London
Saskia Baron
Paddington 2 is that rare thing, a sequel that is more engaging than the original by dint of having a far better baddie. In the first film Nicole Kidman’s villainess was a bleached rehash of Cruella De Ville or Morticia – and it was far from her finest hour. She simply didn't convince as an evil taxidermist intent on giving Paddington a good stuffing. The sequel replaces Kidman with Hugh Grant, who steps into the kind of role that the late Alan Rickman once made his own. Grant plays Phoenix Buchanan, a neighbour of the Brown family living in the same chintzy crescent. Buchanan is a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
At first glance, Susie Boyt’s sixth novel seems in danger of echoing her half-sister Esther Freud’s Lucky Break, another story about actors. But how unfair – of course Love and Fame has its own distinctive, witty brilliance. Eve Swift comes from an acting dynasty but she is a failed thespian after nerves – “She’s as highly strung as a violin factory” – force her to pull out of playing Nina in The Seagull. For four weeks of rehearsals she doesn’t eat, apart from monkey nuts, or sleep. At first the intensity of her performance works – “You do lost so well, Eve” – but then it Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When the songwriting partnership of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford returned two years ago, it was with a renewed sense of vim and vitality following nearly two decades away. The Knowledge continues that revival with a collection of songs that often read like short stories, bursting with detail, smart insight and, occasionally, sharp invective.“Every Story” and “Rough Ride” are two such songs. The former feels like classic Squeeze; two voices, one taking the low road, the other the high, both describing a world of scratch cards and big dreams in which “Kids think they’re adults and adults Read more ...
Rebecca Sykes
Born into an artistic Swedish-speaking household in Helsinki, Tove Jansson’s first, and most enduring, ambition was to be a painter. Although best known as the illustrator behind the creatures of Moominvalley, those plump white hippopotamus-like folk with an existential longing for adventure, Jansson came to regard her widely successful creations as a distraction from what she considered to be her “real work”.Jansson’s illustrations may have been exhibited in Britain before, but Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first to make explicit those connections between the artist’s graphic work and her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The streets around Grenfell Tower on the morning after it was consumed by fire heaved with people. A stream of donors brought food, clothes and toiletries, while news crews and journalists came in vans or on foot as if arriving in a war zone. Not half a mile from the smouldering sarcophagus, I cycled past a primary school with children playing as normal in the playground, and wondered if this was what the Blitz was like. An unfathomable disaster on the doorstep. The only certain difference was in the camera phones aimed ravenously at the flames still licking the flanks of the tower.Stories Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Julian Anderson’s 50th birthday this year was the prompt for the latest of the BBC’s Total Immersion days, devoted to the work of a single contemporary composer. I have long been a fan of Anderson’s music since hearing the marvellous Khorovod in the 1995 Proms, but, after a couple of recent blips – I was not so keen on the opera Thebans or the recent Piano Concerto – I was ready to have my admiration re-awakened. And, in large measure, it was.The day consisted of three concerts of which I heard two: the BBC Singers surveying Anderson’s choral output and the BBC Symphony Orchestra his Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Now we know who sent Jonas Kaufmann the Union Jack boxer shorts for the Last Night of the Proms. Whether the sender’s identity is the bigger surprise, or the hint of ambiguity over whether the "Greatest Tenor in the World" had previously heard of one of Britain’s favourite baritones – well, you decide. And no, we don’t learn who threw the knickers at him from the arena.It’s all good clean fun in the Jonas Kaufmann show. The Last Night of the Proms 2015 was just one incident in an action-packed two years for the German opera star, whose popularity currently sweeps all before it. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. It's Netflix’s new series about the FBI in the Seventies, when the Bureau was slowly starting to realise that catching criminals needed more than the old “just the facts, ma’am” approach. Society is changing and so is crime, with serial killers like Ted Bundy and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz baffling the sleuthing community with their seemingly motiveless killings. Into this strange new world walks Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who, despite his Joe College Read more ...
peter.quinn
Held auspiciously on the hundredth birthday of one of the giants of the music, composer and pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982), the winners of this year's Parliamentary Jazz Awards were announced at a congenial ceremony at London’s newest live venue, PizzaExpress Live Holborn.MC’d by PizzaExpress’s debonair Music Manager, Ross Dines, this thirteenth edition of the annual awards – organised by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group (APPJAG) – was the first to take place outside its spiritual home, the Houses of Parliament. Fuelled by pizza and Peroni (sponsors of the Read more ...
David Nice
Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb performances, in the monologue sequence Queers, surely due a second series. Now it's the turn of one of our greatest novelists - no need to add the qualifying "on gay subjects" - to make even richer work than Queers of stimulating our imaginations by leaving us to fill in the gaps."The Sparsholt Affair" is the big, offstage crisis at the heart of Alan Hollinghurst's dance to the music of time, his pictures at an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The curtain-raiser for the 61st London Film Festival was Breathe, not only Andy Serkis’s debut as a director, but also a film based on the family experiences of its producer, Jonathan Cavendish. It was the story of how his father Robin, a tea broker in Kenya in the late 1950s, met and married Diana but then contracted polio, which left him paralysed. The couple’s determined battle against his condition eventually brought about some revolutionary developments in the treatment of severely disabled patients.Serkis and screenwriter William Nicholson have approached the project with Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
If the best is the enemy of the good, then the excellent is also the enemy of the "meh". And if you can stomach Verdi's Aida, go and see English National Opera’s new production for its central performance by Latonia Moore. In what’s become her signature role – the American soprano has sung Aida a hundred times previously – her searingly expressive, silvery tone and complete inhabiting of the character brought the doomed Ethiopian princess in Egyptian enslavement leaping to life. Unfortunately she was the pearl in an oyster that otherwise proved rather resistant to winkling – showing up how Read more ...