Reviews
Matt Wolf
A spate of tennis-themed films gets off to a vivid if incomplete start with Borg/McEnroe, which recreates the run-up to the Wimbledon Men's Final in 1980 with often-thrilling clarity and (as much as is possible for those who will of course recall the outcome) suspense. Where Danish director Janus Metz drops the ball is with a script that doesn't keep pace with the innate energy of the subject matter.Indeed, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that this film in Björn Borg's native Sweden is being marketed on the strength of his surname alone, leaving McEnroe to fend for himself, much as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
That the countryside is a dump where all good things come to a dead end is hardly a new punchline. There are plenty of novels and memoirs, and indeed newspaper columns, about trading the toxic metropolis for the green and unpleasant pastures of the rural life. The joke is it’s mainly horrible for a narrow spectrum of predictable reasons. It’s muddy, petrol costs a bomb, bored kids are forever after lifts, and as for the people…Now Jack Dee is in on the joke. Bad Move, which he has co-written with Pete Sinclair, finds Steve and his wife Nicky (Kerry Godliman), who seem to be Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on Read more ...
David Nice
Has Hackney ever seen or heard such a spectacle – a full Hungarian orchestra taking up most of the Empire stalls to complete the semi-circle of a relatively empty stage? And did enough of London get to hear about it? I certainly wouldn’t have done had it not been for a chance conversation with Péter Eötvös, a leading figure in Hungary’s beleaguered but still thriving cultural life, in an interval of the Budapest Ring. You don’t often get to witness a major composer conduct his own response to a masterpiece – Senza Sangue, a psychological two-hander fit with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle – so Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Port Talbot (population 38,000) is a town on the south Wales coast famous for two things: steel and actors. The birthplace of Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen made a rare foray into the national consciousness at the beginning of last year when Tata Steel threatened to close the plant that employs 10% of the town. It had been making a loss of £1m a day, largely due to flooding of the global market by China. National Theatre Wales have returned to the scene of the greatest triumph in the company’s short history, the perhaps unsurpassable Passion (starring Sheen), for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Take one off-the-wall spoof spy thriller that becomes an unexpected hit. Add a bunch of gratuitous guest stars (mostly American). Stretch formula to 140 minutes. Stand clear and wait for the box office stampede.This seems to have been the recipe for this follow-up to 2015’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, likewise helmed by Matthew Vaughn, who once again wrote the screenplay with Jane Goldman. Sadly, much of what made the first film work has vanished this time around. Despite having apparently died in the first one, Colin Firth is back as Harry Hart, but his aura of fastidiously hand-tailored Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of writing contemporary history. In telling the story of the 1993 Oslo Accords – the first ever agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – American playwright JT Rogers gets around the disadvantages of documentary theatre by writing what he calls “a scrupulously researched, meticulously written fiction”. And he Read more ...
Veronica Lee
She’s only 30, but Mae Martin has been at this comedy lark for a long time. By her own admission she was a rather strange child; she became obsessed with stand-up after her parents took her to a comedy club when she was 11, and she started performing in clubs in her native Toronto two years later – when the high from making people laugh took over her life.The comedy obsession was part of a pattern in her younger years, and in Dope she explores the compulsive behaviour that resulted in a serious drug addiction by the time she was in her mid-teens. She’s honest about the reasons why – hanging Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Caressing the microphone, and gazing into the audience with winsome, soulful sincerity, tousled auburn locks glistening in the stage light, Mads Mathias looks like nothing so much as Ed Sheeran’s more handsome older brother. His voice has the softest of rasps, like being rubbed gently with velvet, and he has his saxophone on hand, as if threatening to shimmer phrases of Sanborn smooth into the night.To judge purely by appearances Mathias seemed an incongruous choice for one of London’s most esteemed jazz venues. And yet, while seemingly at home in every stereotype of the romantic singer, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For his monster concerts in 1840s Paris, Berlioz took pride in assembling and marshalling a "great beast of an orchestra". At the Barbican on Sunday night, the LSO filled the stage and fitted the bill. Their thoroughbred tradition of Berlioz performance, long nurtured by the late Sir Colin Davis, looks set fair to be renewed by Sir Simon Rattle. Just as they had done last week in a remarkable survey of modern English music to open his tenure as music director, they gave him everything in La Damnation de Faust.Cramped acoustic be damned: there was playing here of unabashed violence, backed up Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Magnum was founded just after the war in 1947 as a co-operative that ensured both the quality of its members, and their clout in dealing with the media world. Its longevity is testimony to its success. The original founders were war-hardened photo journalists and included Robert Capa and David “Chim” Seymour; the first woman member was Eve Arnold, who joined in 1951.The linking of its members to cinema was the hook for this fascinating French documentary on BBC Four, written and directed by Sophie Bassaler, with a delicate voiceover by Sharon Mann and evocative music by Harry Allouche. There Read more ...
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell Collection review - guilty pleasures at the National Gallery
Florence Hallett
If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong. Of the 13 Degas pastels that form the core of this small but wondrous exhibition, most have never been seen outside Glasgow, where they are among the highlights of the magnificent art collection bequeathed to the city in 1944 by the shipping magnate Sir William Burrell.In an Read more ...