Reviews
howard.male
The fact of the matter is that this young, supremely talented Brazilian singer-songwriter is no great performer. But is this an issue when the music she makes is so immersive and seductive in its own right? On record, her songs are like ragged collages held together by scraps of tape. They sound like they might dissipate or disintegrate at any moment were it not for the calm authority of her voice holding everything together. This is music that exudes sophistication. But not the easily faked sophistication of smooth-as-cream bossa nova. It’s a post-modern sophistication that credits the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This one sounds like a hard sell: a muted, taciturn, cautious film from Austria about a friendless boy in a young offenders’ institution who takes a job working for the municipal undertakers. Breathing (original title: Atmen) would appear at first glance modest in scope and gloomy in outlook. But whatever the odds stacked against it, this quiet, observational debut from Karl Markovics turns out to pack a discreetly powerful punch.The name may not be familiar, but the face will be: a few years back Markovics was the poker-faced lead in The Counterfeiters, which won the best foreign film at the Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
In Louis Theroux: Extreme Love, a film about the realities of looking after children with autism, a mother of twin girls from New Jersey confessed: “I just try and make them happy because, God forgive me, I don’t get a lot of enjoyment from them.” Meanwhile Josephine, the relentlessly cheery mother of 20-year-old Brian, remarked: “To be afraid of your child is a terrible thing.”Brian’s extreme autism had caused him to burn down the family home at the age of eight, and repeatedly attack his mother, pulling her hair out in clumps. On one occasion he tried to strangle her so she called the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a members-only bowling club, down a side street in a residential part of Glasgow I'd never visited before last night, Texan fiddle-player and songwriter Amanda Shires stood wearing the most magnificent pair of cowboy boots I had ever seen.They were a well-worn grey, decorated with the same f-shaped slots as her own instrument, and complete with giant silver buckles that made a satisfying jingle like heavy-duty sleigh bells when she stamped her feet hard enough to be her own backing track. They remind me of a shop sign I saw in Nashville once, offering "two free" when you bought one pair of Read more ...
ash.smyth
Footage of wiry East African men and women breaking the tape in marathons and distance track-events is now more or less synonymous with the highest achievements in top-level sport, and it won’t come as a surprise to those who’ve lived through more than a couple of cycles of the Olympic Games to be reminded that the medal-winners in the long-distance running events are no longer, generally speaking, from “round here”. The headline of Jerry Rothwell’s grass-roots feature documentary, though, is that, actually – at least for the last two decades or so – a disproportionate number of them don’t Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Looking at CCTV footage of a school hall in Cardiff through Adobe Flash Player in the corner of a webpage and listening to the attendant interference, bells, buzzes and bleeps might not sound like the cutting edge of theatre. But by the time National Theatre Wales’ tech wizard Tom Beardshaw closes the live stream of Tim Price’s electric new play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning with the school pupils and soldiers we have been watching taking their bow, this is exactly what the "audience" are convinced we have witnessed.NTW Director John E McGrath, having overseen one of the most radical Read more ...
geoff brown
A mischievous part of me firmly believes that from the mountain of dubious art works produced in the world since the 1980s, the most dubious of all have been the percussion concertos. I know I’m being somewhat harsh, for I’ve thrilled along with most audiences to James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – far and away the best piece ever premiered by Evelyn Glennie, instigator of this percussion avalanche. But these ears have also been witness to enough trivial and meretricious concoctions to feel at least some trepidation before the launch of another percussion world premiere.Having Colin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As far as Elizabeth Taylor was concerned, it was the movies that got small as her brand of sumptuous diva-ishness became almost more than even Hollywood could support. Her jewellery collection, however, grew ever more grandiose, and when it was auctioned last year it fetched a record-breaking $135m. One piece alone, the historic La Peregrina Pearl (which had been worn by a string of Spanish queens and by Mary Tudor), sold for more than 11 million bucks.Michael Waldman's shrewd and witty film craftily used this parade of Taylor's priceless baubles as an index of her triumphs and affections. Read more ...
josh.spero
I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself. The shame is that it's all a hoax, and not in the manner of Shovlin's earlier projects concerned with fictional people: the maths is cod, the belief absent - even the pauses for thought are artificial.The original covers of the Fontana series are distinctive - Vasarely-ish geometrical designs in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Religious mania is bad for your love life. In Enda Walsh’s revamped 1999 play — which has already been seen in Galway and New York, and opened in London last night — a 33-year-old man (played with immense conviction and enormous presence by Cillian Murphy) invites us inside his mind to explore the dark and dangerous caverns of religious enthusiasm and psychological collapse. Be warned: it is a strange, tormented and rather weird trip.Set in Inishfree, which the programme reminds us is an Irish town celebrated in WB Yeats’s 1892 peace-yearning poem, the play is a monologue which tells a Read more ...
ash.smyth
“I’m a doctor of psychology,” Pamela Stephenson began her Fame Report last night, the better to establish her intellectual credentials while taking our minds off her orange face and massive boobs. She said this from a balcony somewhere that looked very much like it might be in LA (tossing her platinum hair in the wind as she spoke), then she hopped in a cab to the West End – because you can do that if you’re famous – where, in between letting slip that she’d once been a fêted comedian and, more recently, a third-place finisher on Strictly Come Dancing, she giggled a lot about whatever red- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown. Then comes a phone call which, when he hears the name, the director refuses to take. The caller, we learn, is Tinseltown’s hottest hotshot producer, now fallen on lean times. A director needs a Read more ...