Features
Jasper Rees
Apart from “I did not have sex with that woman” and maybe “It’s the economy, stupid”, Bill Clinton seems never to have said anything quite as memorable. Indeed, of all the phrases with his name attached, none is quoted quite so tremulously as Clinton's description of an event that takes place annually on the border between England and Wales as May makes way for June.Clinton’s “Woodstock of the mind” is actually a misnomer. The Hay Festival, which is celebrating its 25th birthday, is much closer to a Glastonbury of the mind. It occupies its place in the calendar with an ever greater sense of Read more ...
simon.broughton
With the yelling and posturing, R.U.T.A. are clearly a punk band, but it’s like no punk band you’ve ever heard before. The lyrics are in Polish, for one thing, and there are no guitars, but Middle Eastern lutes, archaic fiddles and a battery of percussion. They only formed last year, but already R.U.T.A. – a jokey acronym for the Movement of Utopia, Transcendence and Anarchy - have stirred up controversy.The conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice) party, second largest in the Polish parliament, tried to get them banned at a festival for being “anti-Polish and anti-Catholic”. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was already apparent from Melody Gardot's last album, My One and Only Thrill, that she harboured a more than passing infatuation with the music of Brazil and Latin America. "I love Brazilian music, it's one of my favourite genres," she said at the time. "I love the Stan Getz bossa nova years, I love Getz/Giberto, Jobim, Caetano Veloso... "Three years on, Gardot reaffirms her presence with The Absence, a disc on which her latin leanings have erupted into a full-scale rain forest of shimmering strings, lissome acoustic guitars, supple beats and feline melodies. At a recent showcase Read more ...
Joe Muggs
After a double set of live studio guests in our last show, it's just Joe and Peter this time, and thus a lot more music and discussion. Our intrepid explorers ponder whether there's anything new under the sun, looking at new-sounding folk and old-sounding electronica, angry British hip hop, Swedish jazz-punk, Mexican boutique hotels, murder blues and Crowley-referencing ambient music. There's an exclusive live recording of an acid folk band covering an acid house classic, a broad selection of sound due to come out in the next month or two, and a donkey joke from Peter that's not to be Read more ...
Philip Hoare
Volcano was written in 1956 when Noël Coward was suffering the dubious status of having become Britain’s first celebrity tax exile. The play – unperformed in his lifetime - is the product of his laidback life in Jamaica, and of a period during which he was regarded as a crumbling colonial relic outmoded by a post-war Labour government and the rowdy commotions of the Angry Young Men back home.Coward’s reputation had taken a battering in the post-war years. The British public were no longer satisfied with reruns of Brief Encounter, and critics such as Beverley Baxter posed the question, " Read more ...
bella.todd
As finales go, you can’t get much better than a pterodactyl flying from the torso of an iron giant and wheeling out over Brighton beach. Last night, as the 2012 Brighton Festival prepared to move into its final day, thousands gathered near the seafront for Waterlitz, the latest free, camera-phone defying outdoor spectacle from bonkers French company Générik Vapeur. A 30-ton figure made from eight metal shipping containers, the structure could apparently be seen from neighbouring Rottingdean, looking like a cross between the Wicker Man and the Angel of the North.It turned out to be more of a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Other towns may choose national heroes as their emblems – posing generals, politicians or sword-wielding officers on horseback, glaring sternly down from their plinths – but not Göttingen. It is entirely in keeping with the unassuming, unobtrusive loveliness of this small town in Lower Saxony that its symbol should be not a grandee but a goose-girl.The delicate art nouveau statue of the young girl and her feathery charges that tops the fountain in the market square (pictured below) is the heart of the town, kissed in ritual celebration by every graduating doctoral student. But while students Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Sightseers is the third film by the young British director Ben Wheatley and the first that might be deemed a comedy; that said, as befits the man who made Down Terrace and Kill List, it is a decidedly twisted one.Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) are a new couple embarking on their first holiday together, a caravan trek around the country to visit his favourite sites. The Critch Tramway Museum and the Keswick Pencil Museum may give some cause to yawn, but this is a big deal for Tina, who is desperate to escape the clutches of her monstrous mum.Unfortunately, she has merely exchanged Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s quite a coincidence when two of the competition films in Cannes take place almost entirely within a stretch limousine. Then again, considering that the movie stars here travel the most ridiculously short distances in such vehicles, it’s entirely appropriate. Following on from Holy Motors, in which the limo doubled as a changing room for an actor-for-hire as he’s driven between assignments, in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis it serves as office, doctor’s surgery and love nest for a Wall Street billionaire on a 24-hour self-destruct.Adapted from Don DeLillo’s novel, this features Robert Read more ...
Benedict Andrews
"How light power would be and easy to dismantle no doubt, if all it did was to observe, spy, detect, prohibit, and punish; but it incites, provokes, produces. It is not simply eye and ear: it makes people act and speak." Michel Foucault, PowerCaligula is a portrait of a tremendous soul in terrible crisis. In Albert Camus’s Caligula, Detlev Glanert has found a gargantuan character – a man whose dreams become his society’s nightmares. After the death of Drusilla, his sister and lover, Caligula’s world loses meaning. Life becomes absolutely unsatisfactory. In Camus’s words, "he becomes obsessed Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The last time that actor Brad Pitt and New Zealand director Andrew Dominik teamed up it was for the epic and elegiac western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their new one, in competition in Cannes, couldn’t be more different.Killing Them Softly is a short, sharp, entertaining crime thriller, with a built-in commentary on America in the shadow of the economic crisis – a situation, of course, created by crooks by another name. Brad Pitt plays a freelance enforcer, Jackie Cogan, called to Louisiana to discover who robbed an illegal card game, a deed that has resulted Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Haneke likes to challenge and provoke us, whether it’s with intellectual puzzles (Hidden), bleak character studies (The Piano Teacher) or a brand of horror that makes us feel uneasily complicit (Funny Games). He’s a brilliant director, and a tough one. So while Love may not be a sudden ray of sunshine, it still feels like a departure for the Austrian, a softening of the provocateur, in which he eschews his customary ironic distance for an intimate and essentially positive account of love in adversity. It is as immaculately made as ever, but also touching and terribly sad, with two Read more ...