Reviews
Sarah Kent
Oh yes, I remember it well. Luise Kimme, a German sculptor who shared my flat in the early 1970s, used to buy plaster copies of Michelangelo’s David, paint them garish colours and give them to friend as presents. More a conceptualist than a lover of kitsch, I meanwhile set projects for my students requiring them to photograph every item of clothing in their wardrobes or to empty their bags and present the contents as self-portraits.Ideas like these were in the air – part of the zeitgeist – and most of us moved on to other things; but German artist Hans-Peter Feldman spent the next 40 years Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Nothing tests an artist’s mettle more severely than having to negotiate a full-blown case of tech-horror. Half way through the third number last night, a particularly sweet version of “Summer Morning Rain“, an ear-scorching sonic car crash brought everything skidding to a decidedly ugly halt. Simone Felice leapt from his chair like a scalded cat and muttered something about lawyers. For a moment I thought he was actually going to scarper. And it had all started so well.Formerly of The Felice Brothers and The Duke & The King, on record Felice is in the process of shedding musical skins, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any shade you want, as long as it’s dark. Songs like “Extinguish Me”, "Deathmental”, “Mr Gaunt Pt 1000” meant last night wasn’t going to be defined by uplifting toe tappers. On album, Soap & Skin’s music is desolate, emotive and turbulent. The songs are tremendously affecting, with a touching intimacy. But live, too few heights were scaled.I wanted to love this. Unequivocally. The recent Narrow and 2009’s Lovetune For Vacuum are tremendous albums. And that is where the problem lies. This concert opened with Narrow’s “Deathmental”. On record, its crashing cacophony fuses the industrial Read more ...
howard.male
I’ve long held the belief that much of what is wrong with the human race stems directly or indirectly from religion. But while this subject has had something of a renaissance in recent years, thanks to the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the absolutely central story of the global banishment of the Goddess - in all her many forms - has largely remained untold. So it was with some excitement that I sat down to watch the first instalment of this three-part documentary series.Historian Bettany Hughes' ebullience about her subject was immediately palpable. In the opening minutes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’ve seen a few American film and TV actresses grace the West End stage with surprising potency, but no one surely will surpass Laurie Metcalf for profound emotional truth-telling in Eugene O’Neill’s shattering family drama, given an unbeatably cast new production in London’s West End. Metcalf's by no means famous over here now, so long after her brilliant stint in Roseanne Barr's Nineties sitcom, but this is one of those performances you won't forget, up there in the Vanessa Redgrave class.The play, set exactly a century ago, famously portrays O’Neill’s own family, so much so that he would Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The Gospel of Us is a film about remembering. It is based on and was filmed at The Passion of Port Talbot, Michael Sheen’s triumphant theatre-event that took over his home town in south Wales to retell the Easter story this time last year. Writer Owen Sheers has novelised The Passion as The Gospel of Us. Continuing the chain of collaboration and adaptation, director Dave McKean has taken this title and managed the incredible dual task of producing a lasting memorial to the incredible events of that weekend while also making a film that stands in its own right as part of the pantheon that Read more ...
Marcus O'Dair and Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Sufjan Stevens is a singer-songwriter of startling scope, one minute releasing a record dedicated to the state of Illinois, the next a five-disc Christmas box set or an album for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Bryce Dessner is the guitarist in indie rock act The National, but also plays semi-improvised avant-folk with Clogs and works with leading classical ensembles like Kronos Quartet and Bang On A Can.Composer Nico Muhly counts among his collaborators both symphony orchestras and the likes of Bjork, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Antony and the Johnsons. He’s written soundtracks and operas Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspected that Julian Fellowes' Titanic (ITV1) would improve as it went along, but it hasn't. Sunday night's third episode churned along monotonously, listlessly keeping tabs on a list of characters who became less interesting the more you saw of them. We got a bit more of Italian waiter Paolo Sandrini and his instant undying love (just add water) for lady's maid Annie Desmond, plus the entirely spurious appearance of Latvian terrorist Peter Piatkow. Supposedly he'd been at the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911, but dropping him onto the Titanic from a great height made it seem as if Fellowes Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Cher Lloyd first appeared aged 16 on The X Factor with a storming cover of an unofficial bootleg version of “Turn My Swag On” - a song that peaked at just number 48 on the UK singles charts. Knowing so much about music at such a young age set her apart from the entire competition, and it’s no surprise that her debut album Sticks + Stones is the most feverish and bold set that anyone from the show has yet produced. Some 18 months after that first appearance, the singer headlined her first London show at a 2,500-capacity venue. Keeping it relatively intimate served a little too much as Read more ...
ash.smyth
As a prelude to last night’s John Sergeant Perspectives doco, I made a note of the four things I thought I knew about Spike Milligan. He was the writer and star of the Goon Show, on which my brothers and I were weaned (the grammar of the humour being obvious even to 10-year-olds, but the subject matter almost totally wasted); he was the author of a decreasingly-witty shelf of literary parodies; he once appeared on Paul Merton’s Room 101 and put his own home in the sin-bin (an early twinge of startled sympathy, there); and then his famously brilliant epitaph – “I told you I was ill” – Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The opening credits of US television’s latest watercooler export Homeland have proved to be one of the critically lauded show’s few divisive elements, yet also encapsulate what could be most interesting about it. The sequence – a fragmented, arguably messy blend of real newsreel clips, stylised monochrome footage, anti-terrorism soundbites and the odd persecutory whisper – isn’t really about national security or post-9/11 America, but about psychological illness. Love it or loathe it, it evokes the troubled mind of our de facto heroine Carrie (Claire Danes) more effectively than any moment in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like an adrenalin injection straight to the heart of a flagging horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods is fresh, funny and teeming with deliciously nasty surprises which - have no fear - will not be revealed to you here. Although it’s helmed by first-time director Drew Goddard (the Cloverfield scribe and co-producer of Lost and Alias), for many the key name attached to The Cabin in the Woods will be Joss Whedon, the film’s co-writer and producer. Whedon is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on which Goddard also worked as a writer), Firefly and the lesser but still impressively ambitious Read more ...