Reviews
Justine Elias
Somewhere along a desert highway in the American Southwest, where there's not much to do besides get drunk, shoot guns, and pump iron, a stranger comes to town.In Love Lies Bleeding, a smart, sexy neo-noir, the drifter is a weightlifter named Jackie (Katy M O’Brian), who’s out to score a short-time cash gig to fund her way to bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. On Jackie’s first night training at the local gym, though, there’s trouble: she fights off a handsy jock’s advances, preferring to lock eyes with the gym’s lonely manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart). This is New Mexico, 1989: two women Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The joy of CVC, when they catch fire, is the zing of gatecrashing a gang of cheeky, very individual personalities having their own private party. There’s a moment tonight, for instance, midway through the evening, when guitarists David Bassey and Elliot Bradfield, close in on each other, lock eyes, and spar clanging notes with spine-tingling precision. This band are tight, tight, tight. Meanwhile frontman Francesco Orsi dances louchely as keys player Daniel Jones does a manic jig around him. They enliven the venue with a joyful, if practiced, energy.CVC stands for Church Village Collective, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong, the Hallé’s principal conductor from the coming autumn season, presided in the Bridgewater Hall for the first time yesterday since the announcement of his appointment.It was in the last of the four “Rush Hour” concerts recently introduced, which begin at 6pm and are shorter than usual evening programmes, with fairly mainstream classical content and no interval. They seem to be succeeding very well in attracting audiences of all ages.But this one was a bit special, because Wong had his first chance to conduct the Hallé Choir along with the orchestra. The centrepiece of the menu Read more ...
James Saynor
The 21st century learnt afresh about the reality of carpet-bombed cities thanks to the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. And the Syrian war-set movie Nezouh begins with a teenage girl huddled in a tight, enclosed space – perhaps the bunk bed of an underground shelter – fervently scratching some message of distress or emblem of yearning on a piece of board.Maybe we’re in a fictional version of the chilling Syria siege documentary The Cave from 2019. But moments later the girl, named Zeina, jumps out of bed to help her dad in the sun-lit living room of their comfortable Damascus flat. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
On the morning of the press show of Laughing Boy, the BBC news website’s top story was about the abuse of children with learning disabilities by the staff at a special school.The undercover investigation had revealed a catalogue of distressed young people being locked in rooms barely bigger than cupboards for hours, sometimes naked and with no access to toilets or food. Staff were filmed on CCTV repeatedly hitting and kicking children; but despite a joint police and local authority investigation that concluded six staff had abused children "on the balance of probabilities", they were not Read more ...
David Nice
While the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra were performing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – weirdly, despite its size and difficulty, a repertoire staple – over at the Royal Festival Hall, their Guildhall School counterparts presented a programme of stunning originality.It was, in effect, the final of student instrumentalists’ competition for the coveted Gold Medal, alternating with singers (their turn again in 2025). The draw for collectors of the rich and rare were Argentinian top composer Ginastera’s Harp Concerto and the Divertimento concertante for double bass and orchestra by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Towards the end of David Haig’s new adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 1956 science fiction short story, someone asks if three humans who have been symbiotically connected to a massive AI computer for a decade can survive the experience.Yes, she’s told, “if they stop surrendering their neurons to the organoid.” Just when I’d assumed the script could not get any more infuriating, I’m offered a line that wouldn’t have been out of place in Flash Gordon. Actually, this show may have benefitted from a little of that film's camp. Sadly it’s a noisy, frantic, heavy-handed spin on a typically Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It was her 2018 album Be the Cowboy which saw Mitski propelled to stardom status. Laurel Hell, which followed in 2022, saw her continue on the popstar trajectory with synth-heavy songs, so the more laid back folkiness of last year’s release, The Land is Inhospitable and So are We came as a bit of a surprise.Her gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall came with some deliberate seeming choices to cement her – at least for now – as a singer of folk-soaked country-style melodies as opposed to the brazen pop bangers of her last couple of records. The seats in the stalls remained, with the whole gig being Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the West End. Red Pitch, Operation Mincemeat, For Black Boys… have already made their mark, and now this quirky musical for just two performers joins them.It’s been a long journey, starting in Norwich and Northampton and followed by Kilburn, where the show opened last Christmas at the Kiln Theatre. Appropriate timing, since the musical is set in December with one entertaining song about the insistent horrors of the Xmas musical standards, but it works just as sweetly in the Criterion in April.Illusions and reality Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Masaaki Suzuki has not just travelled into pastures new but proved himself thoroughly at home in them. The founder-director (in 1990) of Bach Collegium Japan, a distinguished harpsichordist-organist as well as one of the most rigorous and scholarly interpreters of the Baroque legacy, has just completed a tour with the Philharmonia that joyfully embraced a selection of Romantic masterworks. They returned from Spain to the Royal Festival Hall (pictured below) with a programme that saw Suzuki, stick-less and relaxed but fiercely attentive to every fine Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
First Nadine Shah raised hopes, then dashed them. “I’ve never had a dance off onstage before,” she observed at one point, impressed by the shapes a crowd member was cutting, before confirming it wouldn’t be happening on this evening either. You’d have backed Shah to triumph too, given how the rest of the gig showcased her skills with style.Dressed in a black power suit that suggested she could tangle with Melanie Griffth and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, Shah has both a superb voice and a terrific stage presence. She prowled around on the opening “Even Light”, all nervy, tense rhythms, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 1903, Wassily Kandinsky painted a figure in a blue cloak galloping across a landscape on a white horse. Several years later the name of the painting, The Blue Rider (der Blaue Reiter) was adopted by a group of friends who joined forces to exhibit together and disseminate their ideas in a publication of the same name.The key members were Kandinsky and his partner Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, Marianne von Werefkin and her partner Alexej von Jawlensky, both Russian aristocrats. The group was based in Munich, but keen to emphasise their internationalism, they invited others to show with them, Read more ...