Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Robert Louis Stevenson's classic swashbuckler has been made into countless films and TV series in several languages, and has survived Muppet Treasure Island as well as an interstellar Disney animation called Treasure Planet. Pleasingly, Sky1's new version made a fine addition to the lineage, combining a shrewdly picked cast with lush production values while retaining much of the darkness and menace of Stevenson's novel.The opening scenes established an appropriate atmosphere of near-supernatural dread, as the crazed Billy Bones (David Harewood, pictured right) arrived at the Admiral Benbow Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We laughed. We cried. We cursed. We gulped. Not at fiction. But at fact. At the real world. The year's best theatre? Murdoch vs Watson. Thriller? The hunt for Osama. Horror? The Japan tsunami. Finest comedy? The Beeb's year long genuflection. Best opera/installation? The funeral of Kim Jong-Il. This was the year that reality trounced art.News channels thrived as their bulletins played out these teeth-janglers. Some were short explosive little numbers; others seemed determined to become five acters. Narratives were complex, characters unforgettable, visuals motley. The world mostly huddled Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was. There may be helicopters, webcams and Wi-Fi, and Dr Watson may be blogging rather than scratching away at the old pen and ink, but still the essence of what makes Holmes such an enduringly compelling fictional figure was evident in spades.The Read more ...
matilda.battersby
In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.In cinema I was most impressed by Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, a take on Michael Lewis’s book about baseball. I think it lives up to its reputation as the film of 2011. However, I must Read more ...
mark.hudson
2011 was a year when now was difficult to find. The YBA/heroic monetarist era was definitively over – though Tracey Emin was accorded a far better retrospective than she deserved at the Hayward (see image below right). Yet whatever will be replacing the dominant art trend of the last three decades, The British Art Show – a vast five yearly survey of cutting edge contemporary art – felt very much not the place to be looking for it. The work, mostly by artists a decade or so out of college, was bright, attractive and entertaining, but a touch callow, like good student work that strays little Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A slightly late arrival, this, but the fourth album from Richie Egan’s highly rated Irish electro-rockers has a calm, clear beauty well worth savouring in the early days of a new year. It's pop, but with a lemony twist, similar in its slightly skewed craftmanship to Egan's compatriots Villagers, although Jape - despite winning the Irish Choice Music Award in 2008 for third album Ritual - remain a much less celebrated proposition in the UK.It's hard to quite explain why, because Ocean Of Frequency is as lovely as it is accomplished. Aptly for an album fascinated by the connections between Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
graham.rickson
The most memorable evening I spent in 2011 was as a paying punter, not a critic, listening to incendiary readings of Sibelius’s Tapiola and Mahler’s sprawling Symphony no 7, given by an augmented Orchestra of Opera North in Leeds Town Hall last March. Conducted by Jac van Steen, the symphony sounded terrific, but couldn’t help seeming baggy and long-winded after a chilling performance of Sibelius's unsettling late masterpiece. I enjoyed Opera North’s flamboyant, ketchup-splattered Carmen, which director Daniel Kramer transposed to a trashy American trailer park. The company’s semi-staged, Read more ...
peter.quinn
2011 can only be described as a banner year for vocal jazz. Gretchen Parlato is blessed with one of the most mellifluous timbres in jazz, but it's her highly developed rhythmic concept that really marks her out. Like some of the great Brazilian singers, Parlato can make the bar line disappear. It helps that she's got a killing band, and together on The Lost and Found they perform the subtlest metrical shifts in the blink of an eye.Gretchen Parlato performs "How We Love" (excerpt) from The Lost and FoundTwo world-class UK singers, Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll, both released career-best Read more ...
judith.flanders
Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)By contrast, the Wellcome’s show of ex-voto panels from Mexico (main picture, above), the small thanks-offerings painted to record miraculous intercessions from the saints in the Read more ...