Reviews
Hanna Weibye
You usually know a good piece or performance when you see one, but sometimes you only identify a great one as such significantly after the fact. What better way to test a work's durability, then, than by seeing what remains of it in the memory after six or 12 months? I admit this "best of" exercise is pretty subjective, but 2014 was such a rich year for dance that I've had to be ruthless: an item only makes my list if I still feel excited when I recall it.This list doesn't sum up the whole year by any means. Some of the biggest events don't get a look in – the Royal Ballet's new Winter's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Filmgoers will either find Denis Villeneuve's latest art-house thriller to be a tantalising head trip or so much celluloid posturing, but there's no denying its contribution to the rise and rise of leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal. Racing up the outside track as a potential Oscar nominee for Nightcrawler even as he is making a (splendid) Broadway debut in the Nick Payne play Constellations, Gyllenhaal here gets to impress twice over and for a simple reason: Javier Gullon's script casts the hirsute star in two different, teasingly complementary parts. Thoughts of Jeremy Irons's career-best Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Birmingham Hippodrome claims to stage the UK's biggest pantomime – a proud boast that highlights its productions' West End-level of investment. And this year's venture, Jack and the Beanstalk, is certainly glitzy and star-laden, while the sets and costumes are fabulous, and there's a 3D sequence as well as a live band, so the claim seems a fair one.Gary Wilmot is Dame Trot, whose three sons Jack, Simple Simon and Silly Billy endlessly get into scrapes. Silly Billy (the excellent Matt Slack, who really connects with the youngsters in the audience) is secretly in love with Princess Apricot Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apologies in advance to fans of The Missing, The Honourable Woman, The Fall, Game of Thrones or House of Cards, none of which feature in the list below, but might well have done. So might The Good Wife, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders. The fact is, in our teeming everything-everywhere world now boosted by Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Now TV and many more, whittling a whole year down to a handful of nuggets requires the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the devious brain of a superhacker. But at least it's no longer feasible to protest that "there's nothing on the telly". Read more ...
David Nice
Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.How proud the EUYO's founding music director Claudio Abbado would have been of this ongoing good work (he died, as if we could forget, this year Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Despite appearances, Jeremy Clarkson aspires to be taken seriously, as readers of The Sun and The Sunday Times will know. With this Top Gear Special he managed it, being chased from Argentina into Chile by a stone-wielding mob that appeared to have designs on his personal safety, in an incident widely trailed in the news media at the beginning of the month.The cause of this outrage was the choice of Clarkson’s car for their drive from the top to the bottom of Patagonia, a Porsche with a number plate ending in FKL, letters widely interpreted as a taunt about the Falkland Islands. The final Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back for its third series [***], Sally Wainwright's saga of Yorkshire folk continues to tread a precarious line between syrupy soapfulness and a family drama with sharp little teeth. Its excellent cast helps to carry it over the worst of the soggy bits, and its best moments have a way of catching you unawares. You'd have to guess that it also scores strongly by not being crammed with serial killers, paedophiles and corrupt cops.It's a sign of the confidence that healthy ratings bring that they dared to open this new season with Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) sitting at a restaurant Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s Turing versus Hawking, Cumberbatch v Redmayne, computer science v astrophysics, tragedy v the triumph of love. Ever since The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything appeared at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the head to head has been inevitable, leading all the way to the Oscars.The foremost battle is between the actors. As Cumberbatch fuelled his already sizeable reputation with his portrayal of the difficult, tortured and finally persecuted genius Alan Turing, so Redmayne has effectively sealed a place at the top table by expressing a man whose terrible affliction Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That old canard about there being no good roles for women needed revising time and again in the theatre year just gone, so much so that end-of-year judging panels for the year's best faced far more competition among the female contenders than they did among the men (such supreme all-male ensembles as the My Night with Reg team notwithstanding). Whether it was the Massachusetts class warrior brought mightily to life by Imelda Staunton in the Broadway export Good People or Eve Best letting down both her hair and her defenses to suggest a newly sensual if ever-intelligent Cleopatra at Read more ...
theartsdesk
From the clubs of Berlin to the pubs of Birmingham, via Somerset and New York, our new music writers select their most memorable gigs of 2014. Drenge, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, FebruaryIn February, teenage drum and guitar two-piece Drenge were basking in the unexpected media glare caused by Tom Watson MP. They were also touring their self-titled debut album of high-octane rock ’n’ roll, and those curious enough to see them in a room above a pub in South Birmingham were treated to a spectacle of raw music and snotty attitude. Fiery tunes like “Gun Crazy”, “I Wanna Break You In Half” Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Every Nutcracker has its day, and every day has its Nutcracker. But sometimes history repeats itself, and so it was that I found myself last night in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, scene of my own childhood encounters with ballet, preparing to watch Peter Darrell’s Nutcracker, the very same production that I and thousands of other Scottish children were raised on between 1973 and winter 1996-7, when the (by then rather battered-looking) Christmas favourite by the company's founder was last performed.The company was Nutcracker-less for the next few years, a turbulent time in which it struggled Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: I'm Just Like You – Sly's Stone Flower 1969–70Although a fixture on America’s mainstream charts since 1967’s “Dance to the Music”, Sly and the Family Stone’s August 1969 appearance at Woodstock changed things forever. After seizing the attention of a massive white audience at the festival, Sly Stone would move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. The band then gradually fell apart. The greater success brought chaos yet also offered Stone the opportunity to stamp his personality on a new record label where he would be the house producer and writer. The appropriately named Read more ...