21st century
Graham Fuller
The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains. Their claustrophobic equivalent in Polytechnique (2009), the eerily quiet 77-minute indie Villeneuve made before his 2010 breakthrough Incendies, is a college campus and its environs during a blizzard – the brutalist architecture and freezing temperature redolent of the feelings of the lone shooter who matter-of-factly fires his semi-automatic rifle at women in a classroom, a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It was around the time of the 14th century Black Death that the word “corruption” – from the Latin corruptus, the past participle of corrumpere, “to mar, bribe, destroy” – was first associated with putrefaction. Moral corruption becomes inextricably entwined with fleshly decay in a cellphone video image of a dying hospital patient taken by a whistleblower that Alexander Nanau incorporated in his documentary Collective, which reveals the extent to which Romania’s state health system had become riddled with bribery by the mid 2010s.The male patient was attending the metalcore band Goodbye to Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
At 93-years-old and with a career that spans nearly 60 years, David Attenborough has spent a lifetime transporting audiences from the comfort of their sofas to the dazzling, often bewildering, majesty of the natural world. Now, he offers what he calls his ‘witness statement’, a Netflix documentary that not only charts Attenborough’s remarkable career, but also how the world has changed for the worse over those years. Biodiversity is dwindling, and with it goes humanity’s future prospects. Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey for Netflix, we go from seeing Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has composed little circular poems, similar (in style though not sentiment) to the posies you sometimes find inscribed on the inside of rings. He incorporates a couple into Reproduction, his debut and Griffin Prize-winning novel. “I’m sorry I made you hate me”, “no I don’t hate you baby don’t hurt me”, they read. Supposedly thought up by a teenager in the throes of childbirth, they speak to the seeming endlessness of labour pains as well as the forging of new bonds that are as hard to split as Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Sufjan Stevens is an artist of remarkable ambition. His 80-minute long new album, with 15 beautiful and poetic songs, belongs to a long line of pop experimentation that runs through from The Beatles and George Martin’s Stg Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Björk’s own highly literate and endlessly inventive mix of dance music and daredevil sonic exploration. He's as much at home baring his soul as he is evoking the turmoil of our times.The Ascension takes us on a rollercoaster of a journey, fuelled by the richness of analog keyboards – in this case a range of Prophet synthesisers whose Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Roughly two years since “the posh mums are boxing in the square” scooped first place in the 2018 National Poetry Competition, Wayne Holloway-Smith returns with Love Minus Love, his second full-length collection. The follow-up to Alarum (2017) includes that competition winner, which describes the magical revival of a cancer-stricken mother, sent into the boxing ring against the very tumour that threatens her life. Now, it is but one of many standout poems in this highly personal exploration of anxiety, broken families, and masculine fraility.If the voice of “the posh mums” performed its Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Watching the semi-satirical psychological horror film She’ll Die Tomorrow conjures the last lines of TS Eliot’s "The Hollow Men": “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature doesn’t depict a widescreen apocalypse – it’s a low-budget indie, after all – but offers a collective whimper from a not very likeable group of people living in relative comfort.If no atoms are split above Seimetz’s’s bourgie LA, there’s still a chain reaction. The protagonist – another Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil, pictured below) – is a thirtysomething lapsed Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the bizarrely personable world of the clinical organ farm, but South stretches the theme. She introduces the poignant figure of a fully-grown, childlike person with no language capabilities. Elsewhere in her debut collection, we run up against vicious pre-teen internet trolls, OAPs with a hankering for phone sex and the wavering figure of online celebrity, revealed to be a piecemeal mess in person.South’s Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Max Richter is the million-selling star of post-Minimalism, the composer of moody symphonies of a stillness that suggests otherworldly bliss and inner peace. The boundary between Richter and New Age isn’t always clear, not least in the work he makes outside his justly celebrated film soundtracks, where drama demands a greater variety of tones, textures, paces and rhythms.Voices features crowd-sourced readings from the UN declaration Declaration of Human Rights, in many different languages (from children as well as adults), spoken with the authentic passion that such a grounding text demands. Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell. In Blueprint Medea, a new adaptation premiered at the Finborough Theatre in May 2019 and available on YouTube until 2nd August, writer-director Julia Pascal gives us a 21st-century reworking of Euripides’ tragedy. This Medea (Ruth D’Silva) is a Kurdish freedom fighter who’s come to England on a dodgy passport; working illegally as a cleaner, she meets Jason (Max Rinehart) – or Mohammed, to his Iraqi-immigrant parents. They move in together and Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Opera Story is an enterprising set-up based in London and founded with a mission to commission and stage new operas by early career composers. They have so far produced three full-scale pieces, the earliest from 2017, performed in a reclaimed warehouse space in Peckham. I reviewed Dani Howard’s Robin Hood for theartsdesk in 2019 and found much to enjoy, not least the ambition of the company, and was looking forward to the new show Pandora’s Box, by composer Alex Woolf and librettist Dominic Kimberlin, which has now been postponed till 2021.Like so many musicians in the last three months, Read more ...