Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Low don’t really look as though they’re given to ostentatious display. With their black shirts, polished footwear and sensible haircuts, they could be waiting staff in a formal restaurant. One with a lot of dark wood and banquettes. The Hendrix-like squall that preceded last night’s set opener “Nothing But Heart” quickly subsided. These flashes are enough to show how intensely Low’s hidden fires burn.On “Drugs”, Sparhawk sang “I was a child, I was on fire, I stayed alive while all else died”. The fundamental tension at the heart of Low is a battle between intensity and their self-defined Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The V&A has played a blinder. This extraordinary, exciting and unexpected exhibition provides endless trips down memory lane for many and will be a revelation for others. Ignore the clunky title, moving us from the postwar Olympics of 1948 to Olympic year 2012, and just go.The anthology ranges from the Apple Mac – British-born designer Jonathan Ive – to the Mini (main picture), launched in 1959 by Smyrna-born Sir Alex Issigonis. And these symbolise the story that is implicit in the narrative, which is the vanishing act of industry, of actually making things: Apple Macs made in the Read more ...
Andrew Perry
Ever since he walked out on the Sex Pistols in January ’78, John Lydon’s music has divided opinion. In the shadow of reductive three-chord punk, his first incarnation of Public Image Ltd was fabulously exploratory and musical, blending fathoms-deep reggae bass, Krautrock and disco into its gnarly, alienated soundworld. After that line-up fragmented, he has touched on much else besides – electro, heavy metal, house, even forward-looking, upscale pop – never settling long enough in one parish to unite critical or popular consensus.What must now finally be beyond dispute is that the line-up he Read more ...
howard.male
What is it with these scientists? Two spanking-new child-sized robots stand opposite each other in a room, talking. Their designer proclaims with barely concealed pride, “I don’t know which one is going to speak first.” In fact he says this twice, as if this very fact is proof that these bipedal assemblages are on the cusp, or have even reached some kind of sentient intelligence - rather than simply being mildly amazing, mildly amusing mimics of sentient intelligence. However, the banal reality of these chatty contraptions is that they have randomness programmed into them, just as dice Read more ...
judith.flanders
An apocryphal story tells of an awful theatrical adaptation of the story of Anne Frank. When the Nazis arrive to search the house where the family are in hiding, an enraged theatre-goer shouts, “She’s in the attic!” Well, I didn’t quite point Anna Karenina to the train station, but the thought crossed my mind.Boris Eifman has always divided the critics. Western audiences tend to respond the way they do to car crashes: they are appalled, but find it hard to look away. Russians, meanwhile, virtually stand on their seats and scream for more. Eifman, who since 1977 has run his own company in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's about as close to a spiritual awakening as I’ve had in my entire life,” said Lionel Richie. He was standing close to the unmarked grave of his great-grandfather, in the pauper’s section of an overgrown Chattanooga cemetery. Richie began the search for the man he’d discovered was called John Louis Brown thinking he was on the trail of a scoundrel. He ended it discovering Brown was a former slave who had become a pioneer of the American civil rights movement. Throughout the programme, Richie wasn’t given to emotional displays and wasn’t verbose. His usual comment as each discovery was Read more ...
fisun.guner
How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien Hirst, who some now imagine has been conning us all for years, but of the execrable Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga must be “exposed”! For is pap in pop really any lesser crime than art pap? You might think it is, even though, through the Nineties, both Britpop and Britart bobbed along on the crest of a Cool Britannia wave. They woz soulmates.We don’t expect Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite being called Roger Brown, the protagonist of Morten Tyldum's wickedly stylish and knowing thriller (adapted from Jo Nesbø's bestseller) is Norwegian, and earns himself a comfortable living as a corporate headhunter. Prowling the coolly minimalist boardrooms and restaurants of a seemingly recession-proof Scandinavia, Brown (Aksel Hennie) tracks his fat-cat candidates with smarmy knowingness, congratulating himself on his mastery of his own private game.Yet for all his oily skills, Roger is also living way beyond his means, and has developed a lucrative sideline as an art thief to boost Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Gergiev’s second Cardiff concert was thematically linked to his first. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony shares with Parsifal a certain kind of solipsistic religiosity that talks about God in the way some people talk about their ancestors. We don’t really need them any more, but they make us feel important. One approaches both works with mixed feelings (some, with actual distaste). But in the end one usually has to admit: art conquers, and God is not (altogether) mocked.Mahler, it can’t be denied, isn’t quite Wagner. The spiritual and intellectual complexity of Parsifal bypasses the fake religion (or Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some gorgeous costumes get paraded about to little effect in Mirror Mirror, the latest in a series of Julia Roberts star vehicles to make one wonder whether this A-list thesp's management is actually out to torpedo her career. A terrific actress in material that actually asks something of her, Roberts looks irritated by her latest assignment in a wan Snow White rewrite, and who can blame her? British viewers may be less forgiving of the way the Oscar-winner possessed of the zillion-watt smile slaloms between accents, as if not entirely sure where her vowels should alight. Others may pass the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It must have been a toss-up for the BBC whether to scrap Waking the Dead or Silent Witness, but evidently the latter won the race against extinction by a putrefying nose, probably attached to a hideously-charred corpse which may or may not have been raped but had been stabbed 47 times and bludgeoned with a... Funnily enough there was one a bit like that in this first episode of Series 15, along with an asphyxiated child and a man killed by knife and stun-gun.It's hard to fathom how murder most graphic and the disgusting perversions of serial killers have become such a staple of middle-brow TV Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A play of boundaries, limitations, barriers, one that gazes outwards while never crossing the threshold, Uncle Vanya is often betrayed by the physical space of major stagings. In a new production at Notting Hill’s The Print Room the audience find themselves trapped along with Vanya, Sonya and their dysfunctional family in a single room. Ranged around the four walls we crowd in upon the (in)action, waiting together with the characters for the rupture that will release the tension. This is Chekhov at his most intimate, and the truths that emerge are predictably painful, but also warm and Read more ...