Reviews
Veronica Lee
Conor McPherson’s 1997 play has become a modern classic, and it's not difficult to see why. It's a glorious evening of storytelling that allows the cast to display their wares, as the conversation between characters who have known each other all their lives flows and ebbs as they reminisce, josh and cajole each other with both affection and darker, underlying feelings. Such naturalistic conversation is, strangely enough, often hard to present with authenticity, but when it's done well - as it is here - one forgets this is acting. We could be eavesdropping on real people chatting.We are in Read more ...
Simon Munk
It has to have been the trailer, there's really no other explanation. Before the original Dead Island came out, there was a trailer. And not just a trailer, but the trailer – probably the most finely-crafted, greatest piece of teaser content ever created for film, TV or games. It's the only possible reason why Dead Island sold as well as it did... and unfortunately, there isn't a similarly brilliant trailer for its sequel, Riptide.The original trailer (see it here) used some beautifully heart-tugging music and a time-running-backwards schtick to pick apart a holidaying family's descent into Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What if John Lennon had left The Beatles in 1962? What if they had continued without him? And what if he had still become the acid-tongued, ready-with-a-quip character the real world became familiar with? Snodgrass took those what-ifs and ran with them to depict a parallel world that was less the “hilarious comedy drama” trailed by Sky and more a gloomy, slightly creepy oddity made even more so by Ian Hart’s deft, second-nature portrayal of a Lennon floundering on life’s scrapheap.Hart has played Lennon twice before and this third outing took him into an imaginary scenario originally created Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It may not be Scorsese and De Niro, but the partnership between Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan has been extremely fruitful. It has given us Coogan’s sublime portrayal of legendary music promoter Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, a triple role as that great literary waffler Tristram Shandy, Tristram’s dad, and as himself playing them in the dazzlingly post-modern A Cock and Bull Story, and again as the worst public image of himself in the television series The Trip.Real, fictional, autobiographical, there’s a certain pattern here, of grandiosity, self-delusion and prattishness. So Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On Monday, Pink shocked Twitter followers by announcing she was pulling out of a gig at Birmingham’s LG Arena. A lung infection had confined her to the hotel. “She better get well soon,” said one fan. “I’d die if she cancelled at the O2.” She didn’t, of course. Whether due to an awful lot of oranges or sheer guts she arrived on stage last night, catapulted by giant bungee cords.The high-octane pace lasted all night long. At the end she was flying again – this time suspended on wires and being fired from one end of the arena to the other. In the intervening two hours, the 33-year old mother Read more ...
peter.quinn
The CD booklet note by NASA astrobiologist Daniella Scalice is just the first of many striking features on this third Basho CD by the Mercury Prize-nominated pianist Kit Downes. Joined by his core trio of bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer James Maddren (both fellow alumni of the Royal Academy of Music), plus reeds player James Allsopp and cellist Lucy Railton, Light From Old Stars sees Downes really getting into his compositional stride.With rippling arpeggiations on the piano strings and icy harmonics in the cello, album opener “Wander and Colossus” ushers you into the album's singular sound Read more ...
Gary Raymond
The play is the thing, to quote one famous bereaved theatrical son, and in this new collaboration between Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, artist Marc Rees and playwright Roger Williams, it is most definitely the thing. A Welsh-language multi-media promenade production that takes as its themes the erosion of the traditions of agricultural communities, Tir Sir Gâr is a complex balancing act between fact and fiction, and between emotional, involving drama and cold introspective installation art. The balance is delicate, sometimes successful and sometimes not.Granted, the story would not be enough on Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s apt that a drama set among soldiers should be presented with military precision; but corruption, cruelty and perversion can lurk amid the human innards of the machine of war, and in Nicholas Hytner’s well-oiled, impeccably paced production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the chainlink and concrete of an army base house scenes of cruel humiliation.Hytner's inaugural 2003 season as artistic director of the National included his staging of Henry V, coinciding with the Iraq War and starring Adrian Lester. Now Lester takes on the titular Moor, opposite Rory Kinnear, whom Hytner directed as Hamlet Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Oh dear. Oh deary dear. Oh deary deary dear. To think that Ben Elton, who has a “written and created by” credit for this pile of poo, once helped to scale the heights of British comedy as co-writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder. Five minutes into this I was thinking, “How on earth did it get commissioned?” Oh I know, because Ben Elton, who once helped create...The story, for all that it amounts to, concerns Gerald Wright (see what he did there with the title?), a nit-picking, pedantic, monotonous drone of a local government health and safety inspector - no stereotyping there, then - whose Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only faintly cracked note in this zinging early-season blockbuster is that, just as spring belatedly puts in an appearance, the action is set around Christmas time, with snow, Christmas trees and even some Yuletide hip-hop beats. Still, think of it as just a further example of the smart counter-intuitiveness that director Shane Black (stepping in for Jon Favreau) has brought to the party, helping to make it the fizziest and funniest of the series so far.Naturally IM3 bristles with CGI and mind-bending technological set-pieces, such as an apocalyptic helicopter assault on Tony Stark's Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’ve always thought of Lynn Shelton as Sundance royalty. Her breakthrough film Humpday – the über-buddy movie with the amateur porn twist – screened at the festival, as did her follow-up, Your Sister’s Sister, which demonstrated that Shelton could handle more mainstream comedy-drama without losing her indie spontaneity.Which is why it’s such a shame that Touchy Feely disappoints. The Seattle director has assembled a talented cast, and films with evident affection in her home town, but her usually deft touch for character and plot deserts her.It concerns a brother and sister, polar opposites Read more ...
David Nice
Visiting orchestras and conductors often complain about agents’ insistence that they programme their main national dishes. The request is partly understandable: we all want to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler, the Czechs in Dvořák, the Hungarians in Bartók. On this occasion, it seemed like no bad thing to welcome back the Budapest Festival Orchestra and its febrile, masterly music director Iván Fischer in a work they’ve brought to London before, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. But it was a surprise to some of us to find that this passionate, flexible team’s interpretation had stiffened Read more ...