Reviews
Adam Sweeting
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.However, Theroux's film suggested that this wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the city's dog-lovers, who appeared in many colourful guises. Louis spent some time riding around the sullen, menacing Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s sleazy being green. In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit The Frog stars as both himself and evil Constantine, a frog that would annex the Ukraine if he could, in a star-studded follow-up to the enjoyable hit The Muppets. Like the feature of 2011, Muppets Most Wanted has some terrific songs, even if it lacks the momentum and funny logic of its predecessor. Nevertheless, given a little time, the frog and his buddies warm up, brush off the dust and get down to the kind of Muppetry we crave. It’s one of those films you’re not sure about, but as you leave the cinema you'll be singing the songs as Read more ...
Naima Khan
Performed by all-female theatre company, Fluff, Sarah Sigal's take on feminism through the ages drops us in and out of three time scenarios: the Royalist household of Lady Anne in 1646, the adventures of fashion journalist Pamela in 1936, and the discourse between corporate manager Celia and her recovering addict friend Lucy in 2014. Sound familiar in both structure and content? Well, if you follow the work of Caryl Churchill, it largely is. The play's elliptical scenes and female-centric focus suggest Churchill's contemporary classic Top Girls, to which Sigal further adds an aspect not Read more ...
fisun.guner
Has any artist ever painted an apple that gets as close to the essence of appleness as Cézanne? I don’t think so. Cézanne’s apples are the equivalent of William Carlos Williams’s cold, sweet plums. Not only can you almost taste Cézanne’s apples but you can sense their weight, their density. And in your mind, you touch their smooth, waxy skins.Cézanne’s still-life oil paintings are a thing apart. Those simple table-top arrangements are, for me, the most seductive of anything he ever painted. But of watercolour, that other medium he painted them in, he thought very little. His sketchy Read more ...
ellin.stein
If Errol Morris lived in Middle Earth he’d make a documentary about Sauron. If he taught at Hogwarts, he’d be turning his cameras on Voldemort. You get the idea. Morris is drawn to Dark Overlords, powerful men of steely ambition and ego, convinced of their own rightness even after events have proven that their wrong-headed ideas have demonstrably contributed to the sum of human misery.He can also claim to be the only person to have made documentaries about not one but two former U.S. Defense Secretaries (Ministers), the pinnacle of the Pentagon. The first was 2003’s Oscar-winning The Fog of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Lou Adler – A Musical HistoryLou Adler is more than a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry. Akin to a whole spool of yarn, he helped Carole King realise the monumental Tapestry, was integral to making 1967’s epochal Monterey Festival happen, brought The Mamas & The Papas to the world and co-wrote Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”. Adler is a towering figure in music. Lou Adler – A Musical History is an overview, collecting records he masterminded. A reminder that the achievements did not spring from nowhere, the disc frames this man within the world he operated in.Many names Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The core pulse of Tudor polyphony is often deliciously slow. It gets down to a mesmeric pace of about 30 beats per minute. The listener just has to succumb to it, and the experience, even in the virtually unheated Cambridge College chapel where The Sixteen began its 2014 Choral Pilgrimage last night, was pure pleasure.The names of the three composers whose work form the Sixteen's programme for the concerts of this year's Pilgrimage will be unfamiliar, but Davy, Sheppard and Mundy are all important precursors of Byrd and Tallis, and the sequence of works has been meticulously prepared to Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The miscellany, a varied collection of works on different topics, was originally a Renaissance concept, an opportunity to bulk up a single volume with a diverse assortment of topics. The concept kept coming back to me, watching this peculiar programme, in places coherent and persuasive, in others curiously perverse, as if form and content had been devised by different people. The concept of a miniseries about the arrival of the Renaissance in Britain and its effect on our damp archipelago is most worthwhile, and presenter Dr James Fox, a young Cambridge don who already has a BAFTA nomination Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Turning every concert into a party, baroque ensemble L’Arpeggiata are performers in the truest sense. Too often early musicians get away with being shy or downright awkward, visibly uncomfortable when forced to introduce an encore. Not so with these European virtuosi, whose signature improvisations give each member (yes, even the percussionist) the chance to step into a starring role. And don’t get me started on the baroque rap that concluded the group’s most recent London concert…For the second of their three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata moved away Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1-5 Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, BBC Philharmonic/Gianandrea Noseda (Chandos)Two of Prokofiev's five piano concertos are so well-embedded in the repertoire that they tend to dwarf the other three. So it's great to have the whole lot squeezed comfortably onto a pair of discs. I've long enjoyed Ashkenazy's 1970s accounts, accompanied by a beefy LSO under André Previn. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's playing is rather different; he realises that there's more to Prokofiev than pure brawn. Not that these performances are lightweight in any sense – the remorseless cadenza in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.Antony Wall’s film did achieve a nice sense of balance about a programme that went from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You'd have to go a long way to find a film as truly, mind-bogglingly bad as A Long Way Down, which trumps A New York Winter's Tale as the worst celluloid entry in this still-young film year and may likely set the bar for some while to come. Adapted from the darkly comic 2005 novel from Nick Hornby, the movie about four suicidal malcontents who find solace in one another's company manages to trivialise and cheapen every aspect of human behaviour that it touches. Amidst the pervasive ineptitude, the astonishing Toni Collette wrings a tonal grace note or two out of the dross around her, which is Read more ...