Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) has, he says, painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20. In the Sixties he was a major star of the British art scene. Now he’s reduced to making personalised video messages for fans (apparently he still has plenty), wearing a blue beret for an authentically artistic look. £149 a pop, £249 “if I sign”.This is prolific director Steven Soderbergh’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon (Mosaic, No Sudden Move, Full Circle) and they created it with McKellan and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You), who plays an art forger, specifically in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
1536, Ava Pickett’s debut play, is a tribute to women who won’t shut up, especially ones living precarious lives in Tudor England in the year of the title. But this is not really a period piece.Pickett’s clever conceit is to give her three female protagonists the swagger and F-words of modern-day young women living a few miles from Colchester. When they get over-excited it’s like listening to a multi-tracked Catherine Tate not being “bovvered”. Their vocabulary isn’t remotely archaic, neither are their concerns and some of their ideas, especially those pronounced loudly by Anna (Siena Kelly, Read more ...
James Saynor
If you seek a filmmaker to create the fine grain of 20th-century Europe at its most traumatised, you can’t do better than Hungary’s László Nemes. The textures of his grinding Holocaust movie, Son of Saul (2015), are hard to dispel from the mind. His new film is set in a broken Budapest a year after the failed uprising against communism in 1956, and anyone with even a folk memory of the 1950s will recognise the scruffy streets, weathered rooms and dilapidated lifestyle items of that time.Each corner of the screen is filled with décor, props and clothes that archive austerity –everything Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes operas – even immensely powerful ones – simply don’t make complete sense, and we can see why Dr Johnson dismissed the form as an “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Then again, that sounds fun, and also a fair description of much of Saint-Saëns’s Biblical blockbuster Samson et Dalila. At Covent Garden, in this comeback for Richard Jones’s 2022 production (with Benjamin Davis as revival director), the exotic parts certainly shine. None more so than the nuanced, heartfelt duo of SeokJong Baek as the love-struck Hebrew hero and Aigul Akhmetshina as his Philistine seducer. That’ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Francisco Zurbarán’s The Lamb of God (Agnus Dei), 1640 (main picture), must be the most compelling religious picture ever painted. Visually, it couldn’t be simpler; perhaps that’s why the image nails you to the spot. A lamb lies on a ledge with its feet tied together, awaiting slaughter. Instead of struggling, it remains absolutely still – as though resigned to its fate.A metaphor for the martyrdom of Christ, the lamb is far from being an abstraction, though. Zurbarán has painted its fleece with such exacting detail that you could almost plunge your fingers into its warm, woolly depths. Its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone who learned to love Bob Odenkirk from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (let alone his stints with Ben Stiller and Larry Sanders) was surely wrong-footed (but in a good way) when he appeared as a reclusive but lethal all-action dynamo in Nobody and Nobody 2. It was as if somebody had cast Harry Enfield as Ethan Hunt.In Normal, under the firm directorial hand of Billericay’s own Ben Wheatley, Odenkirk deftly extends his range a little further as Sheriff Ulysses Richardson. In a story Odenkirk penned with co-writer Derek Kolstad (who created the John Wick franchise and wrote both Nobody Read more ...
Robert Beale
There are three aspects of English National Opera’s most ambitious project to date in Manchester that demand attention.One is the work itself: Royce Vavrek and Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize winning Angel’s Bone, seen as an outstanding creative work of 10 years ago, now getting its UK premiere. The second is the artistic achievement of inter-city musical collaboration bringing it to life in Aviva Studios’ “warehouse” space, where boundary-breaking comes as standard. The third is the approach of director Kip Williams (whose UK opera debut this is), designer Marg Horwell and their team, offering it as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a notable case of nominative determinism, the 2025 film about a kabuki star, Kokuho – meaning “national treasure” – became just that in Japan, a box-office smash. The keening voices and ultra-stylised mannerisms of the genre are not staples of Western entertainment, so a three-hour feature film about a kabuki actor sounds like a tough proposition here. But the time is well spent and flies past.Kokuho’s storyline is the familiar one of the isolating life that supremely gifted artists face and the people they sacrifice along the way in their pursuit of perfection. Think virtually any biopic Read more ...
Liz Thomson
First date, last dance: Emmylou Harris, possessor of one of country-rock’s most beautiful and evocative voices, opened the British leg of her farewell tour on Monday with a generous show at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. It was, of course, sold out, the audience on the older side (it was notable how many guys needed to take a comfort break as time wore on!) and Emmylou herself acknowledging, as she briefly massaged her left wrist, that “I’m 79… arthritis.” But she stood – in her customary cowboy boots, shoulder-length silver hair glinting in the spotlight, and playing her signature Gibson Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1Simo Cell & Abdullah Diawy Dying is the Internet EP (Dekmantel) + Simo Cell FL Louis (TEMƎT)
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Where house music has drifted to conservatism, becoming predictable and dull, some electronic producers are still creating dancefloor-adjacent music that rips. One of the very best is French machine-freak Simo Cell. His wonked-out bangers defy definition. He’s been Vinyl of the Month before, with his Yes. DJ EP, back in 2021. These two new releases are also essential. The first, via Amsterdam’s Dekmantel organization, is Read more ...
johncarvill
Books about The Beatles are apt to prompt questions on whether there is anything left to say about them. Depends who’s doing the saying. We will each of us have had The Beatles seep into the fabric of our lives in a way that feels unique to us; but only a minority will be able to turn that into a story that’s compelling to others. Samira Ahmed achieves this rare feat by dint of being something of an outsider, but also in many ways an insider.As the child of immigrants, Ahmed’s assimilation of The Beatles was inflected by a certain “outsider status”. For her, The Beatles “existed as a kind of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Billie Eilish’s second concert film joins a newly lucrative genre, following Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’s $267 million box-office. Both are marketed as participatory filmgoing, turning cinemas into cut-price venues where fans can relive or imagine communing with their heroes. James Cameron’s co-direction with Eilish in his favoured 3D format adds supposed stature, but this remains incurious star-sanctioned product. Eilish is the visual opposite of Swift’s traditionally glamorous feminine persona. The latter’s arch, “Oh, hi!” as she opened her Eras act in silver and red showgirl finery Read more ...