Reviews
James Saynor
The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema before AI takes over completely. In the battle for credibility between monsters and actors, the actors here come off decidedly worse.From what I can make out, in reality, the Earth’s large creatures are generally the kind and peaceable ones – whales, elephants, the Jolly Green Giant etc – while the little ’uns like us cause all the trouble. Of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of MJ the Musical may be keeping a portrait of the King of Pop that has acquired all his scars, physical and psychological.Few of them, though, are on show in this version of the ongoing Broadway hit. The MJ we meet there is forever frozen in 1992, pony-tailed and dressed in sophisticated black and white. The first scene shows him in a rehearsal room, meticulously fine-tuning numbers for his Dangerous tour with a producer and a troupe of dancers. A young black boy whose mother can’t find a babysitter has accompanied her there. Jackson Read more ...
Jack Barron
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by the airburst of the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy. Shiota’s perfect weather was instantly and irrevocably translated into a brightness totally beyond the imaginative powers of the humans that brought it into being. It is a brightness that blinds, burns your clothes away, and flays the skin beneath – as Shiota discovered, when she stumbled across her brother. It illuminates your very Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across two centuries and on the other side of the world. It’s a resonance that ripples through Laurence Boswell’s eloquent, beautifully acted and staged, and sweetly optimistic production. As sole performer, Greg Hicks is Dostoevsky’s narrator and unnamed protagonist, as well as the numerous people, real and imagined, that the man meets on his journey from suicidal anguish to enlightened optimism, and a new lease of life as an albeit unheeded Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter Week music with a sense of suspense and anticipation built into vocal and instrumental lines that build and strive and stretch towards a climactic revelation that, until the very end, remains just out of reach. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Peter Whelan – much-garlanded director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra – led the Orchestra (and Choir) of the Age of Enlightenment (along with a quartet of accomplished soloists) in a programme that prefaced the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced on her 2007 and 2010 albums Cherlokalate and The Fallen By Watch Bird. Not that her new album is rooted in past ventures, more that it appears she has taken a step back to consider what she has done, and has found this reflection comfortable.And there is a lot to ponder. Weaver, who thrives on embracing new musical and wider cultural discoveries, has her own résumé to contemplate. Her first solo album was issued in 2002. Just before this, there was her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The screenwriting debut of actor Andrew Buchan, Passenger ends up resembling a bunch of ingredients looking for a cake. While characters come out with such meta-observations as “this isn’t Twin Peaks” and “this isn’t Broadchurch” – Buchan having been one of the stars of Broadchurch – Passenger contains echoes of both of them, and rather louder ones of Happy Valley.Set in the fictional small town of Chadder Vale on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, it’s a tale about the friendships and antagonisms of a closely-knit community which seems to have a sinister cloud hanging over it. More than once Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her father, who she’s tracked down and has never met. Her voice trembles, she can barely speak, she has to hang up. But finally she manages it. This is Stéphane, she murmurs. May I speak to Serge?Written and directed by Sébastien Marnier (Faultless; School’s Out), this thriller has an excellent cast and looks wonderful, although the plot-line is somewhat preposterous and soap-opera-esque. Nevertheless, it’s stylish and gripping, and it’s not until half-way through that we realise that Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
“Death doesn’t scare me at all,” said my friend Christopher Hitchens during our last telephone conversation. “After all, it’s the only certainty in life. Dying, however, scares me shitless”.However hard one tries to remove these three final sonatas from the narrative of Franz Schubert’s life and imminent death from syphilis when he wrote them, this is inescapably what they are about: fear not of one’s own obliteration, but the process of getting there. But also insolent defiance of obliteration, and validation of life lived.Paul Lewis’s recordings of these sonatas, and live renderings during Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The name of this group is Mayan Space Station.” In spite of the billing as The William Parker Trio, their bassist – coolly introducing himself as “William Parker, bass” – is firm about the designation under which the three musicians on stage are operating.Mayan Space Station is also the title of a recent album. On the 2021 release, Parker was joined by drummer Gerald Cleaver and guitarist Ava Mendoza. All three are here, on stage in the basement of the Park Hotel in the lakeside village of Voss, to the east of Bergen. Getting here from Norway’s second city, the just-more than an hour train Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring attempt to dramatise Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem. A mind-bending sci-fi epic spanning multiple decades, while also reaching centuries into the past and future, it can scarcely be faulted for lack of ambition, but sometimes there's just too much going on to digest properly.The story opens in 1960s China, where the Cultural Revolution is burning down everything in its path with hideous brainwashed zeal. One of its countless victims is the physicist Ye Zhetai Read more ...