Venice
Marina Vaizey
The National Gallery has produced a revelatory and unprecedented exhibition which shows us an array of paintings from cabinet size to mammoth by a long acknowledged star: Veronese, probably the most flamboyantly exciting artist at the heart of the Renaissance in Venice.Paolo Caliari (1528-1588) known as Veronese in honour of his native city, was born in Verona the son of a stonecutter, and was originally destined to be a sculptor. Changing media, it is his 30-plus years or so in Venice at its artistic heights at the heart of the 16th century, that made him a force to be reckoned with, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As you may recall, Jeremy Deller represented Britain at last year’s Venice Biennale and a distilled version of English Magic, his British Pavilion show, is now installed in the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. It's an especially relevant first stop on a tour that continues to Bristol and Margate, since Morris features large in Deller’s idiosyncratic commentary on British culture. William Morris is best known as the brains behind the Arts and Crafts movement and designer of those famous wallpaper patterns, but he was also an ardent socialist keen to improve the lot of the poor – not Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What better way to celebrate Christmas than by contemplating this sublime altarpiece by the celebrated Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini? It hangs above a sidechapel in the church of San Zaccaria in Venice offering blissful relief from the noise and bustle of the narrow streets around San Marco. Listening with quiet concentration is one of the themes. Virgin and child sit on a raised throne absorbing the music played on a violin by an angel seated below them. With similarly downcast eyes, the saints standing on either side seem lost in thought.The saints are so immersed in reverie that, Read more ...
graham.rickson
From the strange, stuttering opening to its elegiac, drawn-out coda, this is an exquisite, lovingly realised staging of Britten's last opera. It's so good that it amplifies any doubts that you might have about this peculiar, distinctly unlovable piece.Perhaps we've been spoilt here in Leeds by the concurrent revivals of Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night's Dream – both vibrant, colourful operas. Death in Venice is a tougher proposition – the score so spare, so parched that you can't help suspecting at times that Britten's inspiration was starting to flag. Thomas Mann's source novella was Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, with its meditative visual beauty, but that one was very much the exception in the director’s oeuvre to date.Almost all Kim's other films have been marked by varying degrees Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Austere, beautiful, heartbreaking, streaked with genius - that goes for both Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice and Deborah Warner’s remarkable production of it for ENO, returning all too briefly to the Coliseum, with a superb central performance. Besiege the box office for one of the four remaining performances if you want to see contemporary operatic art refined to its most personal and powerful.The story is well-known from Thomas Mann’s novella and Luchino Visconti’s classic film: the downfall of a mature novelist who visits Venice to break his writer’s block, and there falls in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Three paintings by Titian depicting stories from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses welcome you to the National Gallery’s exhibition Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. Diana and Callisto shows Diana casting out the pregnant nymph Callisto from her company. Diana and Actaeon depicts the young Actaeon out hunting and stumbling into a sacred grotto where Diana and her nymphs are bathing; and in The Death of Actaeon, we see the goddess exacting vengeance on the intruder by turning him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds.You may remember the public appeals that helped save these splendid paintings Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”There’s something about da Mosto that makes TV producers come over all unnecessary. In their view there is no one more ruggedly handsome and intrinsically Italian than he. Thus, in Shakespeare in Italy, if he wasn’t captured driving his red Alfa Romeo down country Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
This year’s Venice Film Festival has been awash with great directors from what one might call the old guard: David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Aleksander Sokurov, Philippe Garrel. But when the jury presents its prizes tonight, I hope that it honours some of the new, young film-makers who have been the ones to set this festival alight.Chief amongst those has been a Brit, Steve McQueen, who follows his extraordinary debut, Hunger, with a second film that has shaken and stirred the critics here. The focus of Shame is Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a successful New Yorker whose Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I wonder if it’s possible for a film festival to kick off with a bigger bang. For your first three competition films to be directed by one of the world’s biggest movie stars, one of its most celebrated (and controversial) auteurs and arguably the world’s most famous woman, is no mean feat. And two of these films are pretty damn good. Italy’s economy might be down there with the dregs of Europe, but its premier film festival, now in its 68th year, shows no sign of being knocked off its perch.To call George Clooney a movie star does the man an injustice, of course, since he’s well on the path Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Don’t Look Now really the best British film of all time? That’s how a panel of 150 industry experts voted earlier this year in a poll compiled by Time Out. But then, out of a list of 100 top British movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives came third, ahead of Brief Encounter (12) or anything by Hitchcock.Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural chiller no longer shocks with its infamous scene of explicit sex; and the scenes featuring the two spooky sisters remind us that Roeg’s interest in cinematography and clever editing seems often to outweigh his interest in getting the best out of his actors. But Read more ...