Iceland
When the Light Breaks review - only lovers left aliveTuesday, 27 May 2025
Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic day in Rúnar Rúnarsson’s romantic tragedy, a Prix Un Certain Regard contender at last year’s Cannes.It starts with Una (Elín Hall) high on love with fellow Reykjavik art student Diddi... Read more... |
Goldberg Variations, Ólafsson, Wigmore Hall review - Bach in the shadow of BeethovenMonday, 14 April 2025
Víkingur Ólafsson had something to prove at the Wigmore Hall. And prove it he did, even if, this time, his Goldberg Variations left a few features of Bach’s inexhaustible keyboard panorama at the edge of his pianistic picture. The much-loved... Read more... |
Reykjavik, Hampstead Theatre review - drama frozen by waves of detailMonday, 28 October 2024
“Don’t take a piss in the house of a woman you have made a widow.” The mixture of earthy comedy and tragic pain in this piece of parental advice is typical of the tone of Richard Bean’s Reykjavik, his new work play which explores the lives of the... Read more... |
Album: John Grant - The Art of the LieWednesday, 12 June 2024
“I feel ashamed because I couldn’t become the man that you always hoped I’d become.” The line is repeated during “Father,” The Art of the Lie’s third track. After this, there’s “Mother and Son,” “Daddy” and the allusive “The Child Catcher”. Parent-... Read more... |
Driving Mum review - a dark comedy that has you laughing out loudTuesday, 27 February 2024
Hilmar Oddsson’s award-winning film Driving Mum is pitch-perfect. Jon has spent the last 30 years looking after his domineering mother. There they sit, side by side, in a remote cottage on Iceland’s western fjords, knitting jumpers to sell to the... Read more... |
It's Headed Straight Towards Us, Park Theatre review - indigestible mix of fact and fictionThursday, 21 September 2023
An impressive performance by Samuel West as one of two warring hams stuck on-set in a trailer over a not-so-dormant volcano in Iceland, endlessly waiting to shoot their scene and go home, tended by a young runner whose woke values soon clash with... Read more... |
Album: Sigur Rós - ÁTTAFriday, 16 June 2023
It’s easy to take Sigur Rós’s emotive force for granted. So ubiquitous has their 2005 “Hoppípolla” been on everything from talent shows to apocalyptic environmental collapse documentaries to lyrical scenes of birds in flight that it became the... Read more... |
Godland review - a sly sagaSaturday, 08 April 2023
Iceland’s soul lies in its interior, a forbidding heartland which overwhelms 19th century Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) on his ill-considered posting to this colonial backwater.Director Hlynur Pálmason showed his talent for snapping... Read more... |
Classical CDs: Deserted churches, funeral marches and a Cornish lifeboatSaturday, 11 February 2023
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, Elgar: Introduction and Allegro etc Sinfonia of London/John Wilson (Chandos)John Wilson has done it again! He is, at breakneck speed, building an extraordinary catalogue of... Read more... |
Prom 34, Soltani, BBC Philharmonic, Ollikainen review - journeys into inner worldsFriday, 12 August 2022
Proper music tells stories just about itself, the stern pedagogues insist; it doesn’t (or anyway shouldn’t) paint descriptive pictures of places and people. Well, maybe not – but it was hard to banish all thoughts of geography, even of biography, at... Read more... |
The Northman review - Robert Eggers's elemental Viking epicFriday, 15 April 2022
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white... Read more... |
Thora Hjörleifsdóttir: Magma review - love burns in debut novel from IcelandTuesday, 03 August 2021
Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s Magma is certainly not an easy read. It describes, in short chapters, the obsessive and ultimately destructive power of an abusive relationship. It is, at times, patchily written (perhaps because we have been... Read more... |
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