Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Their reformation was one of the most convincing in recent years, in part also due to quickly bowing out after returning and the favour they brought to the listening public by not writing any new, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby stadium (I didn’t conduct a scientific poll of the gender split, but it had certainly never been easier to use the Gents at Murrayfield.)Everything was bright and brilliant and giddily over-sized, from the piercing screams that greeted every banal utterance (“We love you, Scotland!”), to the price of the merch: £10 for a flimsy plastic lanyard is pretty Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Amber (****) was shown earlier this year in Ireland, the crime series created by Rob Cawley and Paul Duane for state broadcaster RTE caused a kerfuffle as (giving nothing away) it didn't follow the usual narrative of teenager-goes-missing-police-miss-clues-and-family-implodes drama. But that's all yet to pan out, and last night's opening episode of four started traditionally enough as Amber, the 14-year-old daughter of Ben and Sarah Bailey, lied to her parents about visiting her friend and didn't arrive home when expected.The family implosion was already under way as Ben and Sarah ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sometimes a film captures the imagination of the critical establishment for all the wrong reasons, and there's a scramble to see who can file the most entertainingly bitchy copy. And so it is with Grace of Monaco, which emerges from the vipers' nest that is the Cannes Film Festival (and from a very public spat between director Olivier Dahan and the co-chairman of the film's US distributor, Harvey Weinstein) covered in vicious puncture wounds, ridiculously ruffled and resigned to take it all over again on general release. But can it really be that awful?As expected - and as anyone looking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the 70th anniversary of D-Day following hard on the heels of the extensive World War One commemorations, battle fatigue is becoming a very real concern for TV-watchers. Breaking the mould of retrospective war documentaries becomes increasingly difficult, as Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse demonstrated with deadly satirical accuracy in Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, so all kinds of credit are due to National Geographic's frequently devastating record of the D-Day landings and their immediate aftermath.Although this was a multinational collaborative effort, the premise was straightforward Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Two movie-obsessed high-school students Owen and Matt (Owen Williams and Matt Johnson, who also writes and directs) are making a short movie about bullying for their film class. After they show it, to widespread derision from their classmates, the bullying gets worse (by boys they call the "dirties") and so the two teenagers decide to make a new version, incorporating secretly filmed footage of them being harassed and assaulted.As Owen and Matt develop a narrative for the foul-mouthed, Tarantino-esque movie, it becomes increasingly about enacting revenge on the dirties. Matt is the driver of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once upon a time British Airways was our national carrier. It had a theme tune that made you want to go "aah"/croon along/flood your lugholes with liquid strychnine. You knew where you were with BA. Then along came the uppity Euro-oiks from Ryanair and EasyJet, companies that can’t locate a space bar on a keyboard let alone a landing strip anywhere near a city centre, and yet they filched all BA's cattle-class customers. Meanwhile various nouveau airlines from Asia kreemed off the posherati who turn left on planes. But now the solution to this pincer-movement assault on British Airways' Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Finally,” said Sir Simon Rattle, “I get a chance to say thank you. We have had forty years working together without an argument." The Royal Philharmonic Society was awarding an Honorary Membership to Martin Campbell-White, Rattle's agent. Campbell-White, who has been a guiding influence on the conductor's career since the 1970's made a rare appearance on stage, as he became the first artist manager ever to win this award in the RPS's 201-year history. There was a sense of occasion about this concert, which was also Rattle's first appearance with the LSO since the Olympics opening Read more ...
Guy Oddy
For those not in the know, the Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual knees-up of noisy avant garde music drawn from a broad range of genres that is curated by local promoters and heroes, Capsule. This year, despite the event being reduced to two days from the usual three, there was doomy, sludge rock; electronic weirdery; pseudo film soundtrack music; screaming guitars; the legendary Bill Drummond and the mighty Swans. To some extent, the line proved to be gold to the hipster community of the West Midlands (and further afield) with a shocking amount of blokes sporting beards and Read more ...
ellin.stein
In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. After an escalation of anxiety and machismo on both sides, one of the BART police shot the unarmed, handcuffed Grant in the back (he later claimed he thought he was firing his Taser) as the train waited in the station. The event Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Holland-Dozier-Holland - The Complete 45s Collection, Invictus, Hot Wax, Music MerchantAs Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland wrote and produced for The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes and every other top-flight Motown act between 1962 and 1968. Their credit was behind “Baby Love”, “Nowhere to Run”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, “Where Did Our Love Go” and many other classics. But that wasn’t enough for the trio. At Motown, they increasingly felt, as the book with this package puts it, “overworked and under-appreciated”. Splitting from Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tom Cruise has smugly saved the day in dozens of films. In Edge of Tomorrow, he utterly fails to save the same day dozens of times, dying and trying again, in a loop caused by being plastered in the time-warping blood of one of the aliens currently occupying Western Europe.Director Doug Liman has great fun with this just-go-with-it conceit, from the moment cowardly Army PR Major Cage (Cruise) reports for duty at United Defence Force’s London HQ. General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson, either silently seething or chuckling at the giant UDF sign behind him) finds Cage so insufferable he has him Read more ...