Reviews
David Nice
Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to retirement age.Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure. Daring to upstage her in a final speech is manager Barry Humphries, still with his hand in the till while Edna gives all for her art Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Symphonies, Orchestral works Gewandhausorchester /Riccardo Chailly (Decca)Riccardo Chailly's sensational modern-instrument Beethoven cycle hasn't been bettered, and this Brahms symphony set repeats the trick. Pretty much everything is judged to perfection. Brahms never included metronome marks in his music. Chailly recognises that “this ensures a certain amount of licence", but is anxious to emphasise what the notes call "an uninterrupted evolutionary flow". Keep changing gear, and the music will grind to a halt, in other words. That never happens here. Chailly's swiftish Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Counsellor is a cinematic room divider: some people will like it, saying it is stylish and daring. Others will find it truncated, slick and pretentious. Whichever room you end up in, The Counsellor has a tang of its own. This violent, colorful thriller overflows with bravado and, like matching collars and cuffs, identical foreboding. The motto here is that bad things happen to bad people but when they're bad people we sort of like, it's different.Ridley Scott’s latest thriller is the first original screenplay written by novelist Cormac McCarthy. The author, responsible for No Country For Read more ...
Simon Munk
The Ratchet & Clank series has, largely, been a brilliant reminder of how much fun videogames can be. It neither had lofty ambitions of narrative and thematic depth, nor the headache-inducing sturm und drang of the current crop of action games. Sadly, this last entry in the series goes out with both too much bang and too much backstory.The main enemies, a pair of orphaned twins, apparently now need to have a mawkish backstoryBefore, Ratchet, the last-remaining Lombax space cat and his backpack-come-robot-buddy Clank, toured the galaxy fighting largely comedic crime. The series' key points Read more ...
David Nice
Among the diaspora of younger-generation Russian or Russian-trained pianists, there are at least four whose intellect and poetry match their technique. Three whose craft was honed at the Moscow or St Petersburg Conservatories – Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexander Melnikov and the inexplicably less well-feted Rustem Hayroudinoff – have made England their home. Boris Giltburg - the youngest of the group with a fifth, Denis Kozhukhin, close on his heels - left Moscow for Tel Aviv when he was a child and has had a different training. Coltish and capricious at times, his imagination may yet turn out to be Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Today’s special preview of the impending 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who finally filled in some of what happened in the gap between Paul McGann’s 1996 made-for-TV movie and the show’s 2005 televisual regeneration (Big Finish audios notwithstanding, obviously). So it was appropriate that today’s other Who-related event, a one-off tie-in documentary fronted by Professor Brian Cox, began by doing its best to bridge the gap between its presenter’s time in 90s dance-pop band D:Ream and his own unlikely regeneration as one of TV science’s most famous personalities.There are plenty of aspects Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is addicted to his own voice, whether he’s soliloquising about his cock, his safe-cracking, his hangover, or telling the psychotic Russian gangster whose houseguest he is how much he wants to fuck his girlfriend. His ornately foul-mouthed verbosity exhausts even himself as he explodes through life, punching, bragging, drinking, drugging and self-destructing, skin puffy, teeth stained, face scarred, gut flabby and eyes staring with fierce confusion, constantly startled by the latest disaster he’s inexplicably ploughed into. “I’m a cunt!” Dom keeps realising.And he is. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I first saw Mojo as a film, adapted from the stage and directed by its writer Jez Butterworth in 1997. And it really didn’t work. Set in 1950s Soho and involving club owners, gangsters and a wannabe rock & roll star, it tried too hard, felt flashy and stilted; the period proved a graveyard in much the same way as it did for Absolute Beginners a decade before.How wonderful, then, to see Mojo where it belongs, on stage, with its original director again at the helm and a killer cast that relishes the material. For it truly is a fabulous play, which demonstrates that at 25 Butterworth already Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Inevitably, an aura of fin-de-siècle gloom hung heavily over this final Poirot. So daunting was the prospect of terminating his 25-year career-defining stint as Belgium's finest (albeit imaginary) export that David Suchet insisted on shooting the last one before the others in the concluding series.In many respects it was business as usual. An A-list of reliable British thesps (Anne Reid, Phil Glenister, John Standing and a deservedly-promoted Aidan McArdle) found themselves incarcerated amid the spartan, crumbling surroundings of a lonely country house. The rain beat down, and the tall trees Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This year I’ve sat through Carrie Cracknell’s Wozzeck dry-eyed, seen a handful of Mimis take their last consumptive breath without so much as a tremor, even heard Shostakovich’s shattering Symphony No. 13 without obvious emotional distress. I was beginning to think I was getting irretrievably jaded, hardened; then a bunch of Welsh kids with ukuleles and a folk trio from the Highlands came along and everything changed.Music education in the UK has never been more embattled, more fragile. The music centres across the country that gave my generation that first addictive taste of ensemble music- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We shouldn't expect a perfectly formed show with a narrative arc and a final gag that is a series of clever callbacks and which neatly encapsulates all that has gone before, Stewart Lee tells us at the beginning of this show. Much A-Stew About Nothing is a sort of work in progress, as the comic tries out material for the BBC television series that he starts recording at Christmas and which will be on our screens in the spring. As such it's a more loosely formed enterprise than previous live shows and includes a lot of material that may not make the final cut.The show is in three half-hour Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story of Eugene Allen, Daniels' approach is straightforward and highly emotive. There’s plenty for the crowd here, and, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, the fact that The Butler is accessible across almost every demographic will get its message through to those who need to see it - those who maybe wouldn't see it if it were, say, art house. In some Read more ...