1950s
See How They Run review - a whodunit pastiche set in Fifties LondonFriday, 09 September 2022
A starry cast headed by Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell doesn’t quite manage to bring this lavish, light-hearted period pastiche to life, though it looks good – nice cars, lovely costumes, a quasi-Wes Anderson vibe – and there are mild chuckles... Read more... |
Milton Avery: American Colourist, Royal Academy review - from backward-looking impressionist to forward looking-colouristThursday, 14 July 2022
I’ve always been bemused by the American painter, Milton Avery. Not having seen enough of his paintings together, I couldn’t gauge if they are quirkily naive – lodged in a cul de sac aside from the mainstream – or hyper-sophisticated harbingers of... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Garsington Opera review - terrors and tragedyMonday, 11 July 2022
After the long interval, as darkness falls, the screw turns in this Garsington revival more woundingly than any I can remember for Britten's most concentrated masterpiece. Evil chords, trills, cadenzas and silences from the 13 superb Philharmonia... Read more... |
Elvis review - Austin Butler shines in patchy biopicFriday, 24 June 2022
Strictly Ballroom aside, I’ve never been entirely persuaded by Baz Luhrmann. Once you rip open the plush packaging of his films, you often just find satin and tissue paper inside. Elvis isn’t his worst movie (they can’t take that accolade away from... Read more... |
Vivian Maier: Anthology, MK Gallery review - what an amazing eye!Tuesday, 21 June 2022
The story is riveting. A nanny living in New York and Chicago spent her spare time wandering the streets taking photographs. She learned to develop and print, but her plan to publish the images as postcards fell through and, as time passed, she... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Ban the Bomb - Music of the Aldermaston Anti-Nuclear MarchesSunday, 19 June 2022
“The case is quite simple. We think that the policy which is being pursued by the western powers is one which is almost bound to end in the extermination of the human race. Some of us think that might be rather a pity.”This extract from a 1958... Read more... |
Grease, Dominion Theatre review - a super night out, great songs well sung and spectacular dancingWednesday, 18 May 2022
Barry Gibb was at the considerable peak of his era-defining songwriting powers when he provided the song that played over the opening titles of the iconic 1978 film, so it's a wise decision by director, Nikolai Foster, to go straight into "Grease is... Read more... |
Osborne, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - an eclectic mixFriday, 13 May 2022
The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final... Read more... |
Hallé, Wilson, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - valedictory Vaughan WilliamsFriday, 22 April 2022
The baton passed, metaphorically, to the Hallé last night in the Vaughan Williams symphony cycle shared between them and the BBC Philharmonic to mark the composer’s 150th anniversary. Literally, that baton was in the same hand as on the last date,... Read more... |
Great Freedom review - love behind bars in GermanySaturday, 12 March 2022
A story of forbidden love, Great Freedom takes place almost entirely in a prison. The film's background is encapsulated in the word “175er/ hundertfünfundsiebziger”, still to be found in German dictionaries and collective memories as a... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Sun Shines BrightTuesday, 08 March 2022
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the John Ford scholar Tag Gallagher quietly observes in the penetrating – and deeply moving – video essay he contributes to Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray disc of Ford’s 1953 masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright. It’s... Read more... |
Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65, Barbican review - revelations galoreFriday, 04 March 2022
The Barbican’s Postwar Modern covers the period after World War Two when artists were struggling to respond to the horrors that had engulfed Europe and find ways of recovering from the collective trauma.Perhaps inevitably, a considerable amount of... Read more... |
