Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“Ladies and gentlemen, in view of the controversy already aroused the producers of this film wish to re-emphasise what is already stated in the film: that there is no established scientific connection between mongolism and psychotic or criminal behaviour”. With these opening words, Twisted Nerve instantly defined itself as a film out to attract attention. Despite this questionable exploitation aspect, the genuinely unsettling 1968 work is ripe for reassessment.Like their predecessor feature The Family Way, Roy and Thomas Boulting’s Twisted Nerve starred Roy’s then wife Hayley Mills. She Read more ...
stephen.walsh
War may be a dramatic affair for anyone involved in it, but staging it is another matter. In fact describing it satisfactorily at all needs either a Tolstoyan flair for the large canvas, or else a poetic genius for directing its force inwards, into self-reflection or religious contemplation or the kind of intense verbal music, rich in historical and literary allusion, that the great Welsh artist and writer David Jones made his own in his long, tragic prose-poem, In Parenthesis.I can just about imagine an In Parenthesis opera in the form of a one-man show with the author seated on a wooden Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The comedy of widowhood is the brave territory of Mum. Lesley Manville plays Cathy, whom we meet on the day she is burying her husband Dave – although not literally doing it herself, as has to be explained to the nice but dim new girlfriend of her stay-at-home son Jason (Sam Swainsbury). As the mourners gather at her Chingford semi, each fresh arrival proves more grotesque than the last, and poor Cathy’s face becomes a little more pinched as her heroic reserves of tolerance run almost dry.First there’s Kelly (Lisa McGrillis, pictured below) who arrives in a short red dress, needing to borrow Read more ...
David Kettle
For a festival of wild, genre-colliding musical experimentation, Tectonics is almost starting to feel like part of the establishment. Which shows, if nothing else, that it must be getting somewhere with its boundary demolishing. The 2016 weekend over 7-8 May was its fourth outing in Glasgow – conductor Ilan Volkov founded it in Reykjavík in 2012, and since then it’s spread its all-embracing eclecticism worldwide to Tel Aviv, Adelaide, New York and beyond. And it feels like the event has settled nicely into its quirky, iconoclastic identity – and established a faithful and committed audience Read more ...
graham.rickson
Maurice Greene: Overtures Baroque Band/Garry Clarke (Cedille)Maurice Greene. Who? No worries: conductor Garry Clarke's notes fill in all the useful gaps. Greene was a prominent 18th century English composer, remembered by the well-educated for his choral music and for holding down several plum jobs, including Master of the King's Music and a professorship at Cambridge. As a young musician he was a close friend and admirer of Handel, the pair falling out over an unfortunate case of plagiarism on the part of one of Greene's colleagues. Greene didn't leave behind much instrumental Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang. The discerning among them would likely be bowled over by the outstanding feature debut of the Ankara-born, French-educated filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven. On the other hand, our daughters would be irked by having no grounds to complain about anything again after realising how fortunate they are not to be subjected to the restrictions imposed on high-school Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.It’s also when Green Room becomes less interesting than Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, Blue Ruin, which was saturated in inexorable sadness and dread, with an unpredictable, steel-trap plot, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Complete Deaths refers to the complete onstage deaths in Shakespeare’s work, all 75 of them, including the “black ill favour’d fly” in Titus Andronicus. The latter becomes a persistent theme throughout, appearing even as the audience take their seats, a joke shop plastic approximation attached to wire, being poked up the nose of a prostrate cast member. The whole is the work of two respected Brighton-based theatrical entities, the four-person physical comedy troupe Spymonkey and writer/director Tim Crouch. And it’s a fantastic, hilarious, consistently imaginative hoot from start to finish Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
A 28-year-old British composer makes his name with a new four-hand opera, set in contemporary Britain but underpinned by classical legend, pushing the boundaries of operatic subject matter and launching a glittering career. This was Mark-Antony Turnage and his breakthrough work Greek in 1988, showing uncanny parallels with Mark Simpson and his new opera Pleasure.Where Turnage set the Oedipus story in the 1980s East End, Simpson and his librettist Melanie Challenger, tell an original story, based on the myth of Hephaestus, and set it in the toilet of a gay nightclub. Although seeming at first Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The pre-title sequence – in which a middle-aged man without any trousers lies trussed up on the floor – immediately tells us that we are not to take Billions too seriously. A woman in thigh-high leather boots with killer heels towers over him. Removing a cigarette-holder from her lips, she tells him he’s in need of correction before stubbing out the fag on his bare chest.All that’s missing on the soundtrack is Disco Inferno by The Trammps. Burn, baby, burn… As if this weren’t enough, the dominatrix then puts out the fire by urinating on him. That’s right: someone is taking the piss.A turn-off Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Elasticity is a surprisingly reliable test for great art. How far can you stretch, bend, or reshape a work before it loses its essence, its identity? Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Antigone, Pride and Prejudice can all take almost anything you can throw at them, but what about Winterreise, Schubert’s song-cycle of lost love?Katie Mitchell has dehumanised it in her staged interpretation, One Evening, Thomas Guthrie has explored the identity of the poet-lover in his puppet-driven version for New Kent Opera, David Alden has made a television film of it for Channel 4, and now director, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right.Linklater has observed that, as well as being a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, this starts where the Oscar-winning Boyhood ends, with a Read more ...