Reviews
Katherine Waters
A woman gives birth alone two months early in a frost-bound village in the Korean countryside. In Poland, a solitary woman washes down white migraine pills and concludes she must write. The child that is born dies. The finished book commemorates her death by according her an imagined life.Last year Han Kang won the Man Booker International with The Vegetarian, a slim novella about a woman who decides to give up meat — a deeply subversive action practically unheard of in her home country Korea. In her new work The White Book, also translated by Deborah Smith, she transgresses literary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Here we go again then. The “first series”, as the BBC are calling it after the fact, of I Know Who You Are slammed the brakes on and juddered to a bewildering halt back in the middle of August. Almost everyone who’d sat through the plot dodgems of those 10 episodes will have had the same reaction: eh? With no information to indicate otherwise, it looked as if the hatchet-faced procedural melodrama featuring the Elias-Castro axis of evil had chosen to commit hara-kiri in the middle of an uncompleted plotline. It was like Schubert’s Unfinished or Edwin Drood all over again, only less so.In the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.For French cinema goers, the titillation was supplemented by Jane Birkin featuring alongside Serge Gainsbourg at the time they were establishing themselves as the nation’s couple to Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Betsy Jolas is a pioneer, the programme for this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert told us, and she’s certainly unique. Now 91, she has been following her own course for many decades, an associate of the 1960s French avant-garde, but never a subscriber to its doctrines. Her concerto for piano and trumpet, Histoires vraies (2015), here received its UK premiere. The style is restrained but eclectic, modernist only in its avoidance of tradition, but continually inventive and, above all, great fun.The title means "True stories", and Jolas links this idea with the expression of "sounds we try not to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).The reason for the film's non-appearance in 1977 was not made explicit. The charitable explanation is that this was the year of punk and the BBC were alive to a shift in popular Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Kenneth Branagh, like his Poirot, cares about cutlery. The director and detective’s fastidiousness both find their ideal home on the Orient Express, where waiters measure fork placement with the precision of Poirot’s sacred monster of a moustache. This Murder on the Orient Express follows 1974’s Sidney Lumet version and the train itself in ensuring its customers’ well-being with well-appointed luxury. Finding a proper film star in almost every compartment only adds to the steam age glamour.Branagh’s glaring problem is that the audiences most likely to see Agatha Christie at the cinema will Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
At first glance, the meetings between heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) and a 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), lead one to fear the worst for the kid. Their stilted exchanges in public places, during which the man gives the teen expensive gifts, don’t suggest a family connection, or a mentor-student relationship, but a secret intimacy that can only be, in some way, dreadfully wrong.But then Murphy takes the boy home to meet his ophthalmologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children. And before long the earlier assumption is turned on its head. In fact, Martin Read more ...
David Nice
You won't have seen much of magisterial Russian pianist Dmitri Alexeev recently, unless you happen to be a student at the Royal College of Music, where he is Professor of Advanced Piano Studies (they were out in force last night, cheering enough to elicit five encores). His guest appearances at various commemorative concerts, chiefly his towering interpretation of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata, remain carved in the mind, but this is the first time I've heard him give a full recital. Predictably, although he celebrated his 70th birthday in August, there was no loss of the colossal and well-weighted Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. The phenomenal success of JK Rowling’s books, and of their film versions, and of the stage play (now set to remain in the West End for all eternity), has created a template of extravagant cultural impact that must still be bewitching prospective authors of the next big thing, as well as their prospective publishers and prospective readers. The HP phenomenon also provides plenty of material for satire. Step forward Thomas Eccleshare, whose short but fascinating new two-hander opened at the Bush Theatre tonight.Although it’s only 55 minutes long, Heather Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s all a bit Dairy Milk. That was, to wrap it in purple foil, the critical reaction to Les émotifs anonymes when it was released in 2011. Not in the UK, though, where Jean-Pierre Améris’s romantic comedy never made it to cinemas. Lack of local familiarity has given creative licence to Emma Rice, who with her departing production as artistic director has presented audiences at Shakespeare’s Globe not with a Hamlet or a Henry but the theatrical equivalent of a chocolate soufflé.The tale of two pathologically anxious introverts does not present the most likely basis for a musical. Jean-René Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so the mini-boom in motor racing movies continues, this time with a look back at the history of Ferrari and the intense on-track battles of the 1950s, a decade in which the Scuderia won four of its 15 Formula One World Drivers Championships. In particular, Race to Immortality zooms in on the unique partnership of the British drivers Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, who called each other “mon ami mate” and would split their race winnings equally between themselves. Their machiavellian boss Enzo Ferrari began to suspect that their great friendship was blunting their will to win races.The Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata chose All Hallows’ Eve for a concert of (in some part) "holy" minimalism. Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song began it, and his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ended it. They headlined it "Spiritualism and Minimalism", but I think what they really had in mind was spirituality. No "one knock for yes" or anything like that, anyway.Manchester Cathedral - hallowed ground indeed - made an excellent visual setting, its versatile lighting rig used to picturesque effect, and after the buzz of conversation died down there was a ready-made atmosphere of quiet expectation before things Read more ...