Reviews
judith.flanders
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.The first night cast of Jenna Roberts (right, in a previous performance, as the Lilac Fairy), now happily settled back at full health after a long injury break, and Iain Mackay (below left) is as sleek and smooth and elegant as the production. Roberts’s Aurora is gracious Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
There is something very familiar about Star Command. It's not just that this Kickstarter-funded game has been in development since 2011, nor that the setting superficially resembles Star Trek. It's more that there are several other games that do what Star Command sets out to do and, unfortunately, do it better.In Star Command, you are the captain of a small spaceship that you must outfit with both crew and basic functions, represented in-game as "rooms" that can be built on available plots scattered around the deck. Weapons rooms, shield generator rooms, medical bays and other more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation was a marriage of drama, melodrama and social observation that was beyond compare; it’s expecting too much of his new film to equal it. That said, The Past confirms that few can match the Iranian's attention to the psychological minutiae of family relationships. It's riveting.An Iranian, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris to sign divorce papers with his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo), four years after their separation. The couple have an easy rapport, with no evident rancour, and Ahmad gets on well with Marie’s daughters from an earlier Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Seeing the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, I felt a rush of euphoria despite deep reservations about the American invasion. My (misplaced) optimism was shared by the Iraqi student, Ayass Mohammed. ’“Suddenly I felt freedom,” he told reporters; for him the fall of the statue symbolised the end of tyranny and the arrival of hope. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan (pictured right) by the Afghan Taliban two years earlier was a similarly emotive affair. In the west, it provoked a wave of disgust; citing the historical and artistic importance of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ground-breaking though it is as one of the first gay films to come out of Poland, Tomasz Wasilewski’s Floating Skyscrapers brings home how happy endings on such subjects are hardly to be hoped for in the conservative, Catholic country. Wasilewski’s second feature has real visual style though, with laconic imagery and accomplished performances. It has garnered plentiful festival acclaim already, and opens in the UK in December.It’s set in an anonymous-feeling city of underpasses and motorways, a largely dark world where interiors are cramped, like the flat that Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk, below Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
James Gandolfini stars as an overweight charmer in the best romantic comedy of the year, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money). As Albert, Gandolfini – it's one of his last roles, in a film dedicated to “Jim” – brings all his warmth and allure to bear on lively divorced masseuse Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).When the two meet at an LA party they’re so adorable that we instantly want them to become a couple. At the same party, however, ominous tones reverberate as Eva also meets the fabulous poet Marianne (Catherine Keener). Not only is Marianne fascinating, she mesmerises Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the creators of Scandinavia's drama boom could be forgiven if they started behaving like a collection of hysterical Justin Biebers. Not only are their home-grown series hits around the world, they're also being slavishly copied by other broadcasters. The American version of The Killing has been followed by a US take on Danish/Swedish joint effort The Bridge, starring Diane Kruger and set on the Tex/Mex border. Now here's an Anglo-French spin on it, replacing the titular bridge with our beloved Channel Tunnel.In some ways it's not a bad idea, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Naomi Watts’s rare misstep with Diana is forgotten as this playfully provocative tale of female friendship and forbidden love unfolds. It’s an equally rare return to Australia for Watts, who plays Lil, whose deep childhood bond with Roz (Robin Wright) lasts into middle-age, as their respective teenage sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) join them in an idyllic life spent roaming freely between neighbouring beach-side homes. The ad hoc family’s laissez-faire attitudes are taken to extremes when Ian and Tom, both strapping 18-year-old Adonises, end up having sex with each other Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating and touched with despair, as Moodysson confronted how truly terrible lives can be.We Are the Best! is, in startling contrast, about a pair of 13-year-old punk schoolgirls in Eighties Stockholm, and fizzes with wide-eyed idealism. Based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel, Moodysson lets his young actresses Mira Barkhammer (as introspective Bobo) and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50, with stage directions that would be monumental if interpreted literally.Matthew Dunster does the only thing possible, paring it all down to the roughest edges, and does so brilliantly. Visually we've got exposed graffitied walls, wooden pallets and planks and a heap of tyres that define the prison parade ground and construction sites, where metal Read more ...
judith.flanders
Is David Bintley the one that got away, the wrong turning the Royal Ballet took in the early 1990s? I have long thought so, and watching their current triple bill, the feeling only grows. Bintley trained at the Royal Ballet School, graduated into Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham Royal Ballet), and became house choreographer for the Royal in 1985.Then, in 1993, he fled. Two years later he took over at BRB, and the man who should, probably, have steered Britain’s premiere classical company for the next quarter-century has instead quietly, and productively, guided their second, sister company in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Russell Brand, as I've written before, divides the room. Well, not the beautifully refurbished 3,000-seat Hammersmith Odeon in London, where his faithful gathered for the past two nights on his mammoth international tour, but more generally. There are those who find his – and I use the word deliberately – cocksureness irritating, or his loquacity a ridiculous affectation.Myself? No on both counts. Here is a man whose enjoyment of his sexuality is brazenly, comically played up, but like a little boy who has discovered his penis for the first time rather than some leering fool who wants to Read more ...