Paris
An American in Paris review - 'stagecraft couldn't be slicker'Wednesday, 22 March 2017
What’s in a yellow dress? Hope over experience? Reckless confidence? This is a legitimate question when the second big cross-Atlantic people-pleaser hoves into view featuring a girl in a frock of striking daffodil hue. It doesn’t take a degree in... Read more... |
Personal ShopperThursday, 16 March 2017
What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking... Read more... |
Midnight Sun, Sky AtlanticThursday, 16 March 2017
You can just hear Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, the clever-sick Swedes behind Midnight Sun, cackling as they cooked up the pre-title sequence to the first episode of their new series. A grizzled man in a grey suit wakes up to find himself strapped... Read more... |
DVD: ResetWednesday, 15 March 2017
The curious thing about Reset, the documentary that tracks the making of a new ballet by Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opera Ballet, is that it clearly had another agenda. Millepied, a Frenchman nicely named for his profession, was a left-field... Read more... |
Elle review - sexual violence, black humour and satireWednesday, 08 March 2017
As Elle’s director Paul Verhoeven put it, “we realised that no American actress would ever take on such an immoral movie.” However, Isabelle Huppert didn’t hesitate, and has delivered a performance of such force and boldness that even the disarming... Read more... |
Arena: Alone with Chrissie Hynde, BBC FourSaturday, 11 February 2017
Despite having been a rock star since the late Seventies, Chrissie Hynde seems to be an introverted, elusive sort of person. If this Arena profile was anything to go by, she lives as a virtual recluse, positively revelling in solitariness. Like the... Read more... |
Adriana Lecouvreur, Royal OperaWednesday, 08 February 2017
Adriana Lecouvreur deserves to be better known. The opera has a toe-hold in the repertoire, with occasional appearances, usually as a showcase for the soprano in the title role. Its composer, Francesco Cilea, is known for little else, but the opera... Read more... |
Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence, BBC TwoSunday, 29 January 2017
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and... Read more... |
Maigret's Dead Man, ITVMonday, 26 December 2016
So this is Christmas – and what have they done? Scheduled a detective drama that begins with a family being carved up with an axe. Ho ho ho! While Maigret’s Dead Man was no doubt intended to provide a healthy corrective to the festive feel-goodery... Read more... |
Art, Old VicThursday, 22 December 2016
I avoided seeing Art when it was first staged in 1996, even though Matthew Warchus’ production created a huge buzz and won an Olivier Award for Comedy. (On receiving the award, Yasmina Reza joked that she thought she’d written a tragedy not a comedy... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Theo & HugoWednesday, 07 December 2016
Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have described the budget on which they made their latest film Theo & Hugo – the French directors have been collaborators, as well as partners, since the mid-1990s – as a “pirate” one, its restrictions... Read more... |
FrancofoniaFriday, 11 November 2016
The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has never been afraid of tackling weighty, often philosophical issues head on, and his latest film Francofonia is as pioneering – and, some might say, unnecessarily uncompromising – as ever. It’s nothing less... Read more... |
