Reviews
Tom Birchenough
Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at the Berlinale, in the documentary category: the Teddies have been going since 1987, making them no less of a pioneer in the gay world, their brief to acknowledge and support LGBT cinema from around the world. (The maelstrom that is the Berlinale’s programming meant I missed the Portugese drama, Daniel Ribeiro’s The Way He Looks that took the Teddy Read more ...
james.woodall
Not the least remarkable thing about Richard Linklater's Boyhood is its being shot over a decade – that’s probably a first in film history. And it’s more than a sociological experiment, portraying in vibrant contemporary detail and a lot of observational fun the growing-up in Texas of a little boy, Mason, which will surely have an extraordinary impact on the life of the actor, Ellar Coltrane, who played him. It must be a bit like having a red carpet rolled out for you before you know the meaning of or have ever uttered the words “acting”, “award” and “celebrity”.Linklater won this year’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a mark of Miles Jupp's charm that he can do a show with a long segment about being the father of four young children and win over both non-parents and those who wish to forget for two hours that they have left their own offspring at home with a babysitter. But in Miles Jupp Is the Chap You're Thinking Of, which I saw at the Ambassadors Theatre in London, the comic expounds at length on life chez Jupp, which appears to be a whirl of cleaning Weetabix-encrusted crockery and finding faecal matter in inappropriate places.Many will know Jupp from Rev. and The Thick of It, and he's also Read more ...
james.woodall
French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off the street but which are never less than thoughtful – and that is part of the problem. His stage imagination, so flexibly at work in The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Far Side of the Moon (which also became a film), wreaks endless visual and sonic surprises, and also allows itself to probe, three-dimensionally, philosophically. The screen can flatten Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Pretty well the last film in the current array of Oscar hopefuls to reach Britain is also (in my view, anyway) the best. That's saying something as we gear up for an Academy Awards ceremony paying tribute to the strongest selection of nominees filmdom has fielded in an age. But even to talk about Spike Jonze's Her in this way seems tantamount to cheapening it by way of commodification, when the truth is that this quietly devastating, achingly moving film seems to come from a private and privileged place all its own. Small wonder that Jonze has emerged as the front-runner for the Oscar for Read more ...
David Nice
Tippett’s selective, often compelling and mostly well-structured take on Trojan War myths will never capture the wider public’s imagination as much as even the least of Britten’s operas. His ideas sometimes pierce the soul but don’t stick there in the same way, and the human interest level never goes so deep. The sounds, though, are something else: a splintering of interest groups, or even a single instrument, to flank each character.We ought to be gripped by the selective clusters from the opening trumpet fanfares – “heralds before the curtain” – and yowling offstage chorus. James Conway’s Read more ...
Simon Munk
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." thus begins Hunter S Thompson's seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. And the spirit of that book and HST's surreal "gonzo" take on reality live on in this oddball "comedy adventure game set in an alternate-reality Cold War World, plagued with Corporate Espionage, CyberCrime™ and Sentient Martinis."It was when the boss took a trip to the "wine cellar" after handing Agent Polyblank his pill to start the first espionage mission, the boss promptly proceeding to climb under his desk and go to sleep Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”It was an idea that obviously came to fascinate Wenders, and he has been integral in the process of expanding it into Cathedrals of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Old sins, the saying goes, cast long shadows. These are nothing, however, to the shadows cast by old productions. Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto looms larger than most in this regard – a lowering giant of directorial inspiration, with 30 years in rep and as close to cult status as opera gets. As Christopher Alden’s new Rigoletto made his way through the darkened streets yesterday more than just assassins lurked in the shadows.I say new, but of course this Rigoletto has almost as long and tortured a history as Verdi’s hero. It started life back in 2000 at Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Abandoned Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Strypes broke through initially with an amped-up version of the blues, akin to the sounds of the early Sixties London blues rock explosion that gave us the Rolling Stones. Tonight proved that they’ve since taken a Tardis through the decades - although no further than 1992 or so - but have kept fast hold of their smash’n’grab garage band ethos. Where bands such as Foals and Everything Everything explore futurist technology in a rather fussy, uninspiring manner, these Irish teenagers engage with the past in a way that’s visceral and hugely exciting.Clad in black suits with white shirts and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first of three Royal Festival Hall concerts during the first half of 2014 from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Charles Dutoit, all three programmes consisting entirely of French music. The other two will be in May. In between the Swiss-born conductor, a sprightly 77-year-old, will have picked up a Lifetime Achievement gong at the International Classical Music Awards in Warsaw.The relationship between the RPO and Dutoit seems to work well, not least because the repertoire he is working with them on is abolutely his home territory. These were the works Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crikey. Line of Duty was pumping dangerous levels of octane first time round. For this new series we’re in for an overdose. After one hour the body count is racking up: 3 coppers (shot), 1 witness under protection (burned to a crisp), AN Other (defenestrated). Plus that lovely soft Keeley Hawes has been waterboarded in the lav and has assaulted a noisy neighbour with a wine bottle. If it’s cheering up you need, best retreat to Call the Midwife, where they have window latches you can trust.Series creator Jed Mercurio is proud to deliver a cop show that cops don’t have to watch with curled toes Read more ...