Reviews
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of sport about at the minute, and those of us who get off on it are filling our boots. So it’s perhaps not the ideal moment to release a sporting documentary, however rousing, however laudable, especially one about that most unOlympic of team games, US football. If Undefeated makes a legitimate claim on the attention, it’s because it is all about legacy, that ubiquitous buzz word of London 2012.The drama of this improving documentary unfolds in a working-class area of North Memphis, Tennessee, which has entered a downward spiral after the closure of the local industrial plant. Read more ...
charlotte.gardner
What better work for Harry Bicket and The English Concert to perform at the Proms than Bach's joyous Mass in B Minor. Joyous firstly because of the music itself, with its vast stylistic and emotional range. Joyous secondly because, despite the intense scholarship to which Bach and his music have been subjected over the years, its genesis remains unusually shrouded in mystery for such a major work.While it seems likely that Bach viewed the work as a summation and climax of his life's music, that's about as much as we can guess. There's no evidence to suggest that he performed it as a whole Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Julien Temple’s new documentary is a timely accompaniment to the London Olympics. While the Games casts a spotlight on the capital, the film offers a wondrously dense and evocative, warts-and-all portrait of the city.And oddly enough, it has echoes of the Olympic opening ceremony. Just as Danny Boyle used live spectacle, clips and music to celebrate the city’s enviable cosmopolitanism, so Temple draws on a treasure trove of archive material and his own deep familiarity with British music to present the complex story behind that multiculturalism.In essence, this is a history of London from the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens’s new adaptation, A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has it in abundance (as well of course as a dead bee, a live rat, three beer cans and 20-odd metres of model train-track). When you can persuade an audience to stay behind after the curtain-call for a mini maths tutorial you’re doing something right; when you can reduce them to tears with it you’re doing something miraculous.Christopher (Luke Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Plenty of great films have been made about old age, about the humiliations, emotions, fragilities and joys of the end of life. Wild Strawberries, Harold and Maude, Venus, Driving Miss Daisy, even Pixar’s Up probably has a claim on this category, but Asia, with its regard for the elderly, has always had a special cinematic affinity for the subject. Following in the path of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, A Simple Life explores and exposes with infinite delicacy the relationship between an ageing Hong Kong servant and her employer.Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) has worked for the same family for 40 years, bringing up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What do you do after nine series celebrating the cooking and eating of food? You make another, charting the effort to lose some of the weight gained. This time out, the bike-riding Si King and David Myers are still eating and travelling, but trying to adjust what they put in their mouths, to make it less calorie-tastic. Some exercise was on the menu too. As was selling copies of the tie-in book.King and Myers are agreeable enough in small doses – and ought to know how to be after their careers in TV and film production which preceded their transformation into the Hairy Bikers. Their banter is Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Diamanda Galas is a woman who once wrote a book called Sh*t of God and whose avant-garde screeching on subjects like AIDS and schizophrenia frequently takes gothic into an area where it could scare bats. Her CV includes stints as a research scientist, prostitute and drug addict. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t normally seen in context. But then there aren’t many line-ups quite like Antony Hegerty’s 2012 Meltdown, where for a month dissident singers rub shoulders with twilight artists. In fact, on a bill also including the likes of Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Marc Almond, Galas seems amongst peers Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Another day at the Proms, another English choral masterpiece. Last night it came courtesy of the newly formed BBC Proms Youth Choir – a moveable feast of an ensemble that will bring together different youth choirs from across the UK over the next three years. I can’t imagine a more apt work to inaugurate the project than Tippett’s bravely painful meditation on human cruelty and capacity for endurance, A Child of Our Time. Framed intelligently within a collage of 20th-century American styles it offered a hopeful vision of the future, both musically and philosophically.Trained by Simon Halsey, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not usually a good sign when the second series takes two years to materialise. Vexed , a comedy drama with corpses, took its first bow a couple of years ago. It offered Toby Stephens as DI Jack Armstrong, a detective from the old school who’s rather more mouth than trousers. There can’t have been much confidence in it back then: August is the cruellest month for fresh television content when the target audience is generally off on its hols.The drama department may have eventually given it this second run around the paddock, but the schedulers continue to lack confidence in the finished Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
FRIDAY 27 JULY Whatever happened to roughing it? Camp Bestival is, famously, more an upmarket middle England fete than a festival in the Hawkwind-play-Stonehenge sense but, still, why would anyone queue two and a half hours for the “Posh Wash” showers? Barring a below-waist hygiene disaster, surely Wet Wipes and water are sufficient for a weekend? Apparently for many, many Camp Bestivalers, like global travellers who insist on starting their day with toast and cornflakes whether they’re in Surrey or Outer Mongolia, showering is a necessity worth wasting a large chunk of the day over. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Philadelphia, Here I Come! ends in its Donmar invocation with the roar of a plane taking off, which only amplifies one’s sense that the show has taken some while to take wing. Markedly better after the interval than during an abrasive first half, the director Lindsey Turner’s determinedly unsentimental take on Brian Friel’s breakthrough 1964 play comes at a price, and some may wonder whether the (very real) pay-off is worth the often snarky ride getting there.The impulse behind Turner’s approach is in every way sound: to jettison the potential cuteness inherent in the play’s celebrated Read more ...