Reviews
peter.quinn
A bad cover version can be a dangerous thing. Imagine, for example, that your first encounter with the brilliant Gershwins was Kiri Te Kanawa's egregious Kiri Sings Gershwin. This, potentially, could be so distressing that it might put you off George and Ira for life. In fact, it could put you off music for life. Rather than "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", Michael Bolton's typically understated take makes you want to throw yourself in. And then there's Sting's John Dowland tribute, Songs from the Labyrinth. This was released over two years ago, so there's a possibility that Dowland has Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Listening to Woodpigeon’s nuanced indie-folk, I looked around at the 300 or so strong crowd who had also chosen to spend the evening away from Peter Snow and his Swingometer. Some had their eyes closed, others were gently nodding, but mainly they were just smiling. And right then I’m sure they were thinking, as was I, that listening to these luxuriant Canadian harmonies was possibly the best way you could spend election night.Woodpigeon has become known for a sort of lush pastoral sound that sits somewhere between Belle and Sebastian and Sufjan Stevens. And if the latter were the main parties Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The last time Jack Cardiff went to Cannes, nobody recognised him; wearing his trademark trilby, he'd tell curious autograph hunters he used to be a stand-in for Frank Sinatra. In fact Cardiff's claim to fame was somewhat greater: his was the eye behind some of the most achingly beautiful images in all of cinema. Handsome, charismatic and sharp as a tack, with a bottomless fund of funny and revealing anecdotes, he's also a dream subject for a documentarian. Naturally no television company was prepared to fund a film about him.Consequently Cameraman The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff took its Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Chris Ryan and Andy McNab are the Pepsi and Coca Cola of gung-ho, modern SAS war fiction, a lucrative genre that these one-man brands have carved up so effectively between them that it would take a gate-crasher of Nick Clegg-like proportions to threaten their duopoly.Both men retain their pseudonymous existence, more for the self-publicising drama of it than for security reasons - although Ryan rather ludicrously asserts that his life would be at risk if his real identity was revealed. Literary critics aren’t that savage, surely.Admittedly I have never read any of Ryan’s books, although I did Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Definitely no standard biopic, Russian director Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half captures part of the life, and a great deal of the spirit, of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in a rare and rather brilliant gallimaufry of forms – from archive material (some of it skilfully doctored), via plentiful animation, to re-enactment scenes. It also catches the cultural milieu that formed the winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for literature, and the double city - Leningrad/St. Petersburg - of his birth.Brodsky was born there in 1940, and the film opens with the post-WWII return of his father, a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wonder of wonders - a really cracking triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night. The best of the year, by a country mile, and probably the best for several years: a top-notch beauty from Christopher Wheeldon, the love-it-or-loathe-it Marmite of Mats Ek’s Carmen, and in between a comely and reverberant new ballet from a very young Royal Ballet choreographer who looks set to go places.Liam Scarlett is only 24 but has spent long enough in his schooldays choreographing feverishly to count as an alumnus of best Royal Ballet values. Like Wheeldon, he sculpts graceful, organically flowing balletic Read more ...
David Nice
Poland's most imaginative composer after Chopin, and his natural heir in the realm of sensual reverie, certainly knew how to yoke a full orchestra to his dreams and fantasies. Yet the work by Szymanowski I've most longed to hear in concert is the three-movement Mythes for violin and piano. A recording of it by Kaja Danczowska and the great Krystian Zimerman quickly acquired cult status in the 1980s. So it seemed like a heaven-sent gift to hear it live in the hands of an even more rounded violinist, young Norwegian Henning Kraggerud, and another maverick Polish pianist, Piotr Anderszewski. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Why make a documentary about Italia 90? It’s just another tournament that England didn’t win, isn't it? If the World Cup hosted by Italy in 1990 deserves exhumation, it’s for its trickle-down impact on football as we live and breathe it now. Hence the subtitle that won't make it onto the billboard outside cinemas: The Inside Story of a World Cup that Changed Our Footballing Nation Forever.This is the film of the book of the tournament which has a lot to answer for. Gazza cried, Pavarotti opened his lungs, and football became irreversibly commoditised. Attending as a reporter for the freshly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Idris Elba’s screen career is going so swimmingly that you wonder what can have tempted him back to Blighty. Probably not the weather, since the former denizen of Canning Town now lives in Florida, and is in perpetual demand Stateside thanks to the extreme hotness engendered by his portrayal of Russell “Stringer” Bell in The Wire. He was in the American version of The Office, co-starred with Beyoncé in Obsessed, has several movies in production and will executive-produce a new legal drama series for NBC.So, Idris Elba, where did it all go wrong? I jest, of course. Slightly. Luther is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Since the passing of Luciano Pavarotti, there’s been a gigantic hole for a tenor of gold-plated opera chops and the gift of communication, and Rolando Villazón - young as he is, at only 38 - already appears to have sealed that gap up effortlessly. His stint as judge on the lamentable Popstar to Operastar on ITV recently left everyone tarnished but him. Villazón not only has a dazzling voice and uniquely electric hair, but sports about on the platform with a puppyish vivacity that brings dead places to life around him and endears him widely. Roger Federer meets Groucho Marx, said my companion Read more ...
Anonymous
Eight hours of “improvised and experimental music” would not be on everyone’s list of Bank Holiday essentials, and the marathon programme that constitutes the first half of the two-day Freedom of The City festival could have proved daunting for even the free jazz faithful. That the experience turns out to be very far from gruelling is, then, in no small part thanks to the curators, among them such luminaries as Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost.One of the accusations frequently levelled at this type of music is that it all sounds the same, yet the eight acts offer an impressively diverse range of Read more ...
fisun.guner
I wondered how long it would be before Andy Warhol’s "15 minute" quote came up. From the whizzy, flash-bang opening credits I knew it wouldn’t be long. I was right: but less than seven minutes? Less than five? I didn’t time it, since I was still somewhat mesmerised by the sight of perky presenter Alastair Sooke doing a kind of disco-dancey, pointy-arm manoeuvre in front of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon during the intro. (Oh no, Alastair, I wanted to cry, you can’t out-cool Andy, so don’t even try.)Art critic TV presenters come in all sorts of guises these days. You can be scruffy, Read more ...