Reviews
Nick Hasted
Guillermo del Toro strains every sinew to bring his dream film to life, steeping it in religious symbolism and the history of art, cannily restitching Mary Shelley’s narrative and aiming grandly high. He can’t sustain Frankenstein’s heartbeat over two-and-a-half hours which try to justify a lifetime’s devotion to the subject. There are, though, marvellous passages where the ages of reason and magic meet.We begin in Arctic wastes, where an icebound ship encounters broken Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his seemingly bestial Creature (Jacob Elordi). Each tells their tale. Young Victor ( Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Their new album may have been born out of a deep dive into Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic reimagining of the post-Manson killings’ atmosphere of late 1960’s Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. However, Solar Eye’s intro music as they took the stage at the Hare and Hounds this weekend wasn’t Charlie’s “Look at your Game, Girl” or “Cease to Exist” but something far more triumphant – the theme from Rocky.Still, these local boys are making good right at this moment, and clearly in a celebratory mood, with the recent release of their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! and a handful of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s always good to welcome the opening of a new arts venue, and sadly it doesn’t happen too often in the current economic climate. But bucking the trend is The Free Association, an improv comedy troupe who have been plying their trade in various upstairs rooms in pubs for several years and have now found a permanent base in southeast London.The FA was founded 11 years ago by Graham Dickson, Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez (the latter two who perform as Max and Ivan) and as well as performing it the company teaches improv – both to comics and non-professionals. Alumni of FA classes include Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Helping to build the careers of superb young singers is what Wigmore Hall has done for decades: I still remember Olaf Bär’s debut in the hall in 1983, having won the Walther Gruner Lieder competition, and also Matthias Goerne’s in 1997.But whereas Bär was 25 and Goerne 27 when they first appeared in Wigmore Street, Austrian mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller was not yet 21 when she won the Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition last year. She has recently turned 22, and still has another year left as a student in Hanover.Hearing her remarkable Wigmore debut recital at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over 1965 to 1968 Brooklyn's Evie Sands issued a string of singles with classic top sides. Amongst them were “Take Me For a Little While,” “I Can't Let Go,” “Picture me Gone” and “Angel of the Morning.” For reasons which are tackled in the essay coming with I Can’t Let Go – the first-ever collection of Sands’ seven-inch A- and B-sides – all either charted low, or not at all.This is extraordinary and, from the perspective of 60-ish years later, inexplicable. These were fabulous soul-inclined pop records, and fabulous songs – as recognised by the extensive assortment of other, subsequent Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
No Other ChoicePark Chan-wook’s outstanding black comedy is a rare treat, biting social satire delivered with immaculate slapstick touches. His everyman hero is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a jittery but deliriously happy man with a beautiful wife (superstar Son Ye-jin) and two children, one an accomplished cellist. Even his two dogs are handsome. And he loves his work at a paper manufacturer. Naturally, all comes crashing down when his company is taken over by Americans and a chunk of the workforce has to go, including him. As do his dogs, his nice car and many of his belongings. With his Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This powerful, austere collaboration between Les Arts Florissants and the Amala Dianor Company – presented as part of Dance Umbrella – excavated all the violence, grief and transcendence of the events surrounding Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion.Gesualdo published his tortured, piercingly beautiful Tenebrae Responsories in 1611, 21 years after he murdered his first wife and her lover, imbuing the music with the anguish and contradictory emotions of a man who many believe was seeking redemption through his art.Perhaps it’s not surprising then that betrayal with a kiss dominated the first “ Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The last few years have seen the much-needed positivity of the #MeToo movement followed by a raft of ethical confrontations, whether it’s differences over the feminist generation gap, or those for and against cancel culture.Luca Guadagnino’s new campus drama wades enthusiastically into these murky waters, perhaps intending to spark new debate and to ruffle some feathers, but instead sinking beneath them. It’s a perplexing, slowly infuriating affair. That said, Julia Roberts gives one of her very best performances as Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor at Yale University, who becomes Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata have had a ten-year association with composer-conductor Jack Sheen. For this short programme, one of the free Walter Carroll Lunchtime Concert series at the Martin Harris Centre in the University of Manchester, he and they created a partial re-enactment of the January 1914 inaugural concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris. To works by Stravinsky, Delage and Ravel were added two UK premieres, by Sheen himself and by Isabella Gellis. The plan back in 1914 had been to set new compositions alongside the recently created Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper has previously directed A Star Is Born and Maestro, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as this. It’s a story of New Yorkers in the throes of mid-life crises, as Alex Novak (Will Arnett) separates from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) and finds himself floating in unfamiliar new waters. Their divorce also has a perverse knock-on effect on the lives of their close friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), who both start suffering from copycat syndrome.The joy of the piece (written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell and loosely based on the life of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether it’s the trenches of the First World War, or the halls and chambers of Vatican City, we’re becoming used to director Edward Berger creating highly believable, evocative and immersive environments for his stories. His latest is no different – except in one very particular way. Adapted from Lawrence Osborne's 2014 novel, by Rowan Joffe, it's a psychological drama of sorts, which follows the misadventures of the charlatan, gambler and drunk ‘Lord Doyle’ (Colin Farrell) as he swishes around Macau in search of handouts that can take him back to the tables and the elusive winning Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Oh yes, I actually do remember Patty Hearst. She was the American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter, who, at the age of 19, was kidnapped by the ultra-left Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Some months after her abduction, a bank’s surveillance video showed her participating in a robbery.She seemed to have embraced the urban terror group, and was eventually captured and sentenced to jail. But what really happened to her in captivity? This is the question and the story which has inspired Katherine Moar’s Ragdoll, the follow up to her very successful debut play, Farm Read more ...