Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street is such a quintessential rock epic that it ought to be added to the list of things they throw in for free on Desert Island Discs. Defying the old adage that all double albums would be vastly improved by being boiled down into a single one, Exile is such an astounding feast of blues, gospel, boogie, country and flat-out rock that it feels as if it ought to have been a triple album instead. And guess what - now it is, thanks to Polydor's new reissue which arrives with an extra disc of Exile-related material mysteriously lifted from the vaults 38 years Read more ...
howard.male
“Just drop the wisecracks for one minute, will you!” snaps George Alan O'Dowd’s father, played with craggy authority by Francis Magee. And he has a point. The snide remarks and oh-so-gay repartee come so thick and fast in this BBC drama that it is hard to see writer Tony Basgallop’s screenplay as a realistic recreation of the world of Steve Strange, Marilyn, Culture Club drummer Jon Moss and our George. When this waspish crowd fire coruscating dialogue at one another it's as if they are channelling Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.We all know that our George is Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
In the New York City Ballet’s grand tradition of ambitious festivals of new work, its current offering, Architecture of Dance, is a big, ambitious deal: seven new ballets; four of them to commissioned scores; five sporting sets by the famed architect Santiago Calatrava. Three of the works are by the men who are arguably the most exciting ballet-makers in the world right now: Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. In New York, the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer McGregor is the least-known of that trio - this is his first commission for an American company, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Andy Hamilton from his frequent (and very droll) appearances on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz on television and radio, but he is also a prolific writer. His writing credits could take up the whole of this review, but a brief CV includes Not the Nine O’Clock News, Drop the Dead Donkey, Old Harry’s Game and, most recently, the equally excellent Outnumbered on BBC One, which he co-writes with Guy Jenkin. But now, with Hat of Doom, he is going back to where he started in comedy and doing a stand-up tour.He gets the measure of his audience straight Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"We need to inform you officially. Mr Walter, you died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss." It comes as no great surprise to learn that Michel van der Aa’s opera After Life is based on a Japanese film. The Borgesian hyper-real scenario, the no-place location and meditative pacing all point, or rather - rejecting anything so crass - bow respectfully to their original source. Adopting the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film of the same name, Van der Aa has created a multimedia opera that both asks and answers the question: if you could take only one memory with you after death, what would it be Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, though in a far more respectful, design-conscious way: Modernism worked in theory but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the hottest tickets at this year's Brighton festival is Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi accompanied by live soundtrack performance from the Philip Glass Ensemble. Sold out for weeks beforehand, there are touts outside but most of the middle-aged Bohemian audience seem to have bought their tickets well in advance. The reason it's such a draw is that Koyaanisqatsi is a cult whose enthusiasts are multifarious.To the classical modernist it's a masterpiece of post-serialist synthesizer composition, meticulously synchronized to startling imagery. To the ecologically minded it's a Read more ...
fisun.guner
When Rembrandt painted his 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch, he must have expected to live out his days in the style befitting a great artist. Yet he was soon to face financial ruin. In attempting to understand why, Peter Greenaway and has come up with a speculative tale involving a convoluted plot to ruin Rembrandt’s reputation by those he had painted. Greenaway recreates a visual experience akin to a Rembrandt painting, and Martin Freeman puts in a solid performance as the artist in sweary, pugnacious mode. There’s an uncanny resemblance, too. But even for a conspiracy thriller as arty Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A field of sunflowers hang their heads, as though in shame or sorrow, to the deep thrum of a single chord in the film's opening shot, at once beautiful and threatening. But that is about the only breath of fresh air in the whole of the movie. Set on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War, it proceeds for the rest of its duration to trap us, along with four terrified young Israeli soldiers, inside the confines of their tank, a monstrous apparition fetid with stale cigarette smoke, sweat and blood and a fifth character in its own right.It sounds like the recipe for a stage play, even a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“All over the world children are safe – but not here, not on my ship.” Despite its wild pack of homeless children, a flesh-eating crocodile and some of the most gut-punching depictions of parental grief in all literature, J M Barrie’s Peter Pan has somehow been consigned to the theatrical remainders bin, its old-fashioned sentimentality acceptable really only at Christmas, or in pantomime form. David Greig’s new adaptation for the National Theatre of Scotland celebrates the author’s anniversary year by wrenching the story out of the lace-trimmed Edwardian nursery, and bringing it squealing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“You pay money I be funny?” There are times in stand-up when it seems the wrong kind of transaction has taken place. A comedian brings a warped vision of the world to a paying public. He – and the weirder ones are always a he – parade neurosis, dysfunction and fixation that, in the normal scheme of things, they really ought to be working through every week with a psychotherapeutic professional at whatever the hourly rate over however many years. But if you fixed the warp, you’d kill the laughter. So yes, as Hans Teeuwen summed up neatly in the voice of a Filipino table dancer, we pay Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made for a more than usually vulnerable sense of British nationhood: an apt time indeed for the UK release of Triomf, a brutal South African parable about political prejudice, social intolerance, and above all the fear of the new.Set in the days leading up to South Africa’s first free elections of 1994, Michael Raeburn’s film yokes the story of a nation’s Read more ...