Reviews
aleks.sierz
A play about belief? I must admit I was immediately intrigued. After all, most of the people I know are either atheists or don’t usually talk about a world beyond our own. To use a hackneyed phrase, they don’t do God. But what if something happened to a group of us that challenged our mindset? No, that’s much too weak. What would happen if one evening something occurred that took our beliefs and smashed them into a thousand pieces? Like, definitively.That’s the premise of Bryony Lavery’s brilliant new drama. It starts with a banal bit of social interaction. Joff and Marianne are invited to Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Occasionally, but rarely, great imaginative leaps take place in the progression of art that seem to have come from nowhere. This can be said of Julian Schnabel….In these early paintings Schnabel worked with materials on surfaces that had never been used before....The sheer originality of Schnabel’s vision struck the art world explosively.”So writes curator David Thorp in a catalogue essay for this exhibition. And the solemnly vacuous puff continues: “But as with all momentous changes in art these inevitably created as much criticism as acclaim.”Let me begin by saying this. I’ve come to these Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A fresh take on the fish-out-of-water story, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter finds a lonely Japanese woman reimagining herself as an adventuress and travelling to America in pursuit of a fictional fortune. As with others of the ilk, the film derives humour from confusion and the culture clash but rather than being primarily concerned with calamity David Zellner's fifth film (co-written with his brother Nathan) makes Kumiko's alienation and retreat into fantasy its heartbreaking focus.When we first meet 29-year-old Kumiko (2007 Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi of Babel fame), she's following a cloth Read more ...
David Nice
London has had its fair share recently of Chekhov productions from Russia, though none anywhere near as quietly truthful as these from Moscow's Mossovet State Academic Theatre. Veteran film and theatre director-designer Andrey Konchalovsky understands how lives may fall apart or hang in the balance while human beings sip a cup of tea, strum an out-of-tune piano or push a pram.What's more, his admirable actors – at last a true Moscow ensemble, at least in this Three Sisters – can play several parts which seemingly share so much in common between the two plays, and yet they make complete Read more ...
Simon Munk
The core of a great videogame can sometimes be very simple indeed. The Trials series is based around the idea of leaning back and forward while accelerating and braking on a motorbike. Such simple controls, in this series, are turned into the ability to jump, push, roll and otherwise manoeuvre your lump of engined metal over a series of seemingly impossible obstacles – very much like "trials" riders do in real life.The series hit its stride with Trials HD for the Xbox 360 in 2009, and since then has retained that sense of knife-edge balance and dexterity needed to get up, over and under the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's been four years since Ryan Reynolds' one-man-show Buried, which saw the thesp prove his acting chops while six foot under in a box. The Voices gifts him a full and talented supporting cast but it's a film that he also shoulders, cast in a role which requires him to be both the good guy and the very, very bad guy - and the source of the titular voices - despite ostensibly playing just one part.Working from a spiky script from Michael R. Perry (Paranormal Activity 2, TV's American Gothic), Marjane Satrapi's fourth film is almost cartoonish - which might seem fitting considering she's best Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I don't think it makes a good play, but it's a remarkable one," Sean O'Casey famously remarked of The Silver Tassie, his late-1920s drama about the depredations of war, and how simultaneously right and wrong he was. To be sure, his four-act play set before, during, and after the ravages of World War One isn't "good" if one is referring to something theatrically tidy and manicured and all of a piece.But "remarkable" only begins to describe the affect of a text that peers headlong into the abyss and dares an audience to come along on that traumatic (and, in stage terms, altogether vital) ride Read more ...
David Nice
Take a cushion or two among the beautiful young people gathered around the players – no Proms Arena crowd, this - pull up a chair or find your standing place; sit bolt upright, lie back, stretch your legs, tweet during the music if you like (an invitation thankfully declined). CLoSer’s latest concert in the friendly Village Underground is a rather far cry from the 1941 premiere of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps given before 400 of his fellow prisoners and guards, outside in the rain, in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz (now Zgorzelec in Poland). Not in one crucial respect, though. Messiaen Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The bitterness and jealousy of a relationship on the rocks is superbly handled in this disconcerting, witty and sharp indie which poses moral quandaries galore. Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) are the couple at odds with one another. The abrasions caused by their long-term relationship have led them to therapy and as a last resort their therapist (Ted Danson) sends them off on a break guaranteed to cement their love and rekindle their passion.On arrival the pair realise that not all is as idyllic and straightforward as they think, with the discovery of a magical guesthouse in Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
A spiralling stage, horned with two raised prongs. A circular display, mounted on the back wall, which presents the buildings and coastline of a seaside town from a bird’s eye view. Subtle blues, yellows and reds that light up the stage to reflect the time of day. Spirited actors buzzing around like heated molecules in an educational science video as they each take on several roles.If Under Milk Wood was exclusively “a play for voices”, as its author Dylan Thomas suggested, then such visual aspects of the classic Welsh tale would never have come into being. But here they are at York Theatre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A quick scan of the credits gives grounds for optimism about Transcendence, with Johnny Depp leading a copper-bottomed supporting cast which includes Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany and Cillian Murphy. Director Wally Pfister may be a first-timer, but since he's been Christopher Nolan's cinematographer since 1999's Memento and won an Oscar for his work on Inception, you might give him the benefit of the doubt.Hence Transcendence frequently looks superb, and for a good chunk of its running time tweaks your attention with ideas about the (over) appliance of science and mankind's Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Has anyone ever sat through Musorgsky’s last, not quite finished, opera about the struggle for power in Moscow at the time of Peter the Great’s accession in the 1690s, and come away with the slightest idea of what it’s all about? If Khovanshchina had depended for its impact on any kind of Verdian clarity or dramaturgical shape, it would long ago have sunk without trace.But then there’s the music, page after page of inspired, vivid, unforgettable choral writing and solo portraiture that at times even matches Boris Godunov in sheer immediacy and power. It’s a work that, against the odds, Read more ...