Reviews
emma.simmonds
Ah, revenge. Why does something so bad sometimes feel so necessary? Particularly in its most bloodthirsty form, it's a concept well explored onscreen, from almost every western and martial arts film to the final act of so many horrors – and the entirety of the spectacularly absurd TV series currently showing on E4, which is so obsessed with the idea it couldn't be called anything other than Revenge. But what do those determined to get their own back truly hope to achieve, and where does an eye for an eye actually end?Jeremy Saulnier's follow-up to the little-seen Murder Party deals with the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The teenage heroines of In Bloom may be only 14, but in the world in which they live – the film is set in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in 1992 – they are forced to act much older, to take on responsibilities beyond their ages. The action of the film takes place a year after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and their newly independent nation is afflicted by conflict, both on the wider level – the separatist war in Abkhazia is in the background, while queuing for bread involves exhausting daily squabbles – and on the smaller, domestic front, in which families are fractured. The “bloom” which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Policeman wrongly accused of murder" is possibly not history's most original story idea, but in Prey, writer (and TV debutant) Chris Lunt has turned it into a platform for a skilfully-controlled thriller that keeps your brow sweaty and your breath coming in short panicky gasps. It's greatly assisted by having John Simm playing the lead role of Manchester-based DS Marcus Farrow, since there's nobody better when you want a bit of earthy-but-sincere, with added soulfulness.Though we first met Farrow in the aftermath of a road accident, when he was trapped in the back of an upside-down police Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We have all learned to genuflect at the altar of Nordic noir in recent years – see The Tunnel, the Anglo-French remake of The Bridge, and the American Killing, not to mention the news that Borgen creator Adam Price and Michael House of Cards Dobbs are to collaborate. But the traffic is not entirely one-way. One series purchased by the Danish broadcaster DR is Hinterland, an intriguing and impeccably sullen crime series from Welsh-language broadcaster S4C. Its drama department is better known for the long-running soap Pobol y Cwm, but this is an altogether harder-hitting snapshot of rural Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Baroque operas are like buses. You wait years for some Cavalli to come along, and then three of his operas arrive almost at once. It all started with English Touring Opera’s Jason last October – a witty and endlessly shape-shifting work – followed by the Royal Opera’s glossy L’Ormindo at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last month. Now, undeterred by larger rivals, Hampstead Garden Opera continue the trend with La Calisto.HGO are a fixture of London’s fringe opera scene, staging considered, well-funded productions with strong young singers in the theatre above Highgate’s Gatehouse pub. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It might be putting it bluntly, but hell - American rom-coms didn't always suck. The screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s made bickering artful and aspirational and Woody Allen added his own neurotic spin in the 70s. Now the commercial end of the genre makes fools of us all with its desperate women, bland men and rigid, asinine formula. These films are an insult to the intelligent, ambitious or independent, and are at best a guilty pleasure.Modern rom-coms might be a joke but unfortunately they're not a joke with legs, as David Wain's Scary Movie-esque spoof They Came Together shows us over Read more ...
Andy Plaice
She drinks beer, drives a Land Rover and can never remember the names of her sidekick’s wife and daughter: welcome to the offbeat world of Vera Stanhope, deliciously imagined by writer Ann Cleeves and actor Brenda Blethyn. ITV’s Sunday night cop show-by-the sea, Vera, is back with a fourth series which will be welcome news for a loyal few million viewers and for the people who like to sell Northumberland as a tourist attraction.ITV may have forgotten to have given it an interesting title (she could so easily be either a Gwen or a Madge) but in tonight's episode Our Vera was anything but dull Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This German-made drama about World War Two scored huge ratings when it was shown in its homeland last year, but has also prompted scathing criticism. Chiefly, its detractors don't buy the series' portrayal of five photogenic young German friends as largely innocent victims of Nazism. Some are also outraged by the way Poles are shown to be even more anti-semitic than the Nazis, though that didn't occur in this first episode, A Different Time. The question of who knew what as the Führer led the Fatherland into a cataclysmic global war is impossible to answer with mathematical precision, Read more ...
David Nice
For those of us who’d held fast to the generalisation that Michael Tippett went awry after 1962, it seemed emblematic that pianist Steven Osborne and the Heath Quartet were never to meet in a concert of two halves. After all, didn’t Tippett’s music split and splinter into a thousand, often iridescent atoms after his second opera, King Priam? Its satellite piece, the Second Piano Sonata, seems to sit restlessly, and quite deliberately, on the fault line. Yet I take at least some of it back when confronted live, for the first time, with the drive and visions of the Third Sonata composed in the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It is proof, as if more were needed, of how very right-on Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director David Bintley is, that he chose to open the International Dance Festival currently taking place in that city with two specially commissioned ballets from emerging choreographers who started their dancing careers with the company: Quatrain by Kit Holder and Kin. by Alexander Whitley. Finishing up the bill with an early Frederick Ashton piece – Les Rendezvous (1933) on Thursday and Friday; Façade (1931) on Saturday – completes a hat trick by choreographers not far off their 30th birthdays. These Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Debut writer-director Gillian Robespierre strikes the perfect balance between humour and humanism in this New York set comedy about unplanned pregnancy and abortion which sees stand-up comedian Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) get dumped and fired from her job at Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books in quick succession. At her lowest ebb she engages in a drunken one night stand with Max (Jake Lacey), a guy she meets in a Brooklyn bar, and we get to witness how she deals with the consequences of her actions whilst also trying to get to grips with the world around her.Donna's comedy act is all Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Grace Jones: NightclubbingThe scary, steely Grace Jones persona distracts from what has always been her best aspect – the music. Of course, the image is inextricably linked but, taken on their own, her albums have the power to delight. Nightclubbing is hands-down her best album. Originally issued in 1981, it was a coherent statement sequenced like a nightclub act which had danceable peaks, toughness, the influence of Weimar-era Berlin cabaret and a reflective, sensitive conclusion which left a lingering impression. Its reissue brings an opportunity for a fresh assessment. Especially as two Read more ...