religion
Jasper Rees
A few years ago something curious happened to Tom Hollander. He grew up. As a brilliant young actor he won the Sunday Times Ian Charleson Award for a series of stage performances whose governing tone was mercurial energy. But as he moved into film, the sense was of an actor who was more eager to be noticed than believed. In the past few years, however, he has found a vulnerable side, as a hapless government minister in In The Loop and most recently as a minister of the church, the Reverend Adam Smallbone. This week sees Rev’s second coming.A thoroughly engaging sitcom, it stars Hollander as Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Abi Morgan is on something of a multi-platform roll right now. Between writing the Beeb's enjoyably hokey The Hour and scripting The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic which will be hitting our screens shortly before Christmas with all the force of a jet-propelled handbag, comes a new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. An altogether more esoteric offering, 27 raises questions of faith, morality, memory and the role of science by examining the lives of a group of nuns.Mother Superior Miriam and the younger Sister Ursula (“Jackie to her JFK”) belong to a convent in a remote part of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you can judge a man by his friends then the volatile Joseph would be something of a contradiction. His best mate is looking death in the eye, riddled with sickness and regret (and by all accounts left that way by the lifestyle they both shared). Then there’s the wheeler-dealer prone to racist tirades. On the redemptive side is the charming, if porcelain-fragile friendship that he strikes up with dedicated Christian Hannah. It’s this friendship - and that which he also forms with a young, isolated boy on his estate – on which the film pivots.In Tyrannosaur Peter Mullan plays embittered Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Martin Scorsese’s mammoth, authorised survey of the life of George Harrison is a strange old thing. Deeply moving, poetic, full of love, wit and warmth, it's also at times oddly assembled and, at a shade over three and a half hours, runs wide but not always terribly deep. Using archive footage - including much unseen film and photography - and music that's both instantly familiar and previously unheard, the film's narrative voice is stitched together from old interviews with Harrison and the comments of other principals: the two surviving Beatles, wife Olivia, son Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ex-voto paintings are a tradition in Mexico, an offering of gratitude to God and the saints for answered prayers, row after row of them lining the walls of Mexican churches, testifying to the congregations’ devotion, and to the enduring link between man and the spiritual. In artistic terms, however, these paintings, which have been created from the 16th century onwards, are one of the great national archives of folk art, extraordinary depictions of ordinary people: a moving, comic, tragic, epic narrative that is not to be missed.Ex-votos, or retablos, began to be painted in the 16th century, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It takes an ultra-liberal Catholic like Kevin Smith to tear into Christian fundamentalism with Red State’s ferocious accuracy. The writer-director’s 10th is being sold as a horror film, but the only demons to be seen are those of church and state.When his debut Clerks became a micro-budget paragon of independent cinema in 1994, Smith gently dismissed himself as “a 24-year-old with a talent for dick jokes”. In some subsequent films – Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), for instance - he’s seemed happy to live down to that, and massage his own cult. Red State is a radical change. An early Read more ...
hilary.whitney
William Dalrymple wrote his highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu, an account of his journey to the ruins of Kubla Khan's stately pleasure dome, when he was 22. In 1989 he moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching and writing his second book, City of Djinns (1993), which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award. Since then he has published five further books, all of which have won major prizes. White Mughals (2003), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, is to be made into a film directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes.Dalrymple also has an illustrious Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"I wanted to do an album that would be very uplifting and positive, as well as inspirational," quoth the divine Miss P of her latest waxing. Starting as she means to go on, she opens with the chunky honky-tonk pop of "In the Meantime", which crams a panorama of hopes and fears behind its perky exterior. We shouldn't worry about nuclear war and Armageddon, she advises, because "nobody knows when the end is coming" and besides, "God still lives in the hearts of men". Oh, and we should take care to look after the planet, too.There's quite a lot of this sort of holy-rolling self-helpism sprinkled Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A nine-year-old girl testifies in court. She’s clear, precise and damning. The case revolves around her testimony alone. All the accused – 10 of them, her family and neighbours - are declared guilty and executed. The girl is the only one of the family left alive. Thirty-two years later, the girl faces the same charges. Tried, she’s found guilty but the case goes to appeal. The girl was Jennet Device and the charge was witchcraft. This extraordinary, atmospheric and beautiful documentary told her story, the story of The Pendle Witch Child, the implications of the case and how it resonated. And Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pre-publicity has been spinning this saga of the notorious Renaissance family as a kind of origin story for The Sopranos. I suppose you could argue that Rodrigo Borgia, like Tony Soprano, was in the waste management business, as he himself suggested when he took the Papal throne as Alexander VI: "God has chosen us as a new broom to sweep the Vatican clean of corruption."But Rodrigo is undoubtedly aiming higher than a few sleazy rackets in New Jersey. As the incantation went at his spectacular coronation in Rome, "You are father of kings and monarchs, lord of the globe, earthly resident of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In Düsseldorf in the 1970s there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers – and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a proud art city, and published at the time a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great messianic leader Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter (and Gotthard Graubner among others) taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography and photographed anonymous industrial architecture in black and white. Germany rejoined and even led the avant-garde that it had destroyed in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
In 1981, when I last came to Bayreuth, the festival still seemed to be a battleground between the German Left and Right, between the blame faction and the guilt faction, between the commie East and the fat-cat West. Plus ça change. Without quite openly taking sides, Sebastian Baumgarten’s new staging of Tannhäuser rings some cracked old political bells while, apparently with Bayreuth’s connivance, candidly parodying most of the thinking that underpins this admittedly somewhat raw, yet for Wagner absolutely crucial early work.Baumgarten is the latest scion of the Felsenstein school, a pupil of Read more ...