Reviews
Jasper Rees
There’s a queue to get into Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant to order things like blowtorched fetlock of kudu with jus de cat-gut noodle on a bed of iron filings strained through a muslin jockstrap. A state of emergency was declared in the gated communities of the south-east a couple of years back when some punters succumbed to metal fatigue or carbon monoxide poisoning or some such specialist alimentary ailment. Thus it is with anxiety that one learns of Heston’s latest mission: to think laterally about fish and chips.Yes, assume the brace position. In his new series, the zany lab technician Read more ...
kate.bassett
This political satire is hardly a case of rapid-response playwriting. Opening in London's West End last night, after a month touring the regions,The Duck House is a farce about a fictional MP caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal which hit the headlines way back in 2009. One certainly might have expected Dan Patterson (of TV’s topical Mock the Week) and Colin Swash (from Have I Got New for You) to have been swifter out of the blocks in co-authoring the script. Or have they just belatedly extracted it from their bottom drawer (adding a prologue wherein the MP looks back on the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A cynic might say that the presenter of a series entitled Places that Don't Exist is perfectly qualified to go on a long walk to look for religious revelation. In keeping with his past explorations of wild places, Reeve's commentary was better on scenery than spirituality. Yet he didn't have the time to walk the entirety of any of his routes, giving his narration a slightly distant, disjointed feel. Reeve made his reputation broadcasting about terrorism, and observed in the first episode that he felt uncomfortable with religious absolutism. It was just as well, then, that the Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
"My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I was born with arms like this."This is the simple, straightforward opening to a show that is anything but. Husband-and-wife team Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser have devised something here that is part fairytale, part puppet show, part cabaret and part burlesque – with a fair amount of wry comedy thrown in for good measure.It ostensibly follows the well-known tale of Beauty and the Beast, with Muz ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is one of those epoch-making events that are so huge as to be almost beyond our comprehension. It affected the lives of literally millions of people. And has a resonance today. To understand this cataclysmic event, you feel, will require six hours of documentary, a two-month mini-series or a novel of at least 600 pages. Yet here is Howard Brenton’s new play, which opened last night, and it tells the story in one quick evening.Brenton achieves this compression by focusing on a small tale at the heart of the larger epic. While the big names – Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s usually documentary cinema that takes us inside societies of which we know little, revealing their structures and rituals. Occasionally feature films achieve something similar, and Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void is one such, telling its story from inside the world of Israel’s Orthodox Hasidic community, specifically the Haredim.So it might seem surprising that one of the first comparisons critics have been making has been with the fiction of Jane Austen (Burshtein herself has acknowledged such resemblances, too). On reflection, it's nothing of the sort: both the film and the novels show Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The sense of an ending is a hard thing to achieve. The Paradise has garnered a loyal following over two series, and no doubt there will be viewers sad to see it depart. But unless options are still being kept open – no announcement either way seems to have surfaced from the BBC – last night’s episode looked like a finale.It certainly went out with a set-piece bang of a kind from which there would seem no way back. The marriage of Katherine (Elaine Cassidy) and Tom Weston (Ben Daniels) could hardly get any worse – it’s long strayed into the sinister territory of a Wilkie Collins novel, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema Paradiso is having a third outing 25 years on. A commercial flop in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore’s homage to the big screen as an escape route into other worlds excited love on a global scale only after it was re-released as winner of the best foreign film Oscar the following year. After so many films from New York's Italian diaspora had glamourised the mob, here was a bitter-sweet picture postcard from Sicily that had nothing to do with the Cosa Nostra (or very little: one local don does get popped off, but blink and you miss it).Tornatore’s specialist subject is nostalgia - Italian lives Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The photographs of Henri Matisse at work show, over the years, a sober, suited, bearded and dignified figure; there is also a charming series of Matisse in a white coat, as though he were a doctor, sitting in his studio and thoughtfully examining in close-up a curvaceous naked young woman, his model. In his maturity, he looks almost like the stereotype of the upper middle class professional, the lawyer that he once almost was.Of course, what happened is that he became, against family opposition and with an almost life-long struggle, one of the most dominant and adored artists of the last Read more ...
kate.bassett
We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia production of From Morning to Midnight – Georg Kaiser's fearlessly weird German Expressionist drama from 1912 – Adam Godley's Clerk starts out as a desiccated nonentity, nose to the grindstone.A huge, ticking clock hangs above him, cogs whirring, bells chiming. Shrill whistles blow as customers whirl in and out through brass turnstiles. Godley remains stiff as a corpse, except for his hands darting out to Read more ...
fisun.guner
I can’t say I ever tune into More4, so I confess that I don’t know whether its arts strand is any good, or even if it has one. But I suspect that Get Folked might have made a better three-parter on BBC Four, and not just for dedicated folk-heads. As it was, it tried to pack a lot into its 50 minutes (though allowing only 10 seconds for Mumford and Sons might be seen as a blessing by some) and it did so with a lot of seasoned hyperbole. According to the voice-over in Sam Bridger’s mish-mash of a film, “Something unbelievable has been unfolding over the last few years,” and that something is Read more ...
David Nice
It was a bright idea which, thanks to careful programming, has delivered – among other special events – two rich concerts in the Tower of London’s unexpectedly welcoming Tudor church, courtesy of the enterprising Spitalfields Music Winter Festival. Bach left behind an exquisite volume, the “Little Organ Book”, designed to contain 164 chorale preludes. He completed only 46; organist William Whitehead decided to commission composers to fill in the gaps, basing their inspirations on (hopefully) the music and/or the meaning of the words in the original chorales. The notion of pairing the preludes Read more ...