21st century
Robert Beale
An evening of “scenic orchestral works”, according to the programme booklet, was on offer from the BBC Philharmonic on Saturday. Scenic was certainly true of the Seven Early Songs of Alban Berg and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. But Tom Coult’s Three Pieces That Disappear was something else.The high romantic word setting and vivid orchestral picture painting of Berg and Strauss are in familiar aesthetic modes: the music (and the words of nature poetry, in the Berg) animate your imagination, and something visual may well pop into your head, aided of course by the composer’s own descriptive Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do. Of course, Brutalism would shun such foolishly romantic notions, one of its key practitioners, Le Corbusier, famously remarking, “Architecture or revolution”. And with the white heat of technology still burning bright, he provided the template for the Park Hill Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie. Thankfully, that title was spiked and not just because it’s trite. Smoke gives us a key to unlock a complicated, clever and challenging play unafraid to treat its audience as grown-ups and all the more rewarding for that.Sami Fendall’s set comprises a square shallow pit filled with black sand with an upturned Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s been a good year for donkeys at the cinema. Not only did Martin McDonagh make a surprise star out of Jenny the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, but she’ll be competing at the Oscars with the title character of EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s paean to beautiful Sardinian donkeys. The veteran Polish director has crafted a film like no other, weaving together extraordinary images with a devastating score by Pawel Mykietyn. We first meet Eo performing with a travelling circus. He’s led through his tricks in the ring by his devoted trainer Kasandra ( Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ben Gernon’s calm and clear way of conducting an orchestra (something he once told me he’d observed in the work of his mentor, Colin Davis) is good to watch and, I would guess, welcomed by those he directs. Since his time with the BBC Philharmonic as principal guest conductor (2017-2020) he’s been a welcome visitor to them in Manchester and Salford, and this programme pulled a good crowd and was indeed very rewarding.That doesn’t mean that everything they did together was perfect, but when it worked, it worked beautifully. Beginning a programme with something that needs instant Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A film telling just the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s campaign against Purdue Pharmacy would have been worth the ticket price alone.But Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers so much more. It moves between two interlocking strands: the twin stories of Nan the activist and Nan the artist, and, fascinatingly, shows how one informed the other. Goldin grew up in New Jersey but at 14, silenced by her older sister’s death, was sent away to reforming schools and was only saved when she ended up at a hippie establishment that didn’t believe in expelling Read more ...
Saskia Baron
We’re told from childhood that it’s rude to stare at people, but sometimes it’s hard to extinguish that desire and sitting in a dark cinema can provide the perfect opportunity. If seing Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight and Corsage left you craving more screen time with her, More than Ever might just satiate that yen. It’s another chance to allow this fine-featured, body-confident actor to show her emotional range to us watchers in the shadows.Freed from constricting corsetry this time round, Krieps plays Hélène, whose happy life in Bordeaux with her husband Mattheiu (Gaspard Read more ...
Graham Fuller
This is not a rehash of my Skinty Fia review, but smoke from the same grate.Asbury Park, New Jersey, 5 October – we've driven down from NYC to see Fontaines DC play hopefully most of their blistering third album at the Stone Pony venue. Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny played here in the Seventies. It's legendary – and bad news for we arthritics. The stage is not at the end of the narrow hall opposite the entrance and the bar but runs along a side wall, so the audience is squashed and stretched in front of it. Naturally wanting to get as close as we could to the Irish quintet Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)3= Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen); and3= Happening (Audrey Diwan)5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel)6. Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)7= The Duke (Roger Michell); and7= Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)9. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) Each critic’s first choice was Read more ...
Mark Kidel
I am a sucker for Malian singers. I have been ever since I made a couple of films there at the end of the 1980s. According to ancient tradition, the jalis, and other singers have a mission: to open the hearts of those who hear them, and to fill them with healing and courage. Thirty years on, Rokia Koné keeps the flame going and touches me in the same way. Her first solo album, the highpoint of the year for me is, a collaboration with US producer Jacknife Lee, who brings to the combination exquisite taste and a profound complicity with West African soul. He is always at the service of the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).Which makes me feel slightly less guilty for going back this year again and again to the softest cinematic comfort blanket I know, Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1969). In new films I didn't review, I was entranced by the compelling performance of Renate Reinsve as the woman whose Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Empires rise and fall; every dog has its day. The increased awareness of and need for diverse voices – together with the series-driven streaming revolution – has made Hollywood less relevant now than it has been at any time since the industry colonised Southern California's orange groves. Even stars have become an endangered species.I enjoyed Licorice Pizza, The Fabelmans, and Bullet Train (until its awful last scene), but the films listed below speak with an urgency avoided by American mainstream movies with their escapist imperative – She Said being a grave, classy Read more ...