Reviews
Kieron Tyler
New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.The Irony of Fate (the full title is The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!: Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) is a farcical and straightforward-seeming Read more ...
theartsdesk
Prepare to disagree. 2016 has been getting bad reviews all year long, but for film it was actually pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that there are big omissions from this list of our best films from the past 12 months. Our method of selection was arbitrary: each of the theartsdesk’s film reviewers was invited to volunteer one film each as their favourite of the year. No one was allowed to choose two.So there is no place in our top seven for the film which was this year’s winner of the Oscar for best film (Spotlight), nor best adapted screenplay (The Big Short), nor the film with the best Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are visually enthralling, landscapes of nature that dwarf the sufferings – visceral, in the literal sense, since they involve damage to the human body – inflicted on many of its characters. We’ll leave the “and yets” to later…The Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The hyperbole began as soon as the voiceover did: “For most of us Judi Dench is M…” So much for Bernard Lee. The implication was that if you can remember him, then Judi Dench: All the World’s Her Stage was not for you. After all, she played James Bond’s boss for 17 years – until, at Daniel Craig’s suggestion, the sky fell in on her in Skyfall.Older fans of 007 – ie those watching BBC Two on a Friday evening – will have heard it all before (on Wogan, Film 97 and Desert Island Discs). Despite promising to uncover her secrets, there were no revelations in Francis Whately’s tribute to the much- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Yorkshire-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright has carved a distinguished niche for herself as chronicler of that brooding, beautiful region’s social and familial dramas. After the romance of Last Tango in Halifax and the gritty panorama of Happy Valley, she has settled on perhaps the quintessential troubled Yorkshire family, with awesome bleakness on the side: the Brontës.Despite a difference of 150 years in setting, To Walk Invisible is not only a seamless progression from Wainwright’s previous work, but the story comes, ready-made, both achingly sad and also driven by a passion that can’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If there's one big question hanging over the television industry, it's "how long can the old broadcast networks survive in the new era of subscription and downloading services?" No doubt there will be a variety of answers, with different hybrid arrangements and partnerships springing up to deliver programming across multiple formats. From the viewer's point of view, it's a pain to have to keep subscribing to multiple providers such as Netflix or Amazon, not to mention all the extra devices we now have sticking out of the back of the TV. On the other hand, have viewers ever had it so good? Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A 90-minute biographical documentary about Bruce Springsteen, you may think, is for Springsteen fans only. But really anyone who is interested in fame, friendship, family relationships and the creative process will have enjoyed this – a revealing mix of personal testimony, The Boss reading from his recently released autobiography of the same title, Springsteen family home movies, and rarely seen footage of his early career.For music fans, the most interesting section was where Springsteen talked about his influences – they are wide and varied, and have a noticeably large number of British Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.On the other hand, 1980s racer Tommy Byrne was a working-class chancer from Dundalk who was permanently skint and got nicked for stealing. Yet the evidence suggests he was one of the fastest natural drivers who ever sat in a racing car, and who even gave Ayrton Senna a run for his money when both of them drove for the Van Diemen team at the start of the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times. 2016 leaves an impressive legacy of museum-building, too: Tate Modern opened its much needed extension in the summer, and the new Harley Gallery at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire provides a fittingly magnificent home for the treasures of the Portland Collection.The Read more ...
David Nice
It was the best and worst of years for English National Opera. Best, because principals, chorus and orchestra seem united in acclaiming their Music Director of 14 months, Mark Wigglesworth, for his work at a level most had only dreamed of (“from the bottom up,” said a cellist, contrasting it with the top-down approach of predecessor Edward Gardner). Worst, because he stayed true to his principle of only working with a full-time company, and when the chorus unexpectedly accepted a nine-month contract, announced his departure.No-one wants a great company’s demise, but despite the announcement Read more ...
David Nice
Revelations in the classical year never stop coming. Even the week before Christmas yielded two performances as good as you're going to get: the sheer effervescence and light-flourishing of Lucy Crowe in ecstatic Bach and Mozart with La Nuova Musica, and Sheku Kanneh-Mason in Haydn's C major Cello Concerto. So any sifting of 2016's musical riches needs to put the truly one-off packages at the top of the list.In terms of unrepeatable magic and logistics that actually worked, watch the birdie for Pierre-Laurent Aimard's four Aldeburgh Festival concerts of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux from 4. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's not often you hear the sound of film critics sobbing quietly to themselves, but this really happened at the screening I attended of A Monster Calls. Having seen the trailer, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around a spooky-looking rural landscape, I'd marked it down as one to avoid. How wrong can you be.In conjunction with screenwriter Patrick Ness, who also wrote the original novel, director JA Bayona (known for the scary The Orphanage and the tsunami saga The Impossible) has conjured a bittersweet and often painfully moving account of bereavement and growing up, in which Read more ...