Reviews
Tim Cumming
Opening acts don’t always enjoy a full house, but at at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of a UK tour in support of Suzanne Vega and her acclaimed new album Flying with Angels, there was a warm and generous welcome for singer-songwriter Katherine Priddy’s opening five-song set, drawn from her first two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing, and featuring a preview from the third, These Frightening Machines, due in March.The new song is “Matches”, about the witch trials, but a springboard, too, to broader and wider concerns that persist and exist beyond historical time. They Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen. Like Malick, Bentley is scrutinising a small group of people living in a bygone era in a remote part of North America; Malick focused on the Texas panhandle, Bentley on small-town Idaho at the turn of the century. Here a logger called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) ekes out a tough, often isolated living, moving with the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ash (Riz Ahmed) is one of cinema’s capable men, the kind of monastically devoted pro made to be a hitman or getaway driver. David Fincher’s The Killer parodied the type with Michael Fassbender’s system-driven assassin, and from The Day of the Jackal to Drive, such men live or die by their method.
Ash’s gig is, though, intriguingly odd: he helps corporate whistleblowers with cold feet safely return evidence to employers, communicating via the Relay phone system for deaf callers, who type messages then spoken by operators, an old-school set-up firewalling him from detection. Ash is also versed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically supplanted by Israel’s seismic 1948 founding.
The Gaza War meant director Annemarie Jacir filmed under duress, with her original West Bank village set overrun by Jewish settlers and Jordan standing in, before a defiant return to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The war impacted Jacir in subtler ways, emotionally entailing a straightforward film shorn of levity or experiment. The result is a low-budget equivalent to David Lean, less interested in Lawrence of Read more ...
David Nice
Janáček described his nature-versus-humanity fable The Cunning Little Vixen as “a merry thing with a sad end”. In which case, the even stranger Makropulos Case is a chattery legal mystery with a transcendent end as the 337-year-old (437 in this update) protagonist decides life only has meaning within its natural span and rejects the formula she's come for.You don't feel the transcendence from director Katie Mitchell, who complicates an already wordy text with a whole new subplot where minor character Krista falls in love with Emilia Marty.Although the original play was also written by a Read more ...
Heather Neill
Perspectives on Shakespeare's tragedy have changed over the decades. As Nonso Anozie said when playing the title role for Cheek by Jowl in 2004, white actors once "concentrated on their perception of what a black man is". Laurence Olivier, whose 1964 performance in polished ebony make-up was once the gold standard for the part, famously observed black dock workers to learn their gait and mannerisms.Since the 1980s, as numerous actors of colour have tackled the role, the importance of Othello's race has shifted further from the centre of productions. At the National Theatre in 2013, Adrian Read more ...
Katie Colombus
After cancelling his Birmingham gig an hour before curtain-up due to illness, the anticipatory hype around whether Benson Boone’s London show at The O2 would actually go ahead was almost as electric as his infamous song. But a reassuring ping from the ’gram confirmed: it’s on. And indeed, it was.Two hours of rip-snorting kitsch-pop later, and any trace of illness or fatigue was well hidden. Somehow, Boone summoned the energy to bring full Bennie-style spectacle to a sold out arena in a show equal parts confetti-drenched musical dream and emo-tinged, power-grabbing balladry, delivered by a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on the book by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love is an unsettling dive into the disturbed psyche of Grace, played with mercurial brilliance by Jennifer Lawrence. Grace is a new mother still struggling to get accustomed to the demands of her baby, and with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), she has moved into the house that belonged to Jackson’s dead uncle, out in the remote backwoods of Montana.The plan is for Jackson to fix the place up, when he can get around to it. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, with Jackson’s parents living nearby Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Climb upon a bridge to far, go anywhere your heart desires.” The key phrase from the title track of Midlake’s sixth studio album conveys the perception that anything is within reach should an appropriate mind-set be attained. However, later on the album there are references to a “lion’s den” and “war within the valley of roselesss thorns,” a setting where “power and glory were in store.”It seems, then, that this is a realm where escaping to a place called “far” is necessary for self-protection. Midlake singer and frontman Eric Pulido has said of the album’s "The Calling" that the song “has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s so very different about Belfast and Glasgow, both of which I have visited in the last few weeks, compared to, say, Manchester or Birmingham. Sure, there’s the architecture and the accents, but it’s more than that. To find Glasgow's Citizen’s Theatre, I typed "Gorbals Street" into Google Maps. I looked down for a minute on a bus in Belfast, and when I looked up, the Falls Road had become the Shankhill Road, the (in)famous murals rather contrasting. For an Englishman, these places come freighted with a history of transgression, even insurrection, and, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During a false start to “Billy Don’t Fall”, on Sunday night at Birmingham’s iconic Town Hall, Sananda Maitreya took the opportunity to address the packed house before him. He noted that there’s now a King on the throne of England, an American Pope and that “all the white ladies have got big lips and big asses – so, it’s a long time since we were here last.”It certainly is an age since the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby headlined a UK tour. Twenty-three years, to be precise. In fact, for those who don’t remember that far back, he was once a global superstar to rival anyone who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
This five-parter by Rebecca Miller is essential viewing for any Martin Scorsese fan – and for anybody who wants to understand the process of movie-making, full stop. Miller has interviewed all the key figures from the director’s life, not just film luminaries but his family, his childhood friends, an ex-wife, the priest who inspired him.With no trace of sycophancy (her husband of 30 years is Scorsese collaborator Daniel Day-Lewis, who contributes astute insights to the mix), Miller moves through the phases of his career chronologically, with a keen eye for using exactly the right footage to Read more ...