Reviews
edward.seckerson
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in his Fourth Symphony when Stalin branded him a renegade but which later became a kind of defiant titter trailing to eternity in his fifteenth and last symphony. That piece, oblique and puzzling but extraordinarily lucid too, might be regarded as the apotheosis of his most powerful weapon in life and death: irony. It begins in the nursery like a second childhood Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There must be something about doing a medical degree. A steady stream of medics - including Jonathan Miller, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden and Paul Sinha - have hung up their stethoscopes to plough a furrow in comedy (Phil Hammond, meanwhile, manages to combine the two careers). It was definitely medicine's loss and comedy's gain when Harry Hill made his career detour and, as he gleefully tells us in Sausage Time, five years at medical school provided him with the wherewithal to deliver an educated (and very funny) fart gag.Hill has been away from live performance for several years, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
No your eyes don't deceive you - Terrence Malick has directed another film, released not even two years after his last offering The Tree of Life. If you've no idea why that's worth remarking on, the gaps between his last four offerings were respectively six, seven and - drumroll please - 20 years. To The Wonder may be in the same ballpark of beauty as Malick's previous picture, and sound as if it shares the same astronomical ambition, but where that film soared this one sometimes struggles.It starts with an attractive couple, rapturously in love. They are the Neil (man of the moment Ben Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skipping across time and place – South Pacific 1849 to Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 to San Francisco 1973 to UK (looks like England) 2012 to Neo Seoul 2144 to Earth’s post-apocalyptic Hawaii 2321 – Cloud Atlas is like a scary old punk who's actually quite nice. A simple and satisfying moral centre stops you from feeling its 172 minutes are a waste of time and its six stories don’t intertwine as much as play tag with each other. But look past extraordinary makeup, special effects, distracting painted horses and Hugo Weaving as Old Georgie, an irritating amalgam of Tom Waits and Johnny Depp, and Read more ...
terry.friel
The public rarely sees the human cost of journalists covering war. More rarely still does it see the real civilian cost. That makes Walking Wounded a frank and refreshing insight into the world at either end of the lens. Siobhan Sinnerton’s remarkable film followed British photographer Giles Duley as he returned to Afghanistan after losing both legs and his left arm in an IED explosion two years ago this month while embedded there with the US Army’s 75th Cavalry Regiment.His project - to photograph work in a Kabul hospital that specializes in restorative treatment for locals Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s currently a bemusing wave of bands that combine electronic dance with indie stylings. Acts such as Foals, Everything Everything and Delphic are increasingly successful but seem to my ears, at least on record, to be neither fish nor fowl. Whenever they hit a decent dance pulse, they douse the flames with jangle-pop that just doesn’t seem to fit. Clearly many disagree as these outfits are increasingly popular and it’s claimed the live arena is where they come into their own. Time to find out.Tonight Delphic have the odds stacked against them from the start. Their gig doesn’t suit the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Performing Shakespeare in a former cigarette factory in South Bristol has become something of a ritual for Andrew Hilton and his close-knit company. Any act of ritual requires a dedicated space and the red-tiled floor on which the drama unfolds on this most intimate of stages has taken on a certain aura. With the minimum of sets and props, a deep probing of the text and the minimum of modish theatrical artifice, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory proves year after year that less is more, at least when it comes to awakening the imagination.Hilton uses the space as an alchemical vessel, a place Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.But back he is, and entirely on form too. That said – look away now if you deplore journalistic cliché – this was very much a concert of two halves: a solid but buttoned-up take on two early Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain in Joan Jett-like form as an imperilled hipster, the movie goes heavy on portentous sound effects and creepy-crawlies. What it lacks pretty much entirely is common sense. On the other hand, who submits to such genre pictures for logic? The whole point of director Andy Muschietti's movie is to trot out a time-honoured arsenal of horror film Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been exactly typical, this stuff has been easy enough to access for more than half of my life now. And I’m not exactly young. Google and the World Brain, the first of this week’s two technology-themed instalments of BBC Four’s usually excellent Storyville international documentary strand, argued that attempts to preserve the entirety of human knowledge Read more ...
Russ Coffey
These days not all sensitive folk-rockers with trembling voices can bank on easy audiences. Villagers main man Conor O’Brien is one who can – he’s been selling out concerts like nobody's business. This gig was no exception. O’Brien may be plaintive but he also has the reputation for being one of the smartest, artiest writers around. One critic has described his new LP {Awayland} as the first great album of 2013. Like its strange brackets, it can also be quite challenging.Almost every moment of gentle beauty on the record is matched by another of jarring electronica. Last night, although some Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is this the most poetic title in London theatre today? Anders Lustgarten’s new play joins a ragged march of work, from David Hare’s The Power of Yes (2009) to Clare Duffy’s Money: The Gameshow (currently at the Bush Theatre), which attempts to tackle the global financial meltdown. Unlike these other shows, however, it’s USP lies in its claim to offer a solution to the pains and penalties of economic austerity.Set in a dystopic version of current times where, to the tune of David Cameron’s plummy praise of the market, all social services have become businesses, the play rapidly spray-paints a Read more ...