Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The annual reappearance of The Good Wife is always a cause for celebration. Why they persistently park it in the twilight zone of More4 remains one of the enduring mysteries of our era, since it's one of the best shows on TV, but the only question that need concern us is: will season five be as good as the ones that came before? On the evidence of this opener, yes indeed, so much so that American critics have been hailing it as the best ever,Change is in the air at Chicago's upmarket law firm Lockhart Gardner. Not only does Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) have to be mindful of her new Read more ...
David Benedict
“Mind that door.” With the hurricane howling outside it’s no wonder the locals gathered in Auntie’s pub are yelling... but there is no door. Instead, a stage-wide sheet of corrugated iron rears up to let in Stuart Skelton’s storm-tossed Peter Grimes. Enlarging naturalistic, close-up detail into full-blooded, expressionist drama is typical of this frankly electrifying revival of David Alden’s revelatory production of Britten’s masterpiece. The fusion of sound and stage action in the very first moment makes it immediately clear that this production is operatic in the best sense. With the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At first the machines are in control. A crane drags the inert body of a woman across the floor, lifts her up and leaves her dangling from the waist. A man follows, dragged by one foot and suspended upside down. The two bodies rise and fall or swing round in a duet horribly reminiscent of carcasses hanging in an abattoir.French choreographer, Boris Charmatz is obviously not out to please us with a light hearted evening of frivolity. The mood lightens a bit, though, when the crane lowers its cargo onto a giant conveyor belt that gives the dancers a bumpy ride as it bounces up and down with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lance Armstrong is a Hollywood villain who just happens to be real. He bullies, lies, manipulates, cheats and destroys lives until righteous crusaders hunt him down and drive a stake through his heart. And that, more or less, will be the plot of the movie Stephen Frears is working on now. Popcorn munchers demand nothing less than a comeuppance for the bad guy. To cite Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily: that’s what fiction means. It’s not quite what happens in The Armstrong Lie.Alex Gibney, who has made uncompromising films about Enron and WikiLeaks, was the ideal director Read more ...
Matthew Wright
As the Brockman family returns for a fifth and final series of Outnumbered, some viewers will find their hackles standing to attention at the family's extraordinary distillation of middle-class characterstics. There’s the enviable middle-class London home they live in, absurdly beyond the means of a family that seems to subsist on a single teacher’s income. There’s the tameness of their problems, this week's revolving around angst-ridden secondary school choice and the horror provoked by the eldest child Jake's (Tyger Drew-Honey) tattoo. And there's the mother’s relentless anxiety about Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you're suffering from the January blues, hurry to the Southbank Centre where Martin Creed’s exhibition is bound to make you smile. The man best known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 by switching the lights on and off at Tate Britain has filled both floors of the Hayward Gallery with things that not only lift the spirits but reveal how to make magic from virtually nothing.Nor is this an example of art lite; we tend to think of humour as an easy option, but sustaining a joke over five galleries and three terraces is a serious challenge. One false move and the whole thing falls apart; Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There’s no place like home – and home for writer Simon Stephens is Stockport. He doesn’t live there any more, but he was born there in 1971 and still finds the place, particularly its seedier side, a rich source of emotionally charged material. So, having started life less than 10 miles from the Royal Exchange, he keeps coming back. This is the fourth play he has written for the theatre, starting with Port in 2002.That play dealt with Rachael, a girl growing up there in potentially crushing circumstances, but somehow finding within herself the spirit to escape, at least for a while. His Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After his outsized triumph as conman Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle, Christian Bale is gaunt and stringy again (Jennifer Lawrence will be happy to hear) in this minor-keyed, intensely atmospheric story of two brothers in an America that time forgot. It's set in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, a ghost town all but abandoned by its devastated steel industry. "Born down in a dead man's town", as the Boss put it in "Born in the USA". As the camera roams over its poor, pinched houses in the rain, you know nothing good is about to happen here.Bale plays Russell Baze, still clinging to his job at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s Jaakko Eino Kalevi, who played his debut British show last November, heads up theartsdesk’s latest regular round-up of what’s come down from the north. A spellbinding display of individualistic pop, the London outing coincided with the arrival of his first non-Finnish release, the Dreamzone EP.Deadpan and stood at his ancient synth, he was accompanied by a drummer and sax player. The rhythms rarely deviated from the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”. The hollow sax evoked Chris Rea or the white-bread soul-pop of Hall & Oates. The whole enfolded like dub. Kalevi barely Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Patch may have finally answered the summons of the last bugle, but there are still those whose memories run all the way back to the war to end all wars. Violet Muers, 106, was in the firing line when the German navy crept up on the east coast of England and unleashed hell on Hartlepool. A century on, she lucidly recalled the bangs going off in the night. “Me older sister said, ‘I think somebody’s beatin’ the carpets.’” Jeremy Paxman sat in her front room, enthralled by the bonny voice of another England.The most recent attack on these islands was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Once upon a time, there was an assumption that the DJs and remixers who emerged in the late 1980s would kill off touring bands like Depeche Mode. As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth and 34 years since they first got together, Basildon’s finest are not only still providing remixers with plenty of raw material for their craft, but they are reproducing their recreations in the live arena. Last night, Depeche Mode not only played classic after classic in their original recorded form, but also a couple of re-arrangements by way of Goldfrapp’s understated reworking of “Halo”, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“If I didn’t want to have a life, I’d move to LA,” was one of the (many) funny lines in the new HBO series Looking, and brought home that, along with the show’s three appealing gay male leads (main picture), it’s the city of San Francisco itself that plays a central role here.Looking has drawn comparisons variously with the likes of Queer as Folk, Sex in the City, and fellow HBO show Girls, but there’s surely another spectre looming over it, in the very best possible sense: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. The adaptation of the first of Maupin’s books reached television two decades ago, Read more ...