Reviews
fisun.guner
Has there ever been a successful portrait of the Queen? Not a photograph - there are been plenty of those (with its delicious air of ambivalence, Thomas Struth’s portrait of the Queen with Prince Philip stiffly occupying two ends of a sofa at Windsor Castle, is among the best) but a painted portrait. Or rather, since we have Warhol’s screen prints which cannot be bettered in the age of incessant reproduction – not to speak of the air of decadent Hollywood glamour she acquired in the process – an official painted portrait?Let’s cast our minds back. There’s Pietro Annigoni’s full-length Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year at the National Theatre, Jonny Lee Miller appeared in Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch ("two excellent performances", according to theartsdesk's Sam Marlowe). Maybe something rubbed off, because now here's Miller following in Cumberbatch's footsteps as another 21st-century Sherlock Holmes, in this new series from CBS in the States.There were murmurings of disquiet from the team behind the BBC Sherlock when news of the American Holmes became known, but stylistically the two products are poles apart. Apart from anything else, Elementary has to abide by the stringent conventions Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A tale of life at the foot of the slopes, French-Swiss director Ursula Meier’s follow-up to her likeably askew debut Home finds her once again zeroing in on an unusual domestic set-up. This time the focus is on a dysfunctional family, perilously pared down to just a 12-year-old boy and his irresponsible adult sister, who are scraping by on the money generated by the youngster’s gift for theft. The winner of the Silver Bear at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, Sister (French title: L’enfant d’en haut) features an extraordinary young performer at its heart and an international cast Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.Anthony Baxter’s powerful, unashamedly partisan film pitches a number of principled Davids against this gammon-faced, lizard-eyed, overcombed Goliath. The story begins in 2006, when Trump first set his sights on the Menie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's Bond number 23, and if you were to suggest to me that it was the best of the lot, I might very well agree with you. This is a terrific James Bond movie, thoughtfully written, shrewdly cast and taking stock of everything that the 50-year-old franchise has come to mean. But even if it wasn't a Bond film, it would still be darn good.In this year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, it's also surprisingly and rather touchingly British, right down to Adele's stridently Bassey-esque theme tune. In a staggering feat of cross-marketing, they even got the Queen to appear in that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From 10pm last night to around 11.40, the BBC did what no other broadcaster in the world would have the stomach for. It turned its guns with maximum lethalness on itself. The result was extraordinary television. “Crisis at the BBC,” chimed News at Ten, “as one flagship of its journalism investigates another.” (The opportunity to visualise the scenario with Play School graphics was for once passed up.) By the time Newsnight kicked in at the bottom of the hour, Jeremy Paxman was deploying a poker face to flag a story about his immediate boss. “The Newsnight editor incidentally had nothing to do Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If Grizzly Bear’s name is unfamiliar to you, you’ll certainly know some of the indie-folk bands they’ve influenced. These include Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, two of music’s more unlikely recent successes. Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear never seemed to want that mass appeal. This autumn they followed 2009’s melodic Vecktamist with the rather more difficult Shields, whose songs suggested they might sound better live. Last night a 5000-strong crowd at the Brixton Academy was hoping so.The audience may not quite have been hipsters but most were modish, educated-looking youngish men and women. By the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While it’s not unusual for an imported television show to have been downloaded, discussed and dissected at length long in advance of of its UK transmission date, HBO’s Girls is even harder than most to approach with an open mind. Depending on which publications you read, you may already be aware that the show is many things: racist, classist, realistic, unrealistic, hilarious, overrated, written by one of the best and brightest young female writers, written by an overprivileged egomaniac. The show won an Emmy this year for outstanding casting for a comedy series (and was nominated for several Read more ...
bruce.dessau
We currently seem to be awash with rockumentaries. The Rolling Stones have yet another retrospective out, while Friday night on BBC Four would not be complete without dusting off the back catalogue of some mid-table band once adored by some nice middle-aged folk unable to find a babysitter. Status Quo fare better than a BBC Four slot, if less well than Jagger & co's la-di-da London Film Festival airing, with their very own doc, Hello Quo, enjoying a brief cinema release before coming out on DVD.While Quo might not have the cachet of the Stones, they do have a definite niche. Welcome to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As the London Film Festival finishes for another year, this study of the strain an ageing father’s decline puts on his daughter’s love will stay with me as much as anything. It’s Uruguayan director Rodrigo Pla’s third time at the LFF, but only The Zone (2007), his thriller about a young working-class robber trapped in a Mexican gated community after a murder, has found any sort of UK audience. The Delay confirms he’s a major talent whose films demand automatic release.The first thing we see is Maria (Roxana Blanco) washing her naked father Agustin (Carlos Villarino) in the shower, a moment of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Chilly Gonzales is a self-mythologising huckster, a throwback to a vaudevillian tradition of entertainer. He’s had enormous success producing the likes of Feist, is in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest solo piano concert (over 27 hours), and starred in the "existential sports movie" Ivory Tower as the inventor of “jazz chess”. His early albums were a crashed-up mélange of funk, electronic, rap and lounge, but his biggest success was a curveball of an album, Solo Piano (2004), a set of introverted Satie-influenced pieces. In a pop world where even playing keyboards Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Going to the movies will never be quite the same again, as the Victoria & Albert illuminates the work of the costume designers for anybody who has ever been seduced by the world of the cinema, which I guess means all of us. This anthology is a trip down memory lane, from Charlie Chaplin’s tramp to John Wayne’s cowboys and gunslingers. And we’re brought bang up to date with Keira Knightly’s green evening gown from Atonement, a ball gown from Anna Karenina, and then into digital with Avatar – a complex technique called motion capture – and animation.There are three chapters: Deconstruction Read more ...