religion
william.ward
Now here is something genuinely original and genuinely innovative coming out of Italian cinema, a very welcome surprise. Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature film has a freshness of outlook and a sharpness of overview that could put many of her more venerable rivals in Italy to shame. Corpo Celeste – Heavenly Body – based on the novel by acclaimed Anna Maria Ortese - recounts the story of 13-year-old Marta (Yle Vianello) and her somewhat traumatic return to the city of her birth in Southern Italy after spending the last 10 years in Switzerland as the daughter of poor immigrants. The most Read more ...
fisun.guner
This programme wants to challenge certain stereotypes around English identity. It wants to challenge the notion that to be English is to be “tolerant, white and Anglo-Saxon”. But before it does any of that, it wants to address just one question, and that is this: just why are the English so damned full of themselves? That’s right. Just where does their sense of superiority and entitlement come from? And what makes them think they can strut around the world with missionary zeal interfering in other people’s affairs all the time? OK, that’s several questions, but you see the theme. This episode Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Despite an unfortunate title which seemed to have fallen from the pages of the latest Cosmo sex survey (“add some spice to the bedroom: try reverse missionary”), the first instalment of this three-part series about faith, community and religious history had honourable intentions. Its starting premise was that Britain is not just broken but “saturated in secularism”, and throughout it acted as though both presumptions were not only a) true and b) indisputably Bad Things, but also that one was directly responsible for the other.On paper the idea had a neat symmetry. A religious leader from a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film is a series of very curious, strange and macabre unbelievable incidents,” said director Ken Russell of The Devils in 1971. "The point of the film really is the sinner who becomes a saint." The tribulations surrounding its release, still fresh in Russell's mind, could easily have been described as curious and strange too. The long-overdue arrival on DVD of his career landmark is important. The Devils is one of the most astonishing and powerful British films. Following Russell's death last year, its release now also serves as a posthumous tribute to the great auteur.Russell was Read more ...
fisun.guner
Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam is an exhibition about faith that even an avowed atheist might find rather moving. The last of the British Museum’s series of in-depth exhibitions exploring aspects of the three great Abrahamic religions, the exhibition attempts to shed light on what is, to outsiders at least, the most mysterious of religious rituals. And in so doing one is left undeniably humbled by the miracle of transcendent faith, as we read and listen to the words of believers experiencing what must be seen for them not only as an encounter with God but a deep sense of connection with Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken. It left Kiefer and his fellow New Imagers overshadowed and, in a paradox that is absolutely typical of the art Read more ...
william.ward
In his home country, the release of the latest film by Nanni Moretti is always an event, all the more so in the case of We Have a Pope – a bittersweet psychological comedy with tinges of tragedy about a cardinal who is elected to the throne of St Peter, has a panic attack, and does a runner leaving the Catholic Church in crisis and the world media with a bonzer news story. It arrives a full five years after his last outing, Il caimano.A profound neurotic whose long-term relationship with psychoanalysis seems to have resolved little, but which has provided him with endless material for his Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“My first album was a personal love letter to God,” Josh T Pearson tells me, looking like a cross between Johnny Cash and Moses. No wonder, then, that it took him 10 years to record another. On this year's release, Pearson had moved on, talking failed love like a punk Leonard Cohen stranded in the wilderness. Face to face, Pearson is, however, quite the Southern gent: the Last of the Country Gentlemen, as he calls himself in the title of the new album. In a west-London café, he recounted how he got here, and why he is nervous about this Saturday’s big gig at the Barbican.Pearson grew up in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I’m stood in the dusk in front of the tomb of Sheikh Hamid al-Nil as the sun sets on Khartoum, reddening in the exhaust-filled air as it deflates over a receding jumble of low-rise blocks spreading down the banks of the Nile and out towards Tuti Island, where the waters of the Blue and White Nile meet. This is no quaint, picturesque view, though you do feel you're in some ancient theatre of humanity when you land in Khartoum.The voice of a Koranic singer billows and froths from the PA and speakers studded around the conical cream-and-green tower of the mosque, and a crowd of several Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s the God factor. Although, until very recently, most British playwrights - being a secular bunch - have shied away from tackling questions of religious belief in their work, their American counterparts have had no such inhibitions. The market leader of this trend in the new generation is Catherine Trieschmann, whose 2006 play Crooked featured a “holiness lesbian”, and who now turns her sights on the clash between belief and science in rural Kansas.The main protagonist is Susan, a pregnant but unmarried science teacher from Manhattan who relocates to a small Kansas town, Plainview, which Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of us who regarded The Office as a work of comic genius (not a word I use lightly) will, I'm afraid, take some convincing about Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais's latest offering. Keen fans who have followed the duo's every move since that landmark sitcom will feel they know every last trope on display in Life's Too Short, from its mockumentary setting and unPC subject matter to dark comedy and celebrity guest spots.All those and more are present in the spoof documentary written and directed by Merchant and Gervais, in which they also appear. It's about Warwick Davis (played by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Some of the bravest people in theatre operate in the dance world. Lloyd Newson’s new DV8 production, Can We Talk About This?, tackles just as contentious and satirically explosive a subject as Javier de Frutos did in Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, the luridly anti-Papist work that got him death threats and a BBC ban in 2009. Newson takes on Islamic fundamentalism, confronts head-on the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the multiculturalism chimera, and in doing so may have forced himself to prepare for possible reprisals - not least when he shows this at the National Theatre next spring.The Read more ...