Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The spoof “rockumentary” always sounds like a great idea, but it’s hard to pull off. Largely this is because rock stars are so divorced from reality that an element of self-parody is already built in, albeit unwittingly (“everybody’s so different, I haven’t changed” as Joe Walsh deadpanned in "Life's Been Good"). This Is Spinal Tap (the Rosetta Stone of the genre) worked because it didn’t try to invent its material so much as amass a load of real-life examples and compress them into 82 minutes.At least writer/director Rhy Thomas has some credibility in this area, having masterminded the droll Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The journalistic addiction-memoir is a crowded genre these days: Details editor Dan Perez chronicles his massive intake of Vicodin and other opioids in As Needed for Pain; New York Times columnist Eilene Zimmerman pieces together her husband’s drug addiction in Smacked, and now Terri White, editor-in-chief of Empire magazine and former editor of Time Out New York, shares with us her benders, blackouts and hospitalisations, somehow combined with an impressive career path, in the vivid, painful Coming Undone.Born in Derbyshire to a teenage mum “with the best bum in the village”, her childhood Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Strange Destinies” is the first track. “Take your eyes off me Svengali” is its memorable opening phrase. Conjuring up Van Morrison, Tom Petty, Mike Scott, Bruce Springsteen and even The Boomtown Rats when they were aping the first and fourth of those, the song clangs along with a powerpop chug and sports a hook-filled melody. Great.Despite this memorable opening, a triple-CD retrospective dedicated to Philip Rambow might seem like a cult item. Especially when no tracks from The Winkies, the band which first brought him to attention, are included. But there’s definitely a story.The Winkies Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was a weary and frustrated Dom Joly (★★) who left the stage after performing the first drive-in comedy show in the UK. Sadly it had been, as he said earlier, “the first car crash at a drive-in”.In the inauspicious surroundings of the car park at Brent Cross shopping centre, we were entering the new world of live comedy – where closely packed small rooms above pubs and even socially distanced arenas are verboten for the foreseeable future – but this momentous event had turned into a technical nightmare for the Trigger Happy TV star.His show, Holiday Snaps: Travel and Comedy in the Danger Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If COVID-19 isn’t the only topic being tackled by creative folk at the moment, it certainly feels like it. That’s perfectly understandable, when the practical and emotional conditions of doing anything at the moment – in lockdown – invariably become, in some way, the subject.Who knows how many lockdown shorts have been aired on social media? But with Homemade, we have 17 made by a cracking collection of professional filmmakers from around the world. Like any compendium, some are stronger than others, but for the most part it’s a remarkably consistent assembly.As you’d expect, these directors Read more ...
Dancing at Dusk: A Moment with Pina Bausch’s 'The Rite of Spring' review - an explosive African rite
Jenny Gilbert
There’s sun and sand, and both are golden – but this is no holiday beach. Distantly, out of focus, you can make out a man with a donkey and cart. Off-camera, some locals kick a ball. A square of sand about the size of a tennis court has been carefully raked in preparation for a performance – a unique performance, as it turns out.Early this year, 38 dancers from 14 African countries were assembled to mount a production of The Rite of Spring in the 1975 landmark version by the late Pina Bausch. It was due to premiere in Dakar in mid-March followed by an international tour. But then lockdown Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it’s her last play, Les Blancs, that in the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to institutional racism both in the US and UK feels even more relevant. Showing the clash between the dying colonialist rule of the whites, as indicated in the title, and the rise of African nationalism in an unspecified African country, it has a tremendous resonance and power, especially with a top-notch Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Back Roads has languished largely unseen since its completion in 2017, and one can see why: lurid to the point of absurdity, this adaptation of a 1999 novel by co-screenwriter Tawni O’Dell is preposterously self-serious and doesn’t augur well for a hyphenate career for leading man Alex Pettyfer, the English actor (of Magic Mike fame) here doubling for the first time as director.Set in rural America with Louisiana standing in for the Pennsylvania of the book, the film tells of Harley (Pettyfer), whose first appearance suggests an Abercrombie & Fitch store model waiting to happen, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Werner Herzog’s appearance in The Mandalorian paid for this deadpan, documentary-like slice of extreme Japanese life, suggesting how the director’s amusingly doomy Teutonic persona now dominates his own cinema.Family Romance is a real company which takes Japan’s cultural ease with simulacra – from reconstructed historic houses to plastic models of food – to its emotional limit, faking family members and friends to order. Boss Yuichi Ishii plays a version of himself, employed to be the long absent dad of 12-year-old Mahiro (pictured below left with Ishii). In between replacing a drunken father Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of Nigel Slater. There’s a recipe in one of his very early books, Real Cooking, for “A creamy, colourful, fragrant chicken curry” which he candidly admits is “seriously unauthentic”, with ingredients that will leave some purists “really pissed-off”. But it’s a wonderful recipe, and as ever this is partly to do with the words he chooses to describe it. Towards the end, when the chicken, tomatoes, yoghurt, and assorted spices are simmering he declares ‘It will be yellow, green and red. Like a Howard Hodgkin Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Opera Story is an enterprising set-up based in London and founded with a mission to commission and stage new operas by early career composers. They have so far produced three full-scale pieces, the earliest from 2017, performed in a reclaimed warehouse space in Peckham. I reviewed Dani Howard’s Robin Hood for theartsdesk in 2019 and found much to enjoy, not least the ambition of the company, and was looking forward to the new show Pandora’s Box, by composer Alex Woolf and librettist Dominic Kimberlin, which has now been postponed till 2021.Like so many musicians in the last three months, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature film debut with a bruising account of female-friendship torn apart by personal tragedies and gossipmongers, on a council estate in Harlow. At under an hour and a half, Boulifa shows a gift for economic storytelling, but that doesn’t mean it comes without an emotional wallop. The story centres on two twenty-something mothers who have been best friends since school. Lynn is played by street-cast actress Roxanne Scrimshaw, who makes a startling debut, and Lucy by Nichola Burley (Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights), who delivers at Read more ...