Reviews
Matt Wolf
The director Stephen Daldry has always worked beautifully with young actors, whether on film or stage, so it's not difficult to see what might have drawn him to Trash, the Richard Curtis-scribed adaptation of the Andy Mulligan novel about life on the Rio de Janeiro scrapheaps. An opportunity for three Brazilian unknowns to take centre-screen in a film spoken almost entirely in Portuguese, the movie gives an instant career to its three male newcomers while otherwise remaining mired in the feel-good Hollywood muck that even the most elaborate change in locale can't shift.Equal parts adventure Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Is there any bond more powerful than shared history? If life is the sum total of our experiences, then those who experienced it with us will always hold a piece of us – and none more intimate than those formative years when we are figuring out who we want to become. Friendships forged on the cusp of adulthood rival great affairs in their intensity, but can be just as difficult to maintain.Amelia Bullmore’s Hampstead hit, earning a well-deserved West End transfer, is both loving and uncompromising in its incisive study of long-term friendships. Her schematically disparate trio meet at Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ernst Krenek is probably best remembered nowadays as the composer of Jonny Spielt Auf – the quintessential Zeitoper of Weimar Germany and later the archetype of all that was designated “degenerate” in art by the Nazi regime. And perhaps also as – briefly – the husband of Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav. But Krenek was far more than that. He was a magpie collector of styles and influences whose large corpus of work reflects almost every major 20th-century trend. From Romanticism to jazz, serialism, neo-Renaissance modality and even electronic works, Krenek’s history is the history of music Read more ...
Simon Munk
The recent glut of reboots, remasters and HD updates for classic videogames is not a sign of a fatigued industry, out of imagination. One of the biggest issues with videogames and the rapid evolution of the the gadgets and consoles they play on, is that all too often gamers are left unable to play a game five years old, let alone over fifteen years old.That's so ancient in games terms, you might as well try plugging cave paintings into a flatscreen TV. The return of warmly-remembered titles, brought back for those who miss them, and those that missed them first time round, is not then a worry Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's the genuine hard problem facing commentators confronted with Tom Stoppard's new play of the same name: how do you honour the legacy of this extraordinary writer's first play in nine years that also marks its director Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre swansong and is – truth be told – a disappointment on multiple fronts? Speaking as one who can recall as if it were yesterday the revitalising jolt to both head and heart that one felt leaving the opening night of Arcadia nearly 22 years ago, The Hard Problem doesn't sufficiently engage either, notwithstanding occasional Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The habit among ballet critics of being simultaneously down on John Cranko's 1965 Onegin and up on Kenneth MacMillan's 1974 Manon is a curious one. The two have many similarities, from their basis in novels that became operas (though Prévost's Manon Lescaut antedates Pushkin's verse Eugene Onegin by a century), through their patched-together scores that don't actually use the Massenet/Tchaikovsky operas, to the knotty questions of morality and culpability that attend their titular characters. Perhaps it's because the London public eventually got used enough to MacMillan to decide he was a Read more ...
geoff brown
Barbara Hannigan, we all know, is game for anything. This Canadian soprano with the pearliest tones and the dramatic instincts of a Sarah Bernhardt can find beauty and meaning in almost every contemporary composer’s barbed wire. Recently she’s been cavorting on stage as Alban Berg’s Lulu; earlier this month, for a sliver of Ligeti, she paraded herself on the Barbican platform as a gum-chewing schoolgirl in a naughty micro-skirt.There was nothing like that at Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic concert at the Festival Hall. Her dress code was conventional: a stylish but demure white dress Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Now that the national self-delusion of the classless society has been laid to rest by the double whammy of economic crisis and the Cameron-Osborne-Johnson era of Bullingdon Club governance, it would seem an ideal moment to dust off Peter Barnes’s 1968 satire of upper-class madmen and monsters.Unfortunately, The Ruling Class needs more than a dusting-off; 45 years since its last West End appearance, it needs renovation. And it doesn’t get it from Jamie Lloyd’s latest production at the Trafalgar Studios. Despite a hugely charismatic, bravura performance by James McAvoy, and a great deal of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes – and Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cracking part-homage, part-pastiche of the James Bond franchise (and other British spy movies) done with knowing comedy, élan and obvious affection. It's based on The Secret Service comic book created by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar, and is directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class), and here he reunites with Jane Goldman, who also provided scripts for his previous works.It's about a British spy organisation staffed mostly by Savile Row-suited toffs, including the impeccably Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Thomas Pynchon and PT Anderson: too good to be true? News that the director of There Will Be Blood and The Master was adapting America’s greatest and most hiply profound living novelist certainly sounded like a heavenly equation. Better yet, Anderson had chosen Pynchon’s most consistently funny and approachable novel, Inherent Vice, in which the author had effectively passed around a convivial and especially mind-blowing joint to his fans, as a reward for braving the heaving banquet of his preceding, testing masterpiece, Against the Day. With Anderson also coming off his own furthest-out film Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The history play has roots that go deep into our culture. We love to see stories that are kitted out in fancy dress, and long to savour a past that resonates with our present. In the case of Dara, which is adapted by Tanya Ronder from an original by Shahid Nadeem first performed five years ago by Ajoka Theatre in Pakistan, we time-travel back to Mughal India in the mid-17th century to confront once again the problem of militant Islam. But is there more here than contemporary issues clothed in colourful garb?At the play’s heart is a family drama. In the 1650s, at the imperial court of India Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person testimonials will disappear into a past.So it was more than fitting that Touched by Auschwitz should see historian Laurence Rees (whose past films like The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are as authoritative as they come) following the lives of six survivors through to the present day, examining not least Read more ...