Reviews
Jasper Rees
When television goes off exploring classical civilisation, you can hear those lines from The Life of Brian chiming in your head. “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?” Such has been the glut of Roman TV in recent times that no couch potato is in any further doubt. The Romans have kept the plebs royally entertained. But what of the Greeks?The ancient ones, that is. (Of their modern descendants we know quite enough from the financial pages.) What Read more ...
Simon Munk
Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of the battlefield as you sprint through mayhem, dodging and weaving. Strategy games, even the realtime modern videogame versions, rely on a cerebral strategising – often sacrificing men as pawns in a broader scheme. Yet fusing these two ideas is exactly what Company of Heroes 2 tries to do and mostly succeeds at.Here, your World War II Russian forces Read more ...
David Nice
It only takes a few great Lieder by Schumann and Liszt to show the kinds of songs Wagner didn’t, or couldn’t, write. Very well, so the rarities in this programme were whimsies he composed in his youth, but even the Wesendonck Lieder, sole voice-and-piano masterpieces of his maturity, don’t show much concern for the little details of humanity. Fortunately Janice Watson rose to great form to show us what, quite apart from the two "studies" for Tristan und Isolde, their opulent generalities are all about. And her pianist in a thousand, Joseph Middleton, treated Wagner’s phrase endings with as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
People do the funniest things. Seth Rogen is not one of those people. Or not this week. An amiable enough graduate of Judd Apatow’s school of slackers, stoners and other bromantic under-achievers, Rogen has in his time swum upstream by industriously tossing off scripts. Pineapple Express and The Green Hornet told of his one-tracked interest in do-gooding beta males, and his latest project travels down the same road, all the way to the end. This Is The End rounds off a kind of loose trilogy celebrating slobby moral infantilism.Usually when Tinseltown imagines the apocalyptic obliteration of a Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s all stick and no lollipop, a chocolate box stuffed with nothing but empty wrappers: what a walloping letdown this intensely anticipated musical based on Roald Dahl’s perennially popular 1964 children’s book turns out to be.With songs by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman – the team behind the irresistible feelgood hit Hairspray – a book by the highly respected playwright David Greig, and direction by the Donmar Warehouse founder and Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, it ought to be a giant peach. Instead, it’s as bland and sugary as cheap confectionery. And with so little to savour of Dahl’s delicious Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If the Nazis had remained in power, and the Holocaust been hushed up and excused, how might an SS officer feel in his autumn years about those slaughters in Belorussian clearings? What happens when the culture that demanded mass murder simply continues, and the murderers are treated as heroes, free to bask in their rewards for half a century?Such questions arise as, having been arrested whenever he tried to interview victims of Indonesia’s Sixties anti-Communist Terror (in which up to 2.5 million were killed with Western complicity), director Joshua Oppenheimer instead asked some of the Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is essential to quote the famous opening line in any reference to Jane Austen's best-loved work. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old and being celebrated with balls, literary walks, readathons, television programmes and this adaptation for the stage. Notwithstanding several films (including Joe Wright's in 2005, with Keira Knightly as Lizzy) and Andrew Davies's memorable BBC version screened over six episodes in 1995 (with Colin Firth making Darcy a sex symbol in a wet shirt) another truth has to be acknowledged: no other medium truly Read more ...
Ismene Brown
William Forsythe and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in a week - it has to be Sadler’s Wells, the theatre to sample some of the world’s best dance stuff. De Keersmaeker’s Rosas are briefly here to take part in Sadler’s "Sampled", a new thread of summer performances surrounding a single famous piece with chat, film, interactivity and other related things.Forsythe’s equally brief company visit last week was a sampling too, the major work being a medley of chunks. Dance is always most illuminating when you can find contrasts, and to hold the laddish playfulness of the American’s work in mind when Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles is an unfashionably generous indulgence of a score tethered to an unfashionable and unredeemable plot. There’s not a contemporary director alive who can make the wretched thing work, so perhaps it would be better if we all just accepted this and closed our eyes through a Covent Garden revival from the 1980s with some of the finest voices in the business. It certainly gives everything to singers and orchestra that it so cruelly takes away from any director, but sadly the opera’s own faults do tend to end up at the door of those who attempt it anyway.Opera Holland Read more ...
Laura Gascoigne
One of this summer’s seaside attractions in Margate is an overstuffed walrus, but day-trippers won’t find it in the town’s Museum of Monstrosities. The taxidermic freak, on loan from the Horniman Museum, is the star exhibit in the new show at Turner Contemporary. Against the backdrop of a North Sea painted by Turner, the adipose Arctic mammal is out of its element. The fact that it’s also uncomfortable in its overtight skin (thanks to an overzealous Victorian taxidermist who had never seen a live specimen in the sagging flesh) makes it doubly curious - and doubly qualified for inclusion in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many of my friends find the entire idea of festivals abhorrent. It’s not that they’re on some appalled-of-Purley Daily Mail campaign to put a stop to them, just that the idea of staying under canvas for a few days in a field full of noisiness is their idea of Hell. Especially if the weather is inclement. Many of them would also find the pie-eyed utopian warbling, with which this film is entirely packed, irritating in the extreme, irrelevant delusional blather in our world of international debt crisis and cynical political shenanigans.I should state, then, that I am not one of these people. I Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and acclaimed for the likes of Sunrise, found himself in 1929. He came along with documentarist Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), but what had been planned as a joint project ended up as Murnau’s film; Flaherty shot the opening sequence (including the famous fisherman shot, below right), before handing over cinematography to Floyd Crosby, who Read more ...