Reviews
Nick Hasted
Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house.When Thomas (Kai Malina), bearing a concentration camp tattoo, offers help and erotic temptation, Jenny Agutter’s Walkabout odyssey with her brother and Aboriginal guide comes to mind. But for Lore, adolescent longing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always either a very good or a very bad sign when my notebook remains untainted by my scrawl when I'm reviewing; either I am too busy enjoying myself to make notes or I'm so unengaged that I can barely be bothered to lift my pen.It was the latter with last night's opener (part one of six) of Me and Mrs Jones, despite the presence of Sarah Alexander, a talented comedy actress, and Robert Sheehan, a very fine dramatic actor whom the camera loves. And also despite the writing talents of Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, who worked on the wonderful Smack the Pony with Alexander, and then wrote Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Simon’s entrepreneurial cut and thrust is at odds with his purpose, which is merely to provide for himself and his 20-something sister Louise (Léa Seydoux), who despite her age is the childlike dependent of this unusual family unit, unable to hold down a job, wasting her time – and their money – with the local boys.Director Ursula Meier’ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Greg Davies strolls onstage to the sound of Fatboy Slim’s remix of Wildchild’s “Renegade Master”, the “44 year old renegade master,” as he drily observes. From there he initially dwells on middle age and the way his stomach has expanded. His manner is so genial that his gigantic size - 6’8” – is not especially immediate or imposing. Clad in jeans and a black T-shirt he achieves the rare feat, throughout the 90-minute set, of being likeable and funny without ever utilising viciousness. The show he’s now touring is called The Back of My Mum’s Head and we’re soon into why – primarily Read more ...
josh.spero
Things have come to a pretty pass when the old is a breath of fresh air and the new just old hat, but the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent's Park, which closes this weekend, is just that. New sister to Frieze London, which features art since 2000, Frieze Masters is about the best of what came before. And boy is that good.If you've ever been around Frieze London, with its shiny artworks and 170 galleries and thousands of connoisseurs, collectors, rubberneckers and art-world hangers-on committing visual and aural assault on the innocent art-lover, you'll probably fear Frieze Masters as a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Set in the near future on the outskirts of New York, Robot & Frank sees a grizzled ex-con warm to his mechanical helper, eventually enlisting him as a criminal accomplice. It might sound like the plot of a genre flick (Short Circuit springs to mind) but, like the robot in question, this little movie will knock you sideways with its soul. Boasting beautiful performances and ample humour, director Jake Schreier’s accomplished feature debut considers the preciousness and precariousness of memories – how they make us who we are, and indeed what it means to be alive.Frank Langella plays our 70 Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Simon’s entrepreneurial cut and thrust is at odds with his purpose, which is merely to provide for himself and his twenty-something sister Louise (Léa Seydoux), who despite her age is the childlike dependent of this unusual family unit, unable to hold down a job, wasting her time – and their money – with the local boys.Director Ursula Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the gloriously deadpan comedies 25 Watts and Whisky, co-writers and directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll were the leading lights of Uruguayan cinema, not exactly heading the kind of renaissance seen in other Latin American countries in the 2000s – the country’s industry is miniscule – but certainly making two of the region’s most idiosyncratic films. Then Rebella killed himself, a tragedy that threw his friend into a grief that seemed to end his career also. So it’s wonderful to see Stoll back in business, even if his new film doesn’t pack quite the punch we’d hoped.3 concerns a Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Confinement is a thread running through English Touring Opera’s autumn season. In Albert Herring it is in the priggish village; in The Emperor of Atlantis it is in the circumstances of its creation within the Terezín concentration camp; in The Lighthouse, it is one room with curved walls and the interminable wait for the relief ship.This 1979 chamber opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, who also wrote the libretto, is based on real events: in 1900 a supply ship stopping at the lighthouse on a tiny Outer Hebridean island found it in good shape but deserted, with no sign of its three keepers. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The title couldn’t be more resonant, as the economic crisis makes the one-time First World visibly slip another notch. But in Tony Krawitz’s adaptation of Christos Tsolkias’s novel, the meaning is also literal: this is a bloody continent of unquiet ghosts.When Greek-Australian photographer Isaac (Ewen Leslie) defies the horrified wishes of his family to visit Greece, where they apparently fled fascist persecution, incredulous long-shots of Athens show an ugly white concrete sea of over-development. Close-up, it’s strewn with garbage, wild dogs, and refugees which are Europe’s main currency Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Samuel Beckett recalled sinking into a "whirl of depression" while writing All That Fall. Audiences at this production - those, that is, who have managed to score a ticket for this short, sold-out run - are unlikely to emerge into Jermyn Street in a similarly gloomy frame of mind.Apart from the exceptional nature of the evening - a rarely seen piece and a superlative cast in an intimate, up-close, 70-seater setting - All That Fall is revealed here as a bawdy, bucolic comedy, and a perversely life-affirming one full of marvellous one-liners, even if they are, of course, also spiked with grim Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There must be something on the air; a few foreign comics (including Edinburgh Comedy Awards newcomer winner Daniel Simonsen) were performing in English at this year's Edinburgh Fringe and now one of them, Germany's Michael Mittermeier, has brought his Fringe show, A German on Safari, to London for a short residency at Soho Theatre.It's a brave (some would say foolhardy) thing to perform comedy - an artform that relies on nuance of expression and shared cultural references - in a foreign language, but it's a particularly brave thing to do with English, an old language of bastardised pedigree, Read more ...