Reviews
Veronica Lee
Made in 1992, this was the first Muppets project after the death of creator Jim Henson, and was helmed by his son, Brian. It's been given a 20th-anniversary re-release by Disney, which now owns the Muppet franchise, appropriately enough in the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth.There's the usual mix of puppet and human action, realised in designer Val Strazovec's foggy, filthy Dickensian London, all narrow alleyways and candelit indoor gloom. Michael Caine does a nice turn as Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser millionaire who is given the chance of redemption after being visited on Christmas Eve Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Why do you want to go to Greece?” After watching the numbing Dead Europe and the journey of its protagonist Isaac the question asked might, more pertinently, have been “do you know the Greece you’re going to visit?” This relentlessly dark film paints Greece – in common with the other countries seen – as a place of barely hidden agonies, characterised by shadows. No wonder Isaac’s mother gives him a talisman to ward off the evil eye before he sets off from Australia.Isaac (Ewen Leslie) is a photographer of Greek heritage, born in Australia. His father commits suicide by crashing his car so, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit has always been the answer to those who rail at the self-consciously epic scale and bombast of The Lord of the Rings; it is the perfect Tolkien primer, an introduction to Middle Earth that is humorous and boisterous, doesn’t take its heroes too seriously, moves along at a good clip and is no less a glorious adventure for its levity.It is also a modest single volume. How ironic, then, that director Peter Jackson should take that very lightness away from it, ignore the fact that it was written for children, and impose his own grandiose design. The hubris is mind- Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Royal Academy’s spacious white galleries at Burlington Gardens are flooded with mystic light and filled with New Age baubles. You are bathed in a trippy purple haze as you enter one gallery which contains a giant glowing pod. The translucent pod is meant to resemble an ancient monolith but instead looks more like an oversized Ikea lamp. The work derives its title, Tom Na H-iu II, from the Celtic “Tom na h-iubhraich” – a site of “spiritual transmigration”. These consist of standing stones intended to guide souls returning to earth after spending 100 years in the spirit world.The pod Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The singer-songwriter Jesse Malin opens one of his songs with a monologue about a trip to Russia. Fresh out of a relationship, and invited by the gypsy punk troupe Gogol Bordello to open their tour of the country, he looked forward to seeing Red Square and spending time in a different world. He was disappointed, however, when the first things he saw there were a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and a Subway.The punchline to Malin’s story is that there are fewer and fewer differences wherever you go in the world these days - everywhere, people are just trying to make a living and getting on with their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Thank heavens for Christmas, without which where would narrative be? Not that I'm sure Sarah Jessica Parker's uptight, brittle Meredith Morton has much to be thankful for in The Family Stone, as the Manhattan careerist braves her boyfriend's family gathering in New England for what seems destined to be the holiday from hell. Well, until such time as the laws of Tinseltown work their drearily inevitable "magic", and everyone is paired up faster than you can say Manolo Blahnik. In fact, writer-director Thomas Bezucha's 2005 film was intended as a star vehicle for Parker fresh off the phenomenon Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was predestined that Lou Doillon would shadow her half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg and their mother Jane Birkin by going into music. More surprising is that her full-length calling card, debut album Places, is entirely written by her. The female members of her clan have generally relied on material from outside, so Doillon is a trailblazer. Part of the annual Trans Musicales festival, this show at Salle de la Cité in Rennes, Brittany’s rain-soaked capital, was an opportunity to discover what she’s about before the UK release of Places next spring.Equally foreseeable is that Doillon’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It is quite a sight to see your children doing the heads down Quo boogie but, by the time the band reach “Whatever You Want”, that is exactly where my daughters, aged 14 and nine, are at. The rest of the Brighton Centre, not sold out but respectably full, is on its feet too. Just beside us a well-preserved man of around 70 is going completely bananas, shirt open, sweat pouring off. The majority of the crowd are in their sixties, perhaps even their late sixties, but by this stage of the gig a good portion of their decorum has been thrown to the wind in favour of shimmying like sassy teenagers Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance. But beneath its brightly painted face, its stockings, suspenders and corsets, its uniforms and bravado, Peter Nichols’ 1977 musical drama is revealed, in a production by Michael Grandage that is as sensitive as it is exuberant, to be both acerbically astute and compassionate. Well, as the leading lady, Acting Captain Terri Dennis puts it, “you can’t always judge a sausage by its foreskin”.That show-stealing role is inhabited to the hilt by Simon Russell Beale as the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When watching an adaptation there are times when it's better to have no acquaintance with the original. That certainly goes for thrillers, in which the reveal is all, so it is with considerable smugness that one brandishes one’s ignorance of The Poison Tree. Wiki advises that it is a bestselling psychological thriller which has floated the boat of the likes of Richard and Judy and their estimable book club. And that author Erin Kelly has filched the title from one of Blake’s Songs of Experience. Whereafter similarities with romantic poetry cease.ITV’s two-part dramatisation tells of Karen, an Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
White Christmas is named so you know that gorgeous song is inside it somewhere. Yes, this is the 12-year-younger and lesser remake of Holiday Inn that also stars Bing Crosby and also features the cry-your-guts-out, I-regret-everything holiday tune by Irving Berlin. The big difference is that in White Christmas, Bing sings along to a music box.The plot centres on Danny Kaye and Bing as a duo of WWII entertainers who find success a decade after the war. Wildly popular, they’re on TV, on Broadway, wherever there’s an audience, that’s where they’ll be. One’s a lady’s man, the other isn’t. Both Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
'Tis the season to be... transported to a magical, mystical extravaganza that will leave your mouth a-gasp, and your festive spirit in overdrive. This is how the lyrics of "Deck the Halls" should read once you’ve been to the Royal Opera House and savoured the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker.The Sir Peter Wright production (1984) begins in the Stahlbaums’ house with a luxurious upper-class Christmas soiree that sees a whole host of diverse guests present. The most individual of all is Herr Drosselmeyer (Gary Avis), godfather to young Clara Stahlbaum (Meaghan Grace Hinkis) who becomes the Read more ...