Reviews
emma.simmonds
You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical. A tawdrily entertaining tale, shot through with youthful lust and romantic delusion, The Paperboy might not deserve to be Read more ...
David Nice
Snow flurries outside, steam heat within. Writer-director Yael Farber’s transposition of Strindberg from a 19th-century Swedish estate to a contemporary farm in South Africa’s Karoo region on the eve of a storm is so painstakingly evocative that all worries about the latest publicity image – shades of blaxploitation, more Mandingo than Miss Julie – instantly evaporate.There’s much of the same giddying power-shifts and sexual violence that buffet the original, but Farber’s recent conception, fresh from acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Festival, recalibrates the context dramatically. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently on a clear day in the Shetlands, you can see Norway and Iceland. And from about halfway through the first instalment of this Caledonian murder mystery, you could see all the way to the final reel and take a well-educated guess about who did it.I was reading an opinion somewhere the other day that ITV's Broadchurch was an inferior rip-off of such fashionable Scandinavian fare as The Killing or The Bridge. Can't see it myself. Shetland, on the other hand, was riddled with Nordicisms and fit the bill perfectly. Shetland (the place) was even a Norwegian province back in the Middle Ages Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a finely drawn portrayal of loneliness and solitude encouraged by bottled-up emotions, Shell would be noteworthy enough. But it also contains two scenes – father and daughter interactions - that are deeply uncomfortable viewing. First-time feature director Scott Graham’s encapsulation of the life of 17-year old Shell and her father Pete’s life at an isolated Scots garage isn’t going to be quickly forgotten.Shell’s mother left years ago, for unspecified reasons. With an epileptic father, her routine, such as it is, is set by the infrequent customers that stop to fill up on the journey Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Watching Mr Selfridge has been like one of those whirlwind tours with the refrain, “It’s Tuesday, so it must be Rome”. Episodes have been defined by the drop-in appearances of Blériot and his aeroplane, Conan Doyle and the séance, Mr FW Woolworth and the like. They've succeeded one another like the purring Monsieur Leclair’s window displays, leaving ongoing interest in character in the shade.Crowning, in every sense, this closing episode was the private visit paid to the store by Edward VII, received with customary unctuousness by Jeremy Piven’s Harry Selfridge. Either it was the King of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
What fire and grace on display last night at what he and we assume will be Wilko Johnson’s final London gig. It’s been a while since ticket touts were out in force outside one of his gigs (£200 for you, sir) although his career has been floating upward in the last couple of years, partly due to Julien Temple’s excellent documentary Oil City Confidential. We came to pay affectionate tribute to one of the great guitar stylists, who announced a couple of months ago that he had terminal cancer.Most bands playing material from 40 years ago are going through the motions and are basically Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Romanian New Wave continues producing cinema with a visceral power that’s hard to match anywhere in Europe, though to say it was alive and well would hit the wrong note, given the bleakness of the world it goes on depicting. Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, his lacerating abortion story set in Ceaucescu’s Romania, and last year his Beyond the Hills took high honours there again - the best screenplay and best actress awards, the latter shared between its two newcomer leads, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan.Alina, played by Flutur, Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Imago, Glyndebourne’s latest Community Opera exercise, putting the cap on 25 years of pioneering educational outreach, is one of those operas where you need to read the programme synopsis first. Or maybe not. Its complications are outweighed by the fabulous impact it makes. The triple-level-set (shades of Birtwistle’s The Last Supper and other bumper enterprises at Glyndebourne) is arresting, and brilliantly capitalised on; the projection visuals - cyberspace gone crazy - are stunning; the choreography is refined, and astonishing for a community effort. You may come out with your Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
What does _ _ _ _ mean to you? What does _ _ _ _ mean to us all? Questions asked every day by all kinds of people the world over. These same questions were posed last night at the London Coliseum about the doyen of 20th-century dance and choreography, Vaslav Nijinsky, at one of the Russian Ballet Icons galas that annually pack in an audience mostly made up of the Russian community London has now come to call its own.Nijinsky (to me, as a male dancer in my thirties) is responsible for a number of things: first, changing what it meant to be a male dancer; second, defining a new way of moving; Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fifteen years ago two male ballet dancers took the awesome risk of leaving the Royal Ballet with an idea in their head about independence. Their first venture was a new Japanese ballet company, which quickly lost their interest as it hit a conventional showbizzy trail. Then they took their second perilous risk: Michael Nunn and William Trevitt boldly declared that they intended to make a point about the possibilities of male dancing in today’s Britain. Enter the Ballet Boyz.They’ve weathered some exceptionally adverse conditions, running several professional lives in parallel, making TV films Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jewels, gold, silver, arms and armour, silks, embroideries, tapestries and lace: the world of the very rich and very powerful royals – and merchants – in Russia and Britain half a millennia ago is set out in glittering array in the V&A’s latest exhibition. The English imported fabulous furs from Russia, delighting in the finest sables, but also wood, hemp and tar, the better to build British ships. The Russians acquired beautifully crafted objects and above all arms, a perennially sought-after commodity which the British were skilled at supplying.Britain’s Muscovy Company was established Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Del Shannon: The Complete UK Singles and More (1961-1966)The plaintive, urgent drama of Del Shannon’s debut single, 1961’s “Runaway”, will always identify him. But amazing 45s like 1965’s crunching “Break up” and the ferocious garage-punk of “Move it on Over” show that there was more to the Detroit stylist than his calling card. This well-presented collection of his early singles – all heard in pristine fidelity, unlike the raft of budget comps available – reveals that Shannon was constantly evolving but hampered by what surrounded him.Shannon was a singer-songwriter before such a label was Read more ...