England
Justine Elias
The enduring image of the 1984-1985 Miners' Strike is that of men standing arm in arm against police and of mass protests devolving into mayhem – with protesters being beaten and knocked to the ground.But it wasn’t just men who were on the front lines, as Iron Ladies recalls. Directed by Daniel Draper, the documentary focuses on the essential and inspiring efforts of working-class women – some wives and daughters of miners, some neighbours – who organized as Women Against Pit Closures.Though some of the women had previous connections to local party politics, or to the CND and other protest Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a wraith.It exemplifies one of the hallmarks of a good model – the ability to become a screen that invites projection, rather than expressing your own personality. And in shot after shot for British and American Vogue, Miller remains an enigma – impassive and searingly beautiful. Would the exhibition bring her into sharper focus, as I hoped, or would Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rockin’ vicar the Rev Richard Coles is not only a C of E priest and former member of Bronski Beat and The Communards, but also a purveyor of crime fiction in the shape of his Canon Clement mysteries. The first of these was Murder Before Evensong, and now it has arrived on Acorn TV, where they do a lot of this sort of thing.As its title might suggest, Murder… is rich in echoes of classic British crime-and-detection stories from way back when. There’s plenty of Agatha Christie in the mix, some Midsomer Murders, maybe a bit of Morse and perhaps a shaving or two of M R James’s celebrated ghost Read more ...
Gary Naylor
An opening video montage presents us with a rogues' gallery of powerful men who have done bad things. Plenty of the usual suspects appear to stomach-churning effect, but no ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced last week to five years in prison by the usually tolerant French. So the problem certainly hasn’t gone away with the Clintons, Weinsteins and they’re ilk. We all know the “power corrupts…” quote, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised and, maybe, we should be a little wary of vesting so much power in such men – that is, most men.Duke Vincentio, no stranger to sins of the flesh Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest instalment of the ITV drama department’s attempts at trial by television is another anatomy of a scandal, but with little of the emotive power of Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It’s an odd, ungainly construct that attempts to meld two separate plotlines, almost as if two dramas were prepared independently and then belatedly welded together. Jack Thorne is credited as the writer of both, the able author of, among many other TV hits, Adolescence and National Treasure. But even he can’t stitch this unwieldy material Into a coherent, impactful whole.The point of contact between the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Robert Plant is magnificently well-equipped to shine as a consummate musical survivor: not only has his voice kept its magic, with a range from sensual caress to ecstatic howl, but he’s deeply rooted in timeless music, Scots-Irish and American folk as well as the country blues.These qualities were well in evidence when he exploded onto the rock scene with Led Zeppelin, a pioneer of heavy metal, whose fire was tempered by an affinity with the magical side of British folk and the melancholy beauty of the blues. His latest album, the first with Saving Grace, his regular touring band for the last Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Like the lighting that crackles now and again to indicate an abrupt change of scene or mood, Simon Stone's version of The Lady from the Sea is illuminated by the sense of adventure and excitement one has come to expect from this singular artist. That's the case even if the cumulative effect falls short of his devastating achievements with the National Theatre's Phaedra or, before that, Billie Piper in Yerma. Moment by moment, the play arrestingly repurposes Ibsen's mystical 1888 play for today, and not only because the text makes reference to OnlyFans, Brooklyn Beckham, and Beyoncé Read more ...
aleks.sierz
OMG! I mean OMG doubled!! This is amazing! Or is it? Can Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel at the Almeida Theatre really be the best play on the London stage, or is it not? Can it be both brilliant and exasperating? At one and the same time? Probably. Maybe. Okay, now you’re in the zone.What’s instantly compelling is the sheer ambition of this dream-like family epic. And I mean epic. Across something like a century and more, Birch shows us what happens to the three sons of Henry Roman, a Victorian gentleman whose brother John is a high-ranking soldier, and whose family live in an English Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour. Some of its gags, like the amplifier that goes up to 11 and the stage prop of a miniature Stonehenge, ought to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if the band themselves are seen Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It can be a hostage to fortune to title anything “grand”, and so it proves with the last gasp of Julian Fellowes’s everyday story of posh folk at the turn of the 20th century. The Granthams are facing a lowering of their status, and it’s time to move on out. Fellowes has just two hours to make something significant out of his plot strands, and a certain amount of corner-cutting was predictable. Exposition is pretty minimal, so good luck to anybody who didn’t give up on the series halfway through. Characters are studiously referred to by their new married names, so that relationships Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I love irony. Especially beautiful irony. So I’m very excited about the ironic gesture of staging a show with no words at the Royal Court, a venue which boasts of being the country’s premier new writing theatre. Billed as “a new experiment in performance”. Cow | Deer uses only sound to evoke the lives of two animals, one domesticated, the other wild.Created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, the piece is performed using the talents of a quartet of performers and Foley artists (Foley being sound effects usually added post-production to films, and so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
ITV continues its passion for docudramas about injustice, which you can’t blame it for after the rip-roaring success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The issue in I Fought the Law is, from one angle, of national (even International) importance, though compared to the persecution of hundreds of innocent postmasters, some of whom committed suicide, its cause is a rarer bird.The person fighting the law is Ann Ming (Sheridan Smith), a feisty mother from Billingham, near Middlesbrough, whose daughter Julie, her oldest child, goes missing in 1989. It takes over two months for her body to be Read more ...