religion
fisun.guner
Can Marcus du Sautoy do for maths what Brian Cox did for physics? Can he convince us of the beauty of numbers and help us fall in love with pi? It’s a tall order, but not only does Professor du Sautoy have an unstoppable passion for ratios, he’s also a natural communicator, which clearly helps if you’re the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding for Science, which he is. And so du Sautoy guided us through some basic mathematical principles which underpin the workings of the universe. He introduced us to The Code.Everything is governed by The Code, he explained, and he made Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea. Geeky Hasidic kid from Brooklyn's claustrophobic Jewish community finds his attention wandering during his rabbinical studies, and falls under the raffish spell of the older and wilder Yosef Zimmerman. He finds the slope is slippery indeed, and with head-spinning speed he's enmeshed in a transatlantic drug-mule racket. He's making big piles of wedge, but losing his immortal soul in the process.Kevin Asch's directorial debut, which is based on the true story of a team of Hasidic smugglers who imported a million Ecstasy tablets from Amsterdam to the USA in 1998-99, has potential in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky. Above all, it’s a film which is buoyed – and which sometimes threatens to be sunk - by its own formidable ambition.The Tree of Life is only Malick’s fifth feature in a career spanning 38 Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the end of my road is a shrine dedicated to a young man murdered there more than a year ago. For the first few months lighted candles, plastic flowers, cards and poems penned by friends and relatives were left on a doorstep; now, though, a blue plaque commemorating his short life has appeared on the wall above a constantly burning flame. Over the years the messages have also changed from outpourings of sorrow to words of adulation; the lad, who by all accounts was a drug-dealing ne’er-do-well, has been elevated to the realm of sainthood by grieving parents determined to keep the flame Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Miracles and omens, blind faith and free will: Ibsen’s epic 1873 drama sinks its teeth into some tough, meaty themes. That it neither breaks the jaw, nor proves totally indigestible in this British premiere is testament to the power of Jonathan Kent’s production and the paciness of Ben Power’s version of the text. It remains rather more demanding than it is rewarding; but it’s hard to imagine how it could be more vividly brought to life.The action traverses Europe and the Middle East and takes places between 351 and 363 AD. Andrew Scott is Julian, nephew of the Christian Emperor Constantius, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I'm tired of Emmy the Great being lumped in with crappy singer-songwriters who've had way too much hype but couldn't write a decent lyric if they were tied to a chair and had a pistol pointed at their temple. Emma-Lee Moss bloomed from a singer-songwritery London milieu but she's a cut above the pack.I speak as one who's sick to death of acoustic guitar-strumming whiners. Like Malcolm Middleton, another fine underrated British singer-songwriter, she doesn't throw out one-size-fits-all palliatives for mopers; her songs are grounded yet enigmatic, allegorical, and as precisely constructed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics, religion and scientific philosophy, Donne’s life under James I holds up a mirror to the conflicted age that produced this extraordinary work of scholarship. Meshing the poet’s biography, his work and social history, Jonathan Holmes has produced a play whose scholarship and subject matter may be serious, but whose theatricality is poignantly, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Not long after the Good Friday Agreement, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast a charming drama featuring a tale of two drums. An Ulster Protestant was too wedded to the marching season to join his wife on holiday in Donegal, so she wrought her revenge by destroying his bass drum and replacing it with its Catholic antithesis, a bodhrán. If last night’s The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching is any indication, that won’t be happening on the Shankill Road any time soon. The drum, still clattered with percussive insistence by Protestant bandsmen, remains a powerful conduit for loyalty to Queen and crown. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Apocrypha is a word that has acquired a dubious meaning, for books of questioned value and authenticity, texts in various religions that may not necessarily be held divine. The Belgian-Moroccan dancemaker Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's dance work Apocrifu applies the word and its queries to the holiest of texts themselves, the Koran, Bible, Kojiki, in a secular era where religion is more about politics than faith. This might sound dubious material for a remarkable evening when you were choosing dance shows to see at the Brighton Festival - the transvestite cabaret probably sounded a better bet. Wrong Read more ...
josh.spero
Although in perhaps a less ostentatious manner than is familiar from Louis Theroux's documentaries, BBC Two's Wonderland last night nevertheless took the well-worn path of finding an odd-seeming community and examining its customs, morals and characters. In this case, it was the 20,000 Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill, north-east London, who - we were led to believe - had some pretty funny ideas about love.The superficial oddities of the culture must have seemed so inviting to the film-maker, Paddy Wivell: pious observance of hundreds of biblical rules of behaviour, from circumcision to Read more ...
howard.male
“Some say it will end in fire, others say there will be a flood…” So began Horizon’s sobering look at past Armageddon-themed episodes. But why not both? As I was writing this review from a preview DVD, ahead of its original scheduled broadcast on 17 March, news came through that the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan had been upgraded to a level-six crisis, on a scale of seven. Two thoughts simultaneously occurred to me: firstly, that doing the review was tempting fate. And secondly, that such superstitious, solipsistic thinking was symptomatic of the human race’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sensitive but unsparing, the debut feature from French writer-director Katell Quillévéré is a tender portrait of a shy, sweet teenager experiencing the first flushes of womanhood. Don’t be deterred by its somewhat sinister title; although Love Like Poison (or a Un Poison Violent, a phrase taken from a Serge Gainsbourg song) doesn’t dodge uncomfortable truths, it is distinguished and defined by its delicacy, insight and humanity.Returning from boarding school for the holidays, Anna Falguères (Clara Augarde), a taciturn teen, is confronted by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. Her Read more ...