Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
Many of us have felt the frustration mixed with nervousness, even fear as night has descended on a country walk, and we’re not quite sure where we are. And it's the sense of familiar foreboding that makes Jeremy Lovering’s debut feature such an effective chiller. Tom and Lucy are taking a touching gamble on romance. Having met at a party, they have agreed to accompany each other to a music festival in Ireland. En route, Tom takes an additional plunge, and reveals that he has booked them into a hotel for the night, one that promises “your own slice of paradise”.This is a bold approach, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Fearlessly smart, honest and philosophical, Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes is the striking, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful second film from Italian-American writer-director Francesca Gregorini. It marries moments of sweeping surrealism with an earnest, credible exploration of female relationships.Kaya Scodelario is Emanuel. A surly, strange-fish of a 17-year-old, she guiltily describes herself as her mother's murderer and her death during childbirth as "the cost of doing business". When bohemian single-mum Linda (Jessica Biel) moves across the road Emanuel is struck by the resemblance Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Killing Joke: The Singles Collection 1979-2012Killing Joke were one of the most singular British bands to emerge in wake of punk. Their metal-edged, tribal stomp didn’t fit in with anything else going on at the time. Collecting 33 tracks from their singles and EPs to date, The Singles Collection 1979-2012 shows them as single-minded, a trait bringing a timelessness and consistency. “In Cythera”, from 2012, is as impactful as 1988’s “America”.Their sound has changed though. The rough edges and bark of “Follow the Leaders” (1981) or "Let's All Go (to the Fire Dances)" (1983) have been tempered Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Reformed rock bands may be ten-a-penny but no other return quite matches the resurrection of Alice In Chains. The first grunge band to break big with their 1990 debut album Facelift, Alice In Chains matched Nirvana both in their ability to marry heavy riffs with haunted melodies and a genuinely desperate sense of despair: on Facelift they sang "We Die Young" while 1992’s Dirt finds nearly every song mined with self loathing alongside odes to heroin. Unsurprising then - if still shocking - that vocalist Layne Staley and bassist Mike Starr both went to early graves.Yet guitarist Jerry Cantrell Read more ...
peter.quinn
Some vocal jazz can be so anodyne that it barely registers on your consciousness, as anyone who's ever heard a jazz wannabe dusting down “My Funny Valentine” will know. A Liane Carroll gig, on the other hand, offers a roller coaster ride of emotions: joy, pain, hope, loss. With the ability to make every song sound like a personal experience, Carroll is one of the few singers who can make your spine tingle for an entire set.Launching her exceptional new album Ballads last night in a newly refurbed Pizza Express Jazz Club, a luxuriant first set featured the singer with exquisite string Read more ...
David Nice
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Yet more than just the icing on the cake was the collective and individual presence of students from the Royal Academy of Music for Ravel's L' Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Scarecrow tied for the coveted Palme D’or of 1973. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg, the man who did Panic In Needle Park and importantly Street Smart, which captured the electrifying moment when Morgan Freeman became a star, this sombre comedy stars Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. In fact, every element of Scarecrow aims for classic status. Thanks to nifty distributor Park Circus, we can now see first-hand on the big screen why this pedigreed film has been so little heard of or seen since its 1973 French triumph.As the film after Hackman's Oscar for The French Connection (1971) and The Poseidon Read more ...
David Nice
Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.Apollo’s celestial strings and the acerbic mix of brass with woodwind in Oedipus, all superbly aligned, guaranteed further contrasts. But Read more ...
joe.muggs
I have to admit I was That Hipster with Underworld: loved them circa 1991, stopped being intensely interested around the first album, diverged almost completely after “Born Slippy” went supernova circa 1995. It was wonderful the way that Karl Hyde bodged together torn up fragments of overheard conversations into his rave-dada lyrics to express the delirium of the rave era, but as the band's instrumental film soundtracks started to become the most interesting thing about them, perhaps foolishly I wrote him off as a one-trick pony, never again to repeat the inspiration of “Mmm Skyscraper I Love Read more ...
Julian White
The first minutes of Paula Milne's new three-parter are absolutely hilarious. MP Aiden Hoynes (David Tennant) resigns from his post as Business Secretary and launches an attack on the Prime Minister from the backbenches in an attempt to trigger a leadership contest, only to find his comments greeted by embarrassed silence. In a split second he has turned from a Westminster high-flier into a social leper who can clear out the House of Commons Gents like a foul gaseous emission. He gambled, he lost and he has no one to blame but himself – well, himself and his best friend, Work and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You wait years for a female comedy duo to take up where French & Saunders left off, then two come along within a calendar year. Which just about counts as at once. Anna & Katy, who recently had a run on Channel 4, rely for most of their wit on a wide range of silly voices. Watson & Oliver, who have returned for a second series, feel like more traditional sketch artists. They observe and they spoof and even hint at pathos.Not that they were entirely welcome last time round. The comment stream for theartsdesk’s review of the first series divided unequally between the appreciative Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“In a world…” How many times have we heard this portentous introduction to a movie trailer, in a reverberating baritone whose seriousness is in stark contrast to the epic fluff it seeks to promote. Director/writer/star Lake Bell’s oddball and hugely likeable comedy makes up for some of the pain we’ve had to endure through such promos, by taking a peep into the world of the voice-over artists, whose finely-honed vocals are responsible.Bell plays Carol, a young woman who is working hard to emulate her father, Sam (Fred Melamed), a legend in LA’s voice-over community. But the odious parent Read more ...