Features
Peter Culshaw
A couple of weeks ago on BBC’s Question Time one of the pundits airily commented that until recently no-one in the audience would have heard of Bamako, the capital of Mali. That wouldn’t be the case were there any world music fans there – for them, the country (perhaps only with Cuba as a rival) has the strongest and most renowned music heritage anywhere.There are more general reasons for the supremacy of Malian music, including its accessible, bluesy sounds and the fact that Francophone African music has always had a boost through Paris, the most global-music-friendly city in Europe. More Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Presented a clear fortnight ahead of the Oscars, while the BAFTAs might have little, if any, bearing on the decision making there, they at least provide an opportunity for the Brits to have a go at the glitz and glamour before award fatigue sets in. With treacherous weather an inauspicious portent, how the night would go was anyone's guess - for, as the ceremony began, only Daniel Day-Lewis and Anne Hathaway were clear favourites in their respective categories.Taking place at the Royal Opera House, this year's ceremony was presented by Stephen Fry who's had the gig on and off since 2001 (this Read more ...
Joe Muggs
As a south-east Londoner and a parent, I was overjoyed recently to discover the Blackheath Conservatoire and its range of family-friendly musical activities – and sad to realise that like so many arts institutions in the current climate it is under threat of closure. It is in fact in the very final stages of a fundraising drive to refinance its debt and prevent its demise – moving steadily towards a donation target of £175,000 needed by the end of this month.Of course, The Arts Desk is happy to support other arts organisations, but what made this even more worth reporting was a chance meeting Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Both on screen and off, Montgomery Clift was sensitive, hesitant, introspective, self-destructive and often tortured. A personality that expressed itself on film as if afraid of what the camera would reveal. There were at least three faces of Clift. The early public one of the dark, romantic, handsome star of the fan magazines; the face of extraordinary beauty marred after a car accident in 1956, and the private face of drink, drugs and a series of unloving homosexual encounters. Although the accident itself had not really disfigured him too seriously, it seems to have scarred his character Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Often it takes a generation or two before a country can address its dark days on films; Hitler didn’t feature in a central role in a German film until Downfall, in 2004. This timorousness was certainly the case in Chile, where in the immediate years following the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1990, the local cinema was dominated by sex comedies.But the renaissance in the country’s film industry over the past decade has been accompanied by a willingness to look back. Andres Wood’s Machuca led the way, in 2004, with a powerful child’s-view account of the days leading to the army Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Proving that laughter is the only sure-fire cure for the January blues, this year's London Comedy Film Festival took place over four days from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th January. Known commonly and affectionately as LOCO, it once again showcased the best of comedy filmmaking from around the world, lined-up alongside a range of imaginative events - a programme seemingly designed to give the most depressing month of the year a well deserved kick up the arse.Giving the intriguing but daunting sounding "Laughter Yoga" a wide berth on Thursday morning, I opted instead for Thursday evening's BFI Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
While the history of 20th-century music is undoubtedly the history of the 20th century – from the decadent expressionism of fin-de-siècle Berlin to the imagined surrealist worlds of 1920s Paris – few composers lived or wrote the century quite as vividly as Witold Lutosławski. He is celebrating his centenary this year. Although latterly obscured by the reputations of his countrymen Szymanowski and Penderecki, Lutosławski’s music combines lyricism and a fiercely rigorous formalism to produce works whose narrative force is unequalled.Fleeing Warsaw as Prussian forces approached in 1915 for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As promised, he's back. Arnold Schwarzenegger's last major movie appearance was in 2003's Teminator 3: Rise of the Machines, probably the worst of the Terminators but a lucrative one nonetheless. Since then he has popped up in a few cameo roles including an appearance as Prince Hapi in the Jackie Chan/Steve Coogan remake of Around the World in 80 Days, but from 2003-2011, he was mostly preoccupied with being governor of California. And handling a few personal issues of course, which led to him separating from his wife Maria Shriver in 2011.Anyway, this week the 65-year-old Arnold gets top Read more ...
David Nice
With the cuts still to bite deep, it's enterprising business as usual for both of London’s biggest concert-hall complexes and their satellite orchestras in the newly announced season to come. I use the word "complex" carefully, because as from September, the Barbican Centre, which already has access to LSO St Luke's up the road, will also be using the 608-seater hall constructed as part of its neighbouring Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court development.The Southbank Centre will soon be able to hold its head high about one reinstated asset which the Barbican Hall sadly can’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Michael Winner was always proud to call himself a film director but his filmography is notably short of quality moments. The likes of I'll Never Forget What's'isname and Hannibal Brooks in the 1960s, pointless remakes of The Big Sleep and The Wicked Lady, a questionable foray into theatrical adaptation with A Chorus of Disapproval, Lia Williams' reluctant turn as a vengeful killer in Dirty Weekend or his last film Parting Shots - these will not be remembered fondly (or even at all). Death Wish (starring Charles Bronson, pictured below) and its several offshoots, at least in the cinema, is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last November, for the 25,000th time on the stage, the actor playing Sergeant Trotter in The Mousetrap stepped forward during the curtain call and asked members of the audience not to reveal the play's surprise ending to others. To do so would, by implication, spoil the whodunnit for future audiences. Over the years the odd clever-clogs stand-up has disobeyed the injunction. And whoever wrote the play’s Wikipedia entry also gives the game away. The play being an old warhorse that even Agatha Christie thought no more than workmanlike, the revelation is all The Mousetrap has, and it has been Read more ...
fisun.guner
“The new job of art is to sit on a wall and get more expensive,” the late Robert Hughes once said. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, gallerist and dealer Larry Gagosian was particularly revealing. “I wish I was in luxury goods,” he confessed, “because then I could just call the factory and say, ‘I need 10,000 more of whatever’” – though he did add that he couldn’t, because “then it’s not art, it’s something else.”Meanwhile, the influential American critic Dave Hickey recently announced that he was walking away from the art world because editors and critics had become a “ Read more ...