Reviews
Helen Hawkins
The latest brainwave of director Richard Linklater is wonderfully simple: don’t do another remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film, A bout de souffle (1959), make a movie about the making of the film that nails what the movement he helped launch, the nouvelle vague, stood for. And make it with a French cast and crew.The result is a film that’s a must-see for all lovers of the original. This isn’t pastiche, it’s an academically sound love letter to the nouvelle vague and all who sustained it. Linklater carefully captions these contributors on their first appearance. The resemblances in some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The typical Jason Statham character is a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, maybe as a hitman, a safe-cracker or a former member of some special forces unit. Statham knows what he’s good at, and it’s provided him with a modest living (he’s said to be worth $100m, and can command fees of $20m per film).His latest, Shelter, is a chip off the old block. Statham plays Michael Mason, a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, who lives in frugal isolation in a derelict lighthouse on a barren lump of rock in the Hebrides. He has an Alsatian dog for company, and amuses himself in a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Kangaroo has promising ingredients: a Sydney TV weather reporter accustomed to soft city life is forced to reconsider his priorities (what, no sparkling Icelandic water or spa treatments?) when stranded in the Outback.Cuddly joeys abound and there’s plenty of silliness and slapstick – a boat race in the desert, for example – as well as a muscular boxing kangaroo called Roger (CGI is involved here).Chris Masterman (Ryan Corr; House of the Dragon) is desperate to find fame and host his own show. His moment comes when he rescues a baby dolphin that’s languishing in the shallows on Bondi beach. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
When it comes to the proletariat taking matters into their own hands, the British working class does not have many spectacular victories to celebrate. There are glorious defeats of course, eg the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the Miners' Strike of 1984, the Stop The War protest of 2003. Even the broader coalition who marched to support a second EU referendum in 2018 made little impact, though it was a nice day out, with nice people and nice food, to be fair.Alas for artists with fire in their bellies, the considerable advances won by progressive politics in the UK tend to have been secured by Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The cellist and the pianist famously have a more competitive relationship in Brahms’ Cello Sonata in E minor than in many compositions for solo instrument and piano. Brahms composed it for the Viennese singing teacher and cellist Dr Joseph Gänsbacher – when, on first playthrough, Gänsbacher complained he couldn’t hear himself because of the piano part, Brahms bellowed back, “You’re lucky.”Yet in the packed lunchtime concert performed by American cellist Alisa Weilerstein and Siberian-born pianist Pavel Kolesnikov, there was no sense that either musician was bludgeoning their way into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Evil capitalists are in the cross-hairs of this six-part thriller, conceived and mostly written by Sotiris Nikias. Possibly not the most original of villains, but they serve well enough as the basis for a story which takes a dive into the unscrupulous underbelly of London’s Square Mile and then spreads its tentacles around a cluster of assorted reprobates and untrustworthy characters.Our heroine is Zara Dunne (Sophie Turner), who works at pension fund managers Lochmill Capital, based in a swanky new skyscraper somewhere near the Lloyd’s building and the Gherkin. But while the company’s high- Read more ...
David Nice
Any conductor undertaking a journey through Mahler's symphonies - and Vladimir Jurowski's with the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been among the deepest - needs to give us the composer's last thoughts, not just the first movement (which, along with the short "Purgatorio" at the centre of the symphony, was all that Mahler fully scored). Or so I thought every time I heard Deryck Cooke's restrained but not anaemic performing version. Last night I wished Jurowski had left it at the opening odyssey, as perfect as I've ever heard it, and not espoused fellow Russian Rudolf Barshai's "completion". Read more ...
Robert Beale
Perhaps it was the thought of “Blue Monday”, which fell a week ago, that stimulated the choice of Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste as the opening piece of this concert. Certainly there can be few short pieces of music filled with such unremitting misery from start to finish.Anja Bihlmaier, the BBC Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, is normally not one to wallow in lugubrious gloom – far from it. But she entered the spirit of music written by the tragic composer who died very young in 1918 and whose last work this was, completed not long before her demise in piano trio form. It was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Following the 2010 release of The Fallen By Watch Bird, Jane Weaver has gone on to issue a further four conventional albums – there are also remix sets, reconfigurations, collaborations and soundtracks. A new album is planned for 2026.Before the release of The Fallen By Watch Bird, Weaver had issued two albums, a mini album and was a member of Kill Laura and Misty Dixon. She first appeared on record in 1992.
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Looking for markers within all this is evidently a challenge. Which releases are the most significant, the ones marking step- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This year the Royal Court is 70 years old. Yes, it’s that long since this premiere new writing venue staged its opening season, whose third play was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a drama which redefined British theatre. The current celebratory year kicks off with Guess How Much I Love You?, by Luke Norris, whose debut Goodbye to All That was successfully staged here in 2012. Since then, the playwright has provoked interest with several theatre and television pieces, including the BBC’s Poldark and So Here We Are at the Manchester Royal Exchange. But because he’s hardly produced more than Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If modern and post-modern dance has a reputation for being earnest, then this latest curation of British and American pieces shows another face. For while there is rigour in Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s selection for her fine small company, there is also fun, colour and even louche behaviour. And for all the variety of moods and dynamics of these creations spanning 90 years, a silver thread connects them all. The late Robert Cohan, granddaddy of British contemporary dance, was once a dancer for American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, and every one of the choreographers presented here has felt Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Scottie Fitzgerald, the sole offspring of F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, swigs from a hip flask where she shouldn’t (she inherited the transgression gene). She’s in the room that harbours her parents’ cluttered archive, and soon she conjures their ghosts who tell us the story of their lives.Or, more accurately, some of the story of their lives, continuing a trend in biopics (Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an example) in which we’re either assumed to know the works or to accept that the artistic achievement is less interesting than the marital strife that fuels it. Inter alia, such narratives come Read more ...