Reviews
ash.smyth
He trudges about in the snow somewhere. He cooks. He sleeps. He chops wood and saws branches. He reads. He looks like Darwin. He makes hot drinks. He does not do spring cleaning.This is a more-or-less complete synopsis of Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea, a “study” (I think is the correct technical term) of some bloke, somewhere, living in the wilderness, who clearly does not hold down a day-job.He takes a shower.It’s shot on old cameras – in black and white, naturally – for the flickery, old-fashioned look, and in that arty thin-screen ratio. All terribly prize-winny and Jim Jarmusch, of course Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best playwrights have an antenna-like ability to pick up, and respond to, the new conflicts and fault lines that appear in society. Over the past five or so years, the antagonism between the baby-boomer generation, who are now parents with everything, and their kids, who have nothing but debts, has increasingly intensified. And no play articulates this conflict better than Mike Bartlett’s latest, which opened last night, in a production starring Victoria Hamilton and Claire Foy.The curtain comes up on a pair of contrasting English brothers, one young and hippyish (Kenneth) and the other Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”There’s something about da Mosto that makes TV producers come over all unnecessary. In their view there is no one more ruggedly handsome and intrinsically Italian than he. Thus, in Shakespeare in Italy, if he wasn’t captured driving his red Alfa Romeo down country Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Atmosphère…atmosphère,” the tart played by Arletty barks at her boyfriend-pimp on a canal bridge in Marcel Carné’s 1938 Hôtel du Nord. She was furious with him for wanting to go fishing for a change of ambience, but the famous line – which later prompted the star to launch a perfume called Atmosphère for charity – might have been screenwriter Henri Jeanson’s insider dig at Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows), which had been released to rapturous acclaim and huge business earlier in the year. Unfolding on the dank, fogbound streets and jetties of charcoal-smudged Le Havre – and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ah, Koko, the old Camden Palace, another of London’s lovely venues, over 100 years old, all done up in red with gold gilt, and two layers of balcony boxes intact. It’s easy, as a regular gig-goer, to become oblivious to these heritage British venues but they are truly wonderful, full of personality that dozens of airport-like civic halls and sports arenas across the Americas can never muster. It’s not surprising that foreign bands adore playing such old variety theatres and, judging from their wide grins, Quantic’s Combo Barbaro, from Colombia, appear to be revelling in their environs.It Read more ...
william.ward
There has long been a conviction in Italian drama circles that there exists a “Special Relationship” between themselves and il Bardo di Stratford: something to do with the complexities of Elizabethan English syntax and the unusual amount of words of Italian that Shakespeare appropriated from the dominant European language(s) of theatre of his day.Indeed, going to almost any contemporary production of Italian theatre (for anyone raised on the English language canon and its main schools of interpretation), is to hit a very hard wall of cultural dissonance. We go for grades of naturalism; our Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Someone came all the way from Saskatchewan to see New Order in Brixton last night, which is either a measure of the esteem in which the band is held or an indication that someone had a pile of Air Miles to get rid of. Judging by the positively rapturous cheers that went up as Bernard Sumner ambled onstage for the first London date of their first tour in six years, it must surely be the former.This is a slight rejigged reformation. Stephen Morris on drums and his wife Gillian Gilbert on keyboards are present and correct, while extra guitarist Phil Cunningham adds some rhythmic ballast. But Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I have no idea why the original title of this fine first feature from Frenchwoman Alix Delaporte has been changed, from Angèle and Tony to the current one. Apart from the pointlessness, it also suggests the wrong tone entirely, since Angèle is certainly no angel.The film’s first scene sees Angèle (Clotilde Hesme) having sex against a wall, in a public space in broad daylight, with a young man we will never see again. The brashness is accompanied by a business-like ennui; her payment, rather fantastically, is an action man: yes, the toy.This twisted transaction sums the woman up. The toy is a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Two more contrasting pianists than Yuja Wang and Martin Helmchen would be hard to find. To move within 24 hours from the glittering assault of Wang’s technique to the restrained, almost introverted, Helmchen is an exercise in extremes, and one that left me yearning, Goldilocks-style, for a soloist neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. Dvořák’s Piano Concerto may have been a sober affair, but the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski bid farewell to their Southbank season in a blaze of Central European passion and music by Suk and Janáček.Anyone heading to Glyndebourne Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of the most colourfully explosive playing I've heard for ages. A good deal of excitement comes from the fact that Wang is a pianist that plays with her whole body. One gets as much of a thrill from watching the extraordinary lever activity of her feet, which must navigate pedals and five-inch heels simultaneously, as one can from her spidery hand Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton is a very funny man, as anybody who watches Have I Got New For You will know. But fans of that programme will find his latest live show, billed as his return to stand-up, which he started doing 30 years ago, a very different experience. First thing to report is that it's not really stand-up, more an autobiographical run-through of his life, using jokes, songs and sketches, aided by some chums from his improv group Paul Merton's Strolling Players.The players – Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson and Suki Webster, his wife – are, like Merton, dressed in pale grey suits, and introduce him Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The sun shines - a LOT - in the new Zac Efron film, which seems appropriate to a celluloid landscape shaded with loss and grief that puts such aspects of the human condition to one side in favour of the sequence of pretty-as-a-postcard images on which Scott Hicks's direction alights before too very long. Rife with portentous voiceovers on such topics as guardian angels, fate, and moving from darkness through to light, the film may appeal to rain-drenched spectators who can go on holiday simply by feasting on the visuals here; others may yearn for those halcyon days before Efron got all Read more ...