as Joe Cocker. Not that they sounded like either, more that their DNA was as sharp-edged as both. The Leicester-born band had roots in soul-pop outfit The Farinas and the psychedelic underground embraced them – they were integral to the 1969 novel Groupie, a lid-lifting, supposedly fictional, exposé of rock’s seamier side. Despite these leg-ups and their popularity, they Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you solve a problem like Medea? Euripides’ baby-killing, hell-invoking sorceress is one of literature’s most terrifying and unfathomable creations – a woman capable of murdering her own children just to watch their father’s pain. Yet with the blood on her hands now centuries-old, Medea continues to work her grim enchantments on artists. No fewer than eight operas (and an almost equal number of plays) have staged her story, but have any really got to grips with the psychology of tragedy’s wickedest witch? I’m afraid that Georg Benda’s 1775 Medea is unknown to me, as is Saverio Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Lulu, this week Cio-Cio San, next week the Vixen Bystrouška. These are the three exemplars of David Pountney’s “Free Spirits” – as he labels his first themed season with WNO. But it’s hard to see poor little Butterfly, pinned to a board by the cruel American sailor-lepidopterist, as a free anything. Like a trapped fly, Suzuki calls her; and if there’s a free spirit in Puccini’s opera, it might rather be Pinkerton himself, “dropping anchor at random,” as he boasts to Sharpless: not such an inspiring thought.Joachim Herz’s production, now 35 years old, was rough and aggressive when Read more ...