Reviews
mark.kidel
Andrew Hilton, the creative force that drives the consistently excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, might be playing safe by returning to a play he put originally put on in 2003. But “As You Like It”, for all its light touches, is a challenging proposition: both in terms of the way the author treats complex relationships between play-acting and authenticity, true and projected love, goodness and evil, but also because the many-threaded story doesn’t unfold with quite the same elegance as in some of the other comedies.This is a play in which structure is a little too apparent Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Unique, dreamy, super cool and splendidly silly, just like its maker Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire flick packed full of romanticism, wit and enchanting, fuzzy music. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast as a pair of vampires named Adam and Eve entangled for eternity by the bonds of love. They don't prowl around town searching for victims, instead they live peaceful existences surrounded by the “human zombies” who are slowly ruining their beloved planet.LA is “zombie central” according to Adam (Hiddleston), an ex-rock star who now hides away from the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Another week, another postwar classic. Hot on the heels of last week’s revival of Oh What a Lovely War comes another legendary play from the Joan Littlewood museum of great one-offs. This time it’s a restaging of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play about poor parenting and teen pregnancy in Salford. Although this play is lauded in most history books as a great radical breakthrough, it has attracted fewer revivals in recent years than plays such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Is there a good reason for this comparative neglect?The original play was penned Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Paul Bunyan, best described as a "choral operetta", was Britten’s first foray into the operatic, and much of its value is surely gleaned through the prism of subsequent successes. The composer withdrew it after its poorly received US premiere in 1941, and its rehabilitation didn’t begin until over 30 years later. In its use of American folk and popular music styles, steadfastly melodic score and exploration of Americana, it was almost certainly bidding for a Broadway slot (interesting to imagine a parallel universe where Britten was embraced by the musical theatre world).Despite its appealing Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Hopelessly devoted women queuing up for hugs and to cut a rug with a playful John Travolta all dressed in black were just two of the highlights of an often pensive and surprisingly serious discussion, hosted by film critic Barry Norman, but one that still came littered with moments of real fun. “I want to make love to you all!”, Travolta exclaimed as he came out on stage to rapturous applause and screams of adoration.Preceding Travolta’s lively "Stayin' Alive"-flanked entrance to the Drury Lane stage where the dimple-cheeked actor gamely struck his famous pose from Saturday Night Fever, the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the end of its first series, My Mad Fat Diary had departed far enough from memoirist Rae Earl’s frank, funny source material that the adaptation taking on a life of its own shouldn’t have been a cause for concern. Still, there’s always that niggle when something that got it so completely right first time around returns: can it possibly repeat that magic, or live up to expectations?Hence why it was such a relief to hear the inner monologue of Earl’s semi-fictional counterpart (Sharon Rooney) during her first sexual experience - well, non-solo one at least. “What if I don’t feel anything?” Read more ...
kate.bassett
Winston Smith is alone. Isolated in a pool of light, with an anglepoise lamp at his shoulder, he is about to pen the first entry in his private diary. But he is, of course, being watched. Mark Arends' Winston is, after all, living in the nightmarish superstate where Big Brother keeps every citizen perpetually under surveillance, even when they don’t know it.In this impressive, disturbing dramatisation of 1984 – Headlong's experimental adaptation of George Orwell's novel (originally published in 1949) – Arends' Winston believes he has found a nook that's unobserved. However, as he Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Long before the stars had begun walking (and working) the red carpet, this year's British Academy Film Awards were a hot topic. Unfortunately it was for all the wrong reasons. A whistleblower writing for the Daily Mail alleged that many of the Academy's 6,500 members make little effort to consider the full gauntlet of options, often voting for the big-budget American favourites sight unseen. Furthermore, the dubious inclusion of Saving Mr Banks, Rush and Gravity in the Outstanding British Film category edged out smaller, less controversially British efforts (the excellent For Those in Peril Read more ...
David Nice
Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).This time, the naval high jinks allow Regan to evoke a kind of Privates on Parade scenario, the show-without-the-show set below deck on a World War Two battleship – or so we Read more ...
james.woodall
He cuts a dash, that man Cave. Very tall, gangly, with his idiosyncratic snub nose and upside-down-U-shaped hair, the Australian is a one-off. His growly music isn’t always easy to like. In his fury days with the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, he was a post-punk rock poet. He has, of course, oceans of fans. It goes without saying that they will be a-quiver at 20,000 Days on Earth (20,000 was the number of mortal days Cave had notched up three years ago when this documentary started: he’s now 57).You'd probably have to be pretty hard core to relish much of the twiddling and impro of the new Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice by director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the closing ceremony of the Berlinale last night, as well as picking up the best actor prize for its star Liao Fan.It was a night for Asian cinema in general, with the best actress award given to Japan’s Haru Kuroki, playing in veteran director Yoji Yamada’s The Little House, while Chinese cinematographer Zeng Jian came away with the Silver Bear for outstanding contribution in the technical categories for his work on Lou Ye’s Blind Massage.Expectations were high for 'Boyhood' by Berlin favourite Richard Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy, playing in Berlinale’s Forum programme, recycles that legend, only in his film Houellebecq is vanished to a gypsy compound outside Paris where he’s held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.Nothing then of the atmosphere of Houellebecq’s most recent Goncourt Prize- Read more ...