Reviews
Tom Birchenough
The opening days of the Berlinale have seen mixed reactions to high-profile English-language offerings. With its stylish sense of mittelEuropa, the festival’s premiere, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, apparently went down a treat. Much less kudos, though, went to George Clooney’s The Monuments Men (released in the UK this week, reviewed on theartsdesk today).More interesting, though not completely satisfying, was Rachid Bouchareb’s Two Men in Town (***), part of the Franco-Algerian director’s continuing exploration of the interaction between Islam and contemporary America. Bouchareb Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They're billing this as a "comedy-drama" about the inner workings of the Metropolitan Police, and it comes trailing a cloud of prestigious bylines. It's written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, who between them have notched up credits for Smack the Pony, Fresh Meat, Peep Show and The Thick of It, and this 90-minute opener was directed by the sainted Danny Boyle. What would be not to like?Sadly, quite a lot. The "comedy-drama" tag is a significant clue but in the worst way, suggesting accurately that the show can't make up its mind which side to lean on. The depiction of the Met displays a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Nazi war machine had great taste: it wanted all of the world’s art treasure for itself. Someone had to stop them .Based on Robert M Edsel’s book, George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s screenplay takes a starry stab at telling a culturally serious World War Two story. Shot in both the UK and Germany, its moral values are high, but this tasteful war heist/thriller hits the ground flat-footed and doesn't get better.The story is cast with Clooney and, it seems, a handful of his friends who play art experts. After going through basic training with real ammunition, the slick seven land in Normandy Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Review convention is to put this at the end, but I can’t risk you stopping reading before I can say: go and see 1980 while it is at Sadler's Wells this week. It is one of the most extraordinary works you will ever watch.If ballet is about getting off the ground and Graham/Cunningham-derived contemporary is about getting down to the ground, then German stage poet/choreographer Pina Bausch is about simply being on the surface of the ground. I can think of no other major choreographer whose dancers so consistently wear “normal” shoes, the kind most people in the audience will have worn Read more ...
fisun.guner
David Hockney has been a printmaker for almost as long as he’s been a painter. From one of his earliest ventures into print, a self-portrait colour lithograph aged 16 while at Bradford College of Art (the black pudding-bowl hair emulates early hero Stanley Spencer, before Hockney went for the striking platinum-blond look), the two activities have been given equal weight throughout his career, though this, as it turns out, was mainly by accident. Being a penurious student at the Royal College of Art in 1959, and finding that he had to pay for his own painting materials, Hockney was drawn Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Bloomfield: From his Head to his Heart to his HandsMike Bloomfield was undoubtedly one of rock’s greatest and most distinctive guitarists. He was also wildly erratic and did much to undermine what others saw in him. He died at age 37 in 1981. He had been a drug addict and self-mythologist. The records he left behind were many, and he never landed in one band or place for long. Crucial to Bob Dylan turning his back on the acoustic, he was on stage with him when he went electric at Newport in 1965. His stinging tones helped define “Like a Rolling Stone”. Dylan told Bloomfield not Read more ...
stephen.walsh
As before, WNO have a theme for their new opera season: this time it’s Fallen Women, a topic that might well attract the attention of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Surely men have the right to fall as well; we await, in June, The Fall of the House of Usher, a much fairer piece than Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, which opened the company’s winter season in a new production by the Polish director Mariusz Treliński. In Debussy’s Usher brother and sister both fall, and the house falls on top of them.Treliński is in any case much taken with the theme. Not only is his Manon (Chiara Taigi) already Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The emergence of artists’ collectives, bristling with idealism and wacky manifestoes, is usually a sign of a vigorous cultural scene. London’s new improvised music scene enjoys several successful examples, of which Loop is perhaps the most prominent. Last night’s Loop club night at the Vortex showed the idea at its best, combining new and established acts across a range of genres.There was - in homage to Valentine’s Day? - something old, something new, plenty that was borrowed, and even something blue. The new act was the band of percussionist Bex Burch, who plays the gyilli, a Ghanaian Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Barbican’s ongoing season of baroque operas and oratorios has been a mixed bag. Most recently The Sixteen’s Jephtha was a rather lacklustre affair, leaving me nervous of committing to the many hours of Handel’s beautiful (but protracted) Theodora. But I needn’t have worried. Harry Bicket and The English Concert gave this late work all the pep and personality that was so lacking last week, driving it through its rather uneven acts to a conclusion of sudden pathos and beauty.It helped that Bicket had booked a dream-team of soloists, led by Rosemary Joshua as chilly heroine Theodora Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Several hundred photographs, of varying scales and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints in superb tones of greys blacks and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years.Stardust is the title given to this self-selected retrospective, three years in the making, the photographer his own curator, and the word neatly encapsulates the fascinating conundrum of photography itself. As Bailey himself puts it, “it’s not the camera that takes the picture, it’s the person” and these photographs are as much about Bailey as his subject Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s an improbable fact worthy of five minutes’ ironic banter that there are so many panel shows presenting five minutes’ ironic banter on a series of improbable facts. Lee Mack, presenter of Sky 1’s new take on the genre, Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, has been a team captain on BBC One’s Would I Lie to You? for the past six years, so has had the time to get his head round the most improbably amusing facts. If your mind craves even more improbable facts, there’s always Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth, chaired by David Mitchell, Mack’s opposing captain on Would I Lie to You? Mack and Mitchell could Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Is it odd that, in a bill containing an achingly contemporary première and a classic meditation on the First World War, a pastel-painted present for the Queen Mother’s birthday should race away with the honours?Not if it was by Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet’s founder-choreographer. He’s been rather an undersung genius since his death, but maybe last night will tip the balance towards him again in the capacity crowd stakes, for his plotless Rhapsody (1980) was the standout piece in the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill. Much of the credit goes to Steven McRae, who danced his heart Read more ...