Reviews
emma.simmonds
Just what kind of beast is Peter Berg's Lone Survivor? A jingoist justification for the continuing conflict in Afghanistan? A cautionary tale questioning the rules of engagement? War porn? An intense vehicle for its talented stars? Or, in fact, a critique of the American war machine which sends young men out to be slaughtered and provides them with scant support? Seemingly improbably, Lone Survivor can be viewed in all of these ways and thus looks set to divide audiences, perhaps along national lines, perhaps along political ones. Only one thing is for certain: it's a film that will get Read more ...
theartsdesk
Poor David Bowie. He didn't win a Grammy for his album The Next Day, and he didn't win a South Bank Sky Arts Award today either. That honour went to Arctic Monkeys and their fifth album AM, as Melvyn Bragg hosted the ceremony at London's Dorchester hotel in front of a crowd of luminaries from all sectors of the arts. This is the fourth time the event has been staged in association with Sky Arts, and it featured live performances by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Dame Evelyn Glennie and Imelda May.Comedians supplied a couple of the more eye-catching moments, with up-and-coming Bridget Christie taking Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who'd have thought that buried deep within the bromance antics of That Awkward Moment, the latest essay in celluloid dude-dom to confirm the notion that guys will be guys, would lurk a Shakespeare comedy? But forsooth, writer-director Tom Gormican's feel-good essay in three lads larking about in New York takes as its inspiration none other than Love's Labour's Lost, that Bardic study in the limits of celibacy and high spirits dampened down near the final curtain by death.Not that it will make a farthing of difference if you don't know your Shakespeare comedies and just want some frat-house, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It is 20 year since Derek Jarman died of an AIDs-related illness. To commemorate the event King’s College London, where he studied English and History, is staging Pandemonium – an exhibition, a symposium, a 24-hour installation in the ornate chapel and coach trips to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness where Jarman retreated after discovering he was HIV positive and created an idiosyncratic desert garden in the shingle.The earliest exhibit is a cubist self-portrait dating from 1960, the year he entered King’s College aged 18. He won a prize for it in the University of London Union Art Competition; Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dory Langdon: My Heart is a HunterAs a singer-songwriter, Dory Previn’s reputation rests on the extraordinary quartet of albums she made for United Artists in the opening years of the Seventies. This, her debut album, was issued in 1958. Commenting on his reaction to hearing “The Lady With The Braid” from 1971’s Mythical Kings & Iguanas for the first time, Jarvis Cocker said “I remember very vividly first hearing this record. I had moved to London. I was living in this squat and I was trying to put a curtain rail up. I was listening to the radio and it’s one of those moments where Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s hard to believe your eyes when you see a film now actually exists in which Stallone meets De Niro in the boxing ring. It’s Rocky v Raging Bull, of course, a fantasy match-up no one sane ever fantasised about. It sounds like the result of a Hollywood pitch meeting gone mad, stunt casting of imperial chutzpah.But here they really are: Stallone, the Orson Welles of action, whose career has been a constant disappointment since the heartfelt brilliance and nerve of writing Rocky and insisting he star in it; and De Niro, an enigmatic, exacting genius for 10 years who, tired, came back to earth Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Barely a month of 2014 has passed, and yet already the opportunities to remember the First World War seem to be presenting themselves at every turn. In this trio of short plays, we get a more unusual treatment of the anniversary – as the overall title suggests, the purpose is to hear the voices that don't sound so loudly across the intervening hundred years. We are here to understand what the women did in the war.The first of the three plays, Luck of War by Gwen John, presents a scenario that must have occurred far more frequently than official histories record. Ann Hemingway, played Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"Be careful what you wish for," fairy tales teach us. After I wished in December for more bite in Scottish Ballet’s saccharine Hansel and Gretel, along comes this revival of Liam Scarlett’s 2013 version of the same story for the Royal Ballet. Depicting as it does child neglect, domestic violence, paedophilia, murder, psychosis and suicide, Scarlett’s Hansel and Gretel has bite all right.Dark is an understatement here, in the black cavernous underground space of the Linbury Studio Theatre. Jon Bausor’s highly effective set bisects the stalls, bringing the audience right into Hansel and Gretel’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Holst: The Hymn of Jesus, Delius: Sea Drift, Cynara Roderick Williams (baritone), Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir, Hallé Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)Surprising musical effects are often achieved with relatively simple means. Holst's Hymn of Jesus contains several striking moments. Such as the bold modulation during the full chorus's “Glory to Thee, Father!” at the beginning of the second part. It could suggest a novice composer fiddling aimlessly with a sequence of unrelated major triads, but here it'll have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. Holst's ecstatic setting of Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Such is the level of confidence that the Silent Witness producers have in their new ensemble that star turn Emilia Fox barely lifted a scalpel in the latest instalment of the BBC’s long-running crime series. Either that or she needed a night or two off, and who could blame her? It's now in its 17th series, and Fox has stuck it out for more than half of them. And with four dead bodies to look at this week, it’s a high pressure job that you’re just bound to take home with you.So step forward the other lot: new guy Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern), research whiz Clarissa Mullery (Liz Carr Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Anyone familiar with Mark Kermode’s reviewing will already have heard his adulation of Steve McQueen’s latest film, 12 Years a Slave. An edition of The Culture Show dedicated to McQueen’s career could, then, have gone a bit weak at the knees in veneration. Instead, it roamed freely, making many intelligent connections across McQueen’s restless artistic journey from Turner Prize-winning video artist to hotly tipped Oscar shoo-in.That’s just one of the very many ways in which McQueen breaks new ground, in what’s becoming a really remarkable career. Rather than letting his artistic success Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There are occasions when just one band isn’t enough. Hence the rare experience of the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic joining forces for a performance, in the Strauss’s Voice series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, of An Alpine Symphony under Juanjo Mena. With around 130 players at his command, on stage and off, along with wind and thunder machines, xylophone, castanets, cowbells and other paraphernalia, Mena had the palette for vividly bringing out all the richness of the orchestral colour.Since this was Strauss’s last tone-poem, 15 years in the making since a day Read more ...