1940s
DVD: Germany Pale MotherFriday, 22 May 2015
This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the... Read more... |
The Glass Protégé, Park TheatreWednesday, 15 April 2015
Hollywood has never met a cliché it didn’t love; unfortunately, neither has Dylan Costello. His peek behind the curtain of Tinseltown’s Golden Age employs every stock type imaginable, from the boorish, chain-smoking manager to a pill-popping Marilyn... Read more... |
Oppenheimer, RSC, Vaudeville TheatreWednesday, 01 April 2015
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” J Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation from Hindu scripture is often used to signify the scientist’s rueful realisation, when it was too late, of what he had created in delivering an atomic bomb to the US... Read more... |
The Four Temperaments/Untouchable/Song of the Earth, Royal BalletSaturday, 28 March 2015
After the second piece of last night's triple bill, Hofesh Shechter's Untouchable in its world premiere, my friend asked me why it had been put on the programme with the first piece, George Balanchines 1946 Four Temperaments. He wondered if there... Read more... |
Harvey, Theatre Royal HaymarketTuesday, 24 March 2015
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, repeatedly unfunny Harvey isn’t just a study of madness, but a punishing example of it. Mary Chase’s dusty 1944 farce about a man hallucinating a 6ft 3in rabbit... Read more... |
DVD: Roberto Rossellini - The War TrilogyTuesday, 17 March 2015
Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make... Read more... |
Foyle's War, Series 9, ITVMonday, 05 January 2015
Writer Anthony Horowitz has imbued Foyle's War with longevity by anchoring it among some lesser-known and frequently shameful occurrences in the margins of World War Two, and this ninth series opener duly embroiled us in murky shenanigans involving... Read more... |
DVD: His Girl FridayTuesday, 30 December 2014
His Girl Friday is funny. Very, very funny. It is also crammed with cutting verbiage as sharply delivered as the moves of a complex pas de deux. Yet another no-frills appearance of the 1940 film on home video is not a surprise as – despite being a... Read more... |
Kon-TikiMonday, 15 December 2014
Nothing proves a theory better than practice, and this is exactly what Norwegian adventurer-archaeologist-ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl did in 1947 when he and five companions sailed a raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove his hypothesis of how the... Read more... |
The Imitation GameMonday, 10 November 2014
“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation... Read more... |
Ceremony of Innocence/The Age of Anxiety/Aeternum, Royal BalletSaturday, 08 November 2014
English National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet have staged programmes of war pieces already this year; now here's the Royal Ballet bringing up the rear in its own inimitable (and rather oblique) fashion with a triple bill that picks up on and... Read more... |
quartet-lab, Wigmore HallWednesday, 22 October 2014
Musical theatre needn’t be dominated by the human voice. Instrumental dramas with an element of acting can be a good way into the wonderful world of chamber music for younger audiences, and the Wigmore Hall’s new gambit of special student tickets... Read more... |
