Reviews
Veronica Lee
This isn't a feature about London's former docklands (although much of it was made in a studio nearby), but rather Wes Anderson's second foray into stop-motion animation (after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox) and a quiet hymn to two of his heroes, Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyasaki. Fittingly, it is set in Japan.It's 20 years into the future; Megasaki is a huge metropolis ruled by a totalitarian mayor (voiced by Kunichi Nomura), who so hates dogs that he manufactures panic about “dog flu” and “snout fever” and then banishes canines to Trash Island, a rat-infested post-apocalyptic rubbish Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s quite bold to create a multiracial comedy set in Hackney in the early Eighties, a not especially amusing period of riots, the Falklands War and Thatcherism. Happily, Hackney boy Idris Elba has managed it with a wry eye and a light comic touch.This Hackney isn’t the lethal drug-saturated combat zone portrayed in Top Boy, but an altogether more genial place where black, white and Asian residents rub along fairly comfortably, and manage to find ways to cope with non-PC attitudes. “We were thicker-skinned back then,” Elba has commented.Naturally, it’s Elba’s character Walter Easmon who’s at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Boxing movies are often about redemption in the ring. From Somebody Up There Likes Me to last year’s Bleed for This via Rocky, the story stays the same: boxer seeks peace though punching. In Journeyman, Paddy Considine travels along a different path. The sporting action happens towards the start, but the heart of the story is in its aftermath.The clue lurks in that title. As a professional, Matty Burton is no journeyman – he’s a world champion – but as a result of his final fight he is a man on a journey. Quite how challenging a journey it will be is indicated in heavy hints as Matty Read more ...
David Benedict
About a decade ago, theatre-makers started routinely describing themselves as being in the business of storytelling. And “storytelling” is most certainly the term that best describes Matthew Lopez’s two-part, seven-hour epic The Inheritance. Beautifully cast, economically designed and directed with strikingly elegant simplicity by Stephen Daldry, it has plenty to recommended it but there’s no denying a central problem. This gay male revamp of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End is a case of too much telling of story at the expense, all too often, of true drama. “Who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly Steven Spielberg movies are plopping off the production line like Ford Fiestas or Cadburys Creme Eggs. It seems like only seconds ago that we were greeting The BFG and the breast-beating earnestness of The Post, and now the director comes steaming back with this huge and hectic tribute to the gamer-world and his own long-lost youth.Based, albeit with a fair bit of latitude, on Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel (Cline wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn), it’s set in a dismal, overcrowded 2045. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is not only named like a superhero’s alter ego, but he escapes into Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hie thee to Oxford, for it is doubtful that we will see the like of this exhibition again this side of the Atlantic. American art of the 1920s and 1930s was once disregarded in its homeland in favour of Francophile superiority, and once it fell into critical and commercial favour it became too expensive to move around at the beckoning of would-be international hosts.But the Ashmolean is – bolstered, too, by its nearly breaking the million-visitor mark last year – a master at barter: as the repository of more Michelangelo drawings than anywhere else, its loans made the Michelangelo exhibition Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sutra is back, 10 years after its premier at Sadler’s Wells. This is, in fact, the fourth time it has returned to London and such is the amazing popularity of this beguiling show that, in the past decade, it has been performed more than 200 times in 66 cities in 33 countries. You can see why it is so successful. The production is clever, funny, skilful and endlessly inventive. Initially the choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui performed in it himself; he played the role of an outsider trying to engage with the beliefs and practices of Buddhist monks from the Shaolin Temple in China, who Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A woman walks out on her husband and their three kids – two teens, one five-year-old - after 19 years of marriage. She doesn’t want custody. What could be so wrong with the man that she’s driven to such drastic action? Eleven months later, Greg (Christopher Eccleston, anguished but plucky, with a shaky Northern Irish accent) doesn’t seem to have the answer.This doesn’t help matters on his sticky first go at internet dating, where his opening gambit is to enthuse about Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test and the conversation, before the question of the whereabouts of his wife comes up, Read more ...
David Nice
Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40. Unfortunately it seems certain Dutoit would have captured the élan vital of Richard Strauss's Don Juan better than Payare - an accomplished soundsmith, on this evidence, but fatally uninterested in the operatic drama of Strauss's tone poems, or for that matter the Read more ...
David Kettle
A feature-length documentary on whaling in the Faroe Islands: you might think you can see it unfolding already. Hardy Viking fishermen battling the elements, gruesome killings of majestic sea creatures, implied or outright condemnation of the shocking brutality.Scottish director Mike Day’s masterful film is no shock-factor exposé, though – although what it does expose is far more chilling than the low-level hunting it shows. The Islands and the Whales is a haunting, deeply troubling portrait of a modern community on the edge, a film that paints an uncompromisingly complex, contradictory Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Should Mum end here? There have been only two series on BBC Two, and it closed the second with all the characters poised for the next step. A third series has been commissioned, so there will be the opportunity to see what happens next for Cathy and Michael now they’ve hugged and, for the second time, held hands. In Spain they might even get round to kissing. But the bitter-sweet comedy of romantic yearning is one thing and fulfilment not the same at all. The dread precedent in sitcom is Niles and Daphne finally getting together in Frasier. The show was never the same again. Let's see.Mum was Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"The Show must go on". So say the posters dotted around Glasgow and Edinburgh for Scottish Opera's production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Except on Thursday, it didn’t. A fire at a nearby Glasgow nightclub which ravaged several city centre buildings caused the Theatre Royal to become so filled with smoke that the opening night’s performance had to be cancelled. Opening instead on Saturday, director and designer Antony McDonald’s new production, co-produced by Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park, is witty and slick, with an unfussy stage design that nods to the period but has a Read more ...