Reviews
anne.billson
They're back! Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (otherwise known as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) are once again smooching on a screen near you. I turned up one hour early for a showing of the new Twilight movie, and the damn thing was already sold out. Which suggests the film will do every bit as well as, if not better than, its predecessor, which made $383 million worldwide.Look on the bright side - maybe this will persuade studio executives they don't need to aim every single movie at adolescent males. The adolescent female market can be every bit as lucrative. What do young women want Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The last time I saw Gilberto Gil play he was performing high-energy reggae with an electric band. Last night, though, it was an autumnal, acoustic trio full of saudade, that Brazilian word that is somewhere between nostalgia, melancholy and homesickness. It made for a reflective, downbeat evening, but as there have been many Gilberto Gils recorded over 50 albums, we should at least be grateful that the cheesy Eighties funk style was left at home.Gil first became famous in the late Sixties as one of the architects of tropicalia, along with fellow musicians of the intelligentsia from Bahia Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Indecision takes the characters to the point of psychic collapse and beyond in Cock, the provocatively titled Mike Bartlett play that forsakes nudity for a far more troubling collective baring of the soul. Ben Whishaw is the name draw for a run that is already pretty well sold out, but James Macdonald's production is scathingly acted across the board; this is a play best seen with someone you fully trust.Whishaw plays John, the only properly named character in a play populated as well by M, W, and F - shorthand for their self-evident presences as Man, Woman, and Father, each of whom comes Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Who’d be a traffic warden, eh? The answer, it would seem, is any number of immigrants willing to be paid £7 an hour to be verbally abused, physically attacked and generally despised by the great British public. And Olly Lambert, writer-director of Channel 4’s well-made and informative Cutting Edge documentary, Confessions of a Traffic Warden, says that although his original intention was to find out about the people beneath the uniforms, what he actually discovered was the hair-trigger vileness of Londoners beneath a badly scuffed veneer of civilised behaviour. None of this will have Read more ...
sheila.johnston
If you stick with the Coen Brothers' new film until the end of the final credit crawl, you will notice the legend, in small print, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." I wouldn't be so sure: they certainly put their hero through the trials of Job. With a title like that, it ought to be a comedy, but the Coens customarily keep a protective, ironic distance from their fictional creations, and so you never really quite know where you stand with them. Still, A Serious Man may be their most personal, most revealing movie yet.It opens, disorientingly, in a lonely, snowbound Read more ...
David Nice
The Schnittke Festival kicked off on Sunday at the Royal College of Music with electric and bass guitars as part of the unwieldy ensemble. Lodged in the Royal Festival Hall last night, Vladimir Jurowski’s programming continued in the second concert with similar flair, but this time two 18th-century horns and two cors anglais were the odd ones out. We were back in 1764 and the early days of the symphony viewed through the prism of Joseph Haydn – every inch as much of an original as Wagner and Schnittke, who were to join him later, and just as able to bend the past to his own ends.So a Read more ...
mark.hudson
The National Gallery is on a roll. Having enjoyed the surprise hit of the autumn with The Sacred Made Real, an exhibition of 17th-century Spanish religious art, the gallery now makes its first foray into installation art with by far the grungiest work ever to cross its portals: The Hoerengracht, a walk-through portrayal of Amsterdam’s red light district by the American sculptors Ed and Nancy Kienholz.Entering the Sunley Room – a space normally reserved for rather prim art-historical displays – you find yourself amid clapboard back alleys littered with dead leaves and beer cans. Peering into Read more ...
fisun.guner
Nottingham Contemporary is Britain’s newest art gallery. Built deep into a sandstone cliff in the city’s oldest site, its sturdy, squat exterior is clad in scalloped gold and pale green panels. Resembling your granny’s old net curtains, the green pre-cast concrete is moulded with a pattern of 19th-century lace, paying homage to the city’s Victorian traditional industry.Inside, the four gallery spaces are irregular in shape: only one is in the shape of a modernist white cube, the others have angled walls, their forms following the site’s natural geography. Two of the galleries are devoted to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It sounded a dry subject and a dry title for Alan Bennett’s first play for five years - a fictional meeting between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W H Auden 25 years after they fell out, two old buggers, one furtive, the other extrovert. But at last night's premiere The Habit of Art proved an excruciatingly funny play, ribald, merciless, and as much about the bad habit of Theatre as that of the higher-toned Art. Nicholas Hytner has given it a wildly enjoyable production at the National Theatre that fields some epic comic performances in a bravura script.Wystan Auden was “in the imperative Read more ...
Anonymous
Slender limbs, intense eyes, and dressed entirely in black: if it wasn’t for the straightened blonde hair, Carla Bley could pass for a jazz Patti Smith. She is also, of course, one of the genre’s most acclaimed composer-arrangers, and her return to London is much anticipated. Before she plays a note, the septuagenarian Californian walks awkwardly, defiantly, to a microphone at the front of the stage.“We’re going to play something very simple,” she announces, before heading to the piano and picking out a melody: "Three Blind Mice". “You’ll hear all this in this next piece,” she continues, Read more ...
peter.quinn
As acts of musical funambulism go, a solo gig by a jazz singer ranks pretty high in the fearless stakes. Listening to Ian Shaw in the intimate surroundings of Pizza Express Jazz Club, without the safety net of bass or drums, you suddenly remember how thrilling it can be to hear songs that have long been absorbed into your consciousness being recast entirely anew.Shaw has never been one to plough a narrow artistic furrow, favouring instead an inclusiveness that draws from several stylistic wells. A superbly paced first set embraced everything from Joni Mitchell's limpid “River” to “Blues in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping anecdotes about Picasso with the painter’s biographer John Richardson, reminiscing about how Mae West used to sleep with two monkeys on her bed, and pointing out where Marilyn Monroe and Tallulah Bankhead used to live in New York.He’d give us their exact house numbers, he said, but he’d left his compendious address book behind. The sense of parody Read more ...