Reviews
Adam Sweeting
And the killer is... No, that would be telling, and you might not have watched it on catch-up yet. But was the revelation worth the wait?We often complain about the way British TV dramas are often squeezed into three or four (or two) parts, when an American series would stretch to 16 or 22 episodes. Hats off, then, to ITV and Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall for picking up the baton to create an eight-parter designed to depict the impact of a boy's murder on a small, tightly-knit seaside town (Oskar McNamara as murder victim Danny Latimer, pictured below). Hats partly back on again, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university field trip as cover for an exposé on North Korea, it's little wonder that the broadcaster's flagship investigative journalism programme has stuck with a far easier target this week.Shari'a law, and the enforcement thereof, is a headline-writer's dream, playing as it does into our fears of the "other". Broadly meaning "the way", Shari'a is the body of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Unburdened by conventional narrative sense, Upstream Color is a true curiosity. Seductively strange, woozily kinetic and above all romantic, Shane Carruth's second feature is a little film with big, bizarre ideas. Incorporating pig farming, scientific experimentation and sound recording, it proves that you don't need a sizeable production budget to swoop and soar on the big screen, and that you don't always need to know precisely what's going on to be immersed in a story.Amy Seimetz plays Kris, a successful creative. One night she's kidnapped, seemingly at random, and force-fed a specially Read more ...
Julian White
“The best times I've ever had were in prison,” says Crystal, aged 23, one of the three inmates being followed in The Prisoners (this was originally planned as episode one, but was bounced from the schedules by the death of Baroness Thatcher). On the brink of being released after serving a 12-week stint for drink-related crimes, she's waxing nostalgic, while her girlfriend Toni – also due out very soon – is in tears. “I'm dreadin' getting out,” she quavers.We also get to meet Jayde, 18, a prolific offender prone to self-harm, and Emma, 23, a well-spoken middle-class girl whose drug habit has Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Orpheus, set in an imaginary Paris in the 1930s, delivers an unashamedly escapist and a quite delightful evening's entertainment. The Orpheus myth is often a pretext for fantasy or fun. Maybe the original, tragic tale is just too unremittingly dark and poignant. But while Offenbach, for example, camped and cancanned it up, and Cocteau found poetry in his vintage cars and his motorbikes, the Little Bulb company's twist on the story – in a co-production with Battersea Arts Centre - has been to make Orpheus into a suave guitarist - Django Reinhardt (Dominic Conway) - and Eurydice (doubling as Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It takes a certain kind of artist to book American mezzo-extraordinaire Joyce DiDonato as a supporting act. It’s a risk. Even if you happen to be Juan Diego Flórez. But it’s one that actually paid off on the first night of Flórez’s three-concert residency at the Barbican.Joined not only by DiDonato but by soprano Julia Novikova and baritone Marco Caria (as well as the massed forces of the LSO), Flórez showed us a softer side than the bravado-recitalist we usually see during his London visits. Surrounded by his peers, duetting, quartetting and generally sharing the spotlight, Flórez rather Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The choir sing off stage at first, under the wide arch to the side before filling the platform and singing the praises of Cuba’s Orisha spirits. Those Orisha guys must be shining like beads on a necklace. Lucumi were finalists in the 2008 BBC Choir of the Year, and they’re a multicultural London choir putting their voices at the service of Afro-Cuban music traditions, where it all begins with the hands and mouth. Percussion, lead voice, chorus, and the call-and-response pattern-making of chants that swim us to the deeper end of the pool. They sound grand in the Union Chapel’s acoustics for Read more ...
graeme.thomson
No theme, no message, no set, no title. Northern Irish comedian Jimeoin is a beguilingly old-fashioned kind of standup. “Just jokes,” he told us at the beginning of his new show, and he was true to his word. His gift lies in mining the quirks of everyday life for points of universal recognition, whether it’s the devilish business of refilling the ice tray, changing bin bags, bringing in the shopping, or why you’ll never see a busy man eating an ice cream.This observational path took some nicely surreal turns, such as when he graphically demonstrated why cowboys struggle with revolving doors, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie Nugent. The format of the film is recognisable from countless documentaries: talking heads giving us the lowdown on a crime. But in Bernie Richard Linklater boldly combines fact and fiction and handles the darkest of subjects - the real-life murder of an elderly woman by her younger male companion - with the lightest of comic touches and, by god, if Read more ...
James Williams
It was a full house in Kentish Town for a homecoming show for grime pioneers Wiley, Skepta and JME. A far cry from the Sidewinder and Eskimo Dance parties that spawned so many of the scene’s main players, instead this was a night that carried an air of triumph, a "we made it" moment that inspired explosive performances and a fantastically receptive audience.Featuring a plethora of grime scene talent, from the up and comers, represented by the Azonto fixated Fuse ODG, who made the most of the stage space to whip the crowd into a skanking maelstrom, to appearances from scene veterans and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s. This repertoire has produced a stream of exceptional dance actors over the decades, some home-reared, others drawn from abroad like moths to flames by the chance to dance ballets where no archetypes can be found, only real people in situations of such prescribed individuality that the performers themselves can become their most individual.There isn’t a more demanding role than Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, a ballet Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was clear that there was an Italian on the podium. Muted strings invoked an atmosphere so crepuscular that, when one involuntarily closed one’s eyes, the murmur of voices intoning the words “Requiem aeternam” seemed to come from deep inside the cathedral. The theatricality of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is inescapable but what was also inescapable under Daniele Gatti’s baton was that every phrase, instrumental and vocal, is breathed as a singer might breathe it. Already, as the opening pages of the piece unfolded, one noted Gatti’s way of keeping the line fluent and singable with dovetailed Read more ...