Reviews
Nick Hasted
“At the time, I was bored, and I needed something to do,” Tara (Lindsay Lohan) says, trying to explain her participation in a film. “And now…I’m looking for something else to do.” And she gives a small, bottomless sigh. The notorious, bedevilled Lohan is the hot spot in Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis’s chilly nightmare about love in Hollywood. Her Marilyn-style on-set unreliability led every pre-release story about their experiment in micro-budget, Kickstarter-funded cinema.Lohan’s recent homage to Marilyn’s last, nude photo-shoot aged 36 is here followed by a film in which the 27-year- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How amusing is death? When stand-ups fail to get laughs on stage, they call it dying, because the silence is like the grave. When actors laugh when they’re not supposed to on stage or on camera, it’s called corpsing because it kills the scene. They can do birth, marriage, divorce and illness, but death is the one part of the journey a comedian can’t turn into first-person material. Not even Tommy Cooper, who literally died on stage. But if anyone can find the funny side, it is surely Billy Connolly.That at least is the thinking behind his new documentary, which sends him hunting for jokes in Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two things in mind.First, anything you may have heard or read about this being the narrative of everywoman mourning an everyman who just happens to have been crucified is nonsense; despite the contemporary props, it’s unequivocally the New Testament story told from a perspective which Biblical literalists will dislike (and they hated it very vocally when the show opened in New York).Second, don’t expect the kind of nuanced Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It wasn't a bad idea to change the scenery by locating the belated ninth season of 24 in London, even if they probably nicked the idea from The Bourne Ultimatum, and episode one opened with a passing shot of an East End mosque just to set the paranoia clock ticking. Nonetheless, despite scenes of grimy railway viaducts, derelict warehouses and traffic-choked streets, large stretches of this curtain-raising pair of episodes still took place inside the kind of dimly-lit operations rooms which have become the show's trademarks. The CIA's London HQ is full of tight-lipped operatives wearing Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises is grand, sweeping and bursting with the kind of beautiful animation we've become accustomed to from Studio Ghibli (which celebrates its 30th birthday next year). Miyazaki delves into Japanese history with a soaring autobiography of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi, which also acts as a tribute to the writer Tatsuo Hori - who penned the original short story "The Wind Has Risen".The freedom and highs of creative expression and following your dreams are stylishly rendered through breathtaking flight sequences - first in Jirô’s fantasies Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When Sylvie Guillem became, at 19, the youngest person ever to reach the top rank of the Paris Opéra, she gained a job title – étoile (star) – that uncannily captured her essence. Most companies call their top dancers principal or prima ballerina or soloist, titles that show they have first place among their peers. Sylvie too stands out among her peers, blessed as she is with an extraordinary body, an extraordinary work ethic, an extraordinary intelligence. But the reason choreographers call her, dancers revere her, critics eulogise her, and audiences with tears in their eyes clap their hands Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Sliding onto the stage of the O2 Arena in a leotard emblazoned with her own mouth and tongue, Miley Cyrus immediately starts bouncing around screaming, “I’m not going down without a fucking fight!”Fighting spirit, aimed at nothing and everything, is the heart of Bangerz. It’s Miley against the world - and that includes her audience, whom she repeatedly refers to as “you fuckers” and projectile-spits all over. She’s a total brat from start to finish. This being her first show back on the road after a spell in hospital, she even turns her anti-authority backlash in the direction Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When absorbing any artistic experience we can be confounded by our own expectations. Such was the case for me with Bonanza. Rather confusingly, Berlin are a Belgian outfit majoring in cinematic, multimedia theatre so, perhaps, I was expecting an element of performance to the evening, of direct human delivery. This was not to be, although the presence of a shadowy figure stage-side, sitting at a laptop behind a rustic wooden sign saying “Bonanza Fire House”, kept me wondering if something of this nature was about to occur. It wasn’t, and once I’d settled to that fact, the evening was engaging Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Viewed through an arch designed to evoke a dimly lit chapel, Lorenzo Costa and Gianfrancesco Maineri’s The Virgin and Child with Saints, 1498-1500, is strikingly legible (pictured below right). The Virgin sits on a marble throne beneath a richly decorated arch, the throne’s fictive architecture covered with panels depicting Biblical scenes, the infant Christ standing precariously on his mother’s knee. By mimicking the poor lighting conditions for which this altarpiece was designed, painted architectural features are revealed as so much more than mere scenery, serving instead to punctuate Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Robert Cray’s veteran blues band made a compelling case for their unique blend of soul and blues at the Barbican last night. Despite the five Grammys, record sales well into seven figures, and investiture in the Blues Hall of Fame in 2011 at the precocious age of 57, he’s sometimes suspected of watering down the blues tradition. What he’s actually done is preserve the most of the attitudes and atmosphere of traditional blues, while modernising some of the instrumentation and phrasing.Off-stage, Cray is considered and soft-spoken. He comes across as a clean-shaven, fresh-scrubbed version of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paths of Glory (1957) stars Kirk Douglas as a First World War colonel who's as fearless leading his poilus on a suicide mission as he is arguing for mercy for three of the survivors. A lawyer in peacetime, he defends them when they are tried as cowards before a panel of French officers who have no intention of exonerating them.Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature was adapted from Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel, which was inspired by the French execution of soldiers chosen arbitrarily to pay for the disciplinary failure of their unit during an attack in the Marne. In February 1915, at Souain-Perthes- Read more ...
peter.quinn
Crazed magnificence, off the cuff improv, pinpoint timing. And that was just MC and trombonist Ashley Slater's on-stage banter. In one of the most hotly anticipated jazz gigs of 2014, the return to the Ronnie Scott's stage for the seminal and utterly singular big band Loose Tubes – almost a quarter of a century after their valedictory residency in September 1990 – surpassed all expectations. Following hot on the heels of their gig at the Cheltenham Jazz festival on Saturday, the jazz band's radical polystylism – referencing everything from Charles Ives and traditional music to samba and Read more ...