Features
graham.rickson
It’s cold, grey and damp. Welcome to Leeds. The city centre has grown more homogenous, less distinctive since I arrived here in the 1980s, but there are still delights to be found.There’s an art gallery with a very decent collection of 20th-century British art, adjoining the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute. At the other end of the city centre, on a site once occupied by an enormous utopian housing development, sits the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The building looks more like a large branch of Tesco than a theatre, but it’s thriving, and does attract a broad audience. The lovely old City Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A Salford lad who used to work as a bolt-cutter by day and sing in working men's clubs at night, Russell Watson started out in showbiz by singing popular hits by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond or Simon & Garfunkel alongside a few belters from famous musicals. One night the patron of the Wigan Road Working Men's Club suggested he should have a go at Puccini's "Nessun Dorma"."It was the first operatic piece I ever sang, and that was really where it all started for me," Watson recalled. It lit the fuse on a chain of events that led to Watson signing a deal with Decca and winning himself global Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a normal day in Cannes, which means that I’ve just chatted to Mexican heart-throb Gael García Bernal on the beach, while a mini sand storm battered the doors of our marquee. Bernal is in town with his new film, No, about the events leading to the fall of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But he took a moment to reminisce about his first year here, in 2000, when Amores Perros took Cannes by the scruff of the neck. The film that helped to ignite the Mexican New Wave was not even in the official competition that year, but it was the title on everyone’s lips.As the first week of this Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It's a real pleasure to see Tim Roth strutting his stuff in Cannes, on screen and off. Roth knows the place well, having been here as an actor in Pulp Fiction, and as the director of The War Zone. This year he’s president of the jury for the un certain regard section of the festival – the second rung of the official selection, but often containing the more adventurous material. The role suits a man whose own career choices have been constantly edgy and surprising. “I’m hoping and expecting to find our deliberations excruciating,” he declares wonderfully in the programme.Roth is also starring Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The first full day of Cannes started with a cracker, appropriately by a Frenchman and one of my favourite contemporary directors, Jacques Audiard. Rust and Bone features a love story between a woman who’s had her legs bitten off by a killer whale and a man who makes his living from illegal street fighting. It ought to be preposterous; Audiard, typically, makes it profound.It opens with Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) on the road with his five-year-old son Sam, stealing food from diners, on the way to his sister in the resort town of Antibes. We never learn much of Ali’s back story, or Sam’s mother Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The release of Jean Vigo’s wonderful L’Atalante on DVD is cause enough to celebrate, but the arrival of everything he committed to film in one place is more than that – it commemorates this special filmmaker’s genius and humanity. Zero de Conduite and L’Atalante are thrilling films, whatever their context and influence on the French New Wave. They need to be seen.This double DVD set, L'Atalante and the Films of Jean Vigo, includes A Propos de Nice (1930), Taris (1931), Zero de Conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934). The films are supplemented by the incredible Nouvelle Vague-flavoured Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.One day every last 1/4 inch of this eccentric audio trove may well be exposed to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Collect is the international art fair for exquisitely crafted contemporary objects. Launched in 2004 by the Crafts Council, the fair represents galleries from around the world and showcases the best ceramic, glass, jewellery, textiles, wood, furniture and fine metalwork by new and established artists.National museums that have purchased work for their permanent collections include the British Museum and the V&A, but the fair is equally popular with private collectors and members of the public who get the chance to see and buy work from leading artists (pictured right: Phoenix, Halima Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Four weeks ahead of its core event in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye the world’s leading festival of literature, ideas and the arts rolls into Budapest. Celebrating its 25th year and 15th location, this is the first time “the Woodstock of the Mind” – Bill Clinton’s phrase - has been held in a country behind what used to be the Iron Curtain.Two decades ago, Central and Eastern Europe was where people looked for glimpses of the future; the removal of the Iron Curtain fomented excitement in uncertainty, the retreat of the Soviet empire created a vacuum. Now, with the future even more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Earlier this year Clotilde Hesme won the César, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, for “most promising actress” in the excellent, atypical love story Angel & Tony. One wonders if the voters have some kind of collective myopia, or simply don’t see enough good movies, because Hesme stopped being "promising" a long time ago.That’s not to take away from a much-deserved award, for one of France’s unsung actresses. Ever since she came seemingly out of nowhere in 2005 to match (and even out-pout) the smouldering Louis Garrel, in his dad Philippe’s epic love story Regular Lovers, Hesme has been a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Where’s Marcus Coates? The gangly shaman-artist was last seen communing with the dark spirit of the soon-to-be demolished Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle, but, hell, he’s nowhere on the Turner Prize 2012 shortlist.Coates is an artist whose profile has been steadily growing over the last decade. Last year he showed a moving work at the Serpentine Gallery in which he carried out the last wishes of patients in a hospice (one elderly gentleman said he’d always wanted to go to the Amazon, and so Coates undertook the trip on his behalf). But after seeing his latest film, Vision Quest Read more ...
ellin.stein
This weekend Robert Redford and his Sundance Institute are bringing a sort of taster version of the world’s leading showcase for independent (non-studio) English-language films to London. No one’s going to mistake Greenwich’s O2 Centre for an upscale skiing resort in the Rockies, home of the famed Sundance Film Festival which is held in January, but if Sundance London lacks the funky screening venues and bars of Park City, Utah, it also doesn’t require standing in line in the snow and freezing cold.The other thing that’s hard to replicate is the possibility that you might find yourself in Read more ...