Reviews
fisun.guner
Manchester was once known as Cottonopolis, since the city was once at the centre of the vast global industry reponsible for its growth and prosperity.The Whitworth Art Gallery, which is part of Manchester University, has in its collection a wealth of textiles, providing not just a colourful history of local cotton manufacture, but tracing the trade’s international links. However, this exhibition is less historical overview, more discursive exploration of the cotton trade’s social impact.The exhibition provokes questions surrounding the ethical production of what had become, by the end Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Incest, rape, torture and matricide, as well as an obligatory spot of cross-dressing, all played their part in making Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk the scandalous success of its day. But with such stuff the bread and butter of Hollywood’s unblinking horror departments, why would a contemporary director choose to revisit this period classic? It was apparently a lifelong ambition of Surrealism’s greatest filmmaker Luis Buñuel to adapt The Monk for the screen. It’s a tantalising prospect of what might have been, and one that speaks not only to the bloody and allusive thrills of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It becomes increasingly difficult for a detective to create any sort of elbow room on the small flat screen in the corner. Up in Denmark they’ve been taking the extreme route, where the dour, bejumpered Sara Lund of The Killing looks like a Butlins entertainer next to Sofia Helin’s hatchet-faced autistic sleuth Saga Noren in The Bridge. In Blighty we churn out far more of these things than the Danes, but not much seems to have moved on much since Inspector Morse started feeling queasy around corpses and necking real ale two decades back. We still get our crimebusters from a strictly limited Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
There was something perverse about the opening of Liza Lou’s show at White Cube in Hoxton Square on a wet Thursday evening. It was as quiet as I’ve ever known it inside, while outside, barred from drinking among Lou’s fragile works, a throng of people guzzled free beer on the other side of the street in the rain.From the second floor where the most plaintive works shimmer against the white walls, you could look down and wonder why White Cube insists on plying them with beer. It seems to add the same kind of crowd-fuelled bluster to the event as movie premieres, to make the invited feel Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Remember when the movies used to celebrate sex, be it Julie Christie diving under the table to service Warren Beatty in Shampoo or Kathleen Turner selling the sizzle in Body Heat? No longer. These days, celluloid sex is a soulless, dispiriting affair even when the bodies on view are beauts. And so it is that hot on the heels of Michael Fassbender's descent into the carnal abyss in Shame comes Juliette Binoche in the Franco-German-Polish collaboration Elles, a film that makes notably heavy weather of the heavy breathing with which it begins.So much for fun, eh? And that's before one has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Does he know she's a bit odd?" asks one of Saga Noren's Swedish police colleagues, on hearing that Danish copper Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) is working with Noren on a new murder case. Well, he's begininning to get the idea. He's seen her forbid an ambulance to cross her crime scene perimeter, even though it was carrying a new heart for a critically ill patient. She drags Rohde out of bed in the middle of the night to track down a piece of evidence, then when he delivers it to her at police HQ she barely says thanks and shuts the door in his face. Apparently she never eats meals.With her long Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.But the whole thing is starting this weekend at Read more ...
Mary Mazzilli
The Young Vic together with American Repertory Theater, Boston have taken on a huge challenge in staging the lengthy yet gripping memoir by Chinese writer Jung Chang that became an instant success when first published in 1991. Wild Swans was one of the first accounts of mainland China to be introduced to the West and as such it paved the way for other stories to be told from China.Wild Swans describes a journey of pain, trauma and survival of three women that, however, goes beyond the period of the Cultural Revolution as it spans over three generations from the early 19th century to the late Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From the moment the first series came eyepoppingly to the boil, the loyal fanbase of Lip Service began clamouring for a second helping. That was back in November 2010. Eighteen months later, their wish has finally been granted, and audiences are once more free to plunge headlong into the world of the Glaswegian L Word. Some things are reassuringly very much as you were. Two characters were down to their smalls within a minute of the start, while the Friday-night bar scene is still a low-lit den of drugs, booze and casual same-sex nods, winks and frots. This remains in-your-face entertainment Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Adams: Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)John Adams’s expansive, hyperactive three-movement work emerges more powerfully than ever before in this live recording from San Francisco. The bass lines in this Harmonielehre have staggering presence – listen too loudly through headphones and your brain begins to liquify. Those low notes are all-important, occasionally giving us a fleeting sense of harmonic stability in music which really soars. Adams’s control of tempo is remarkable; at times it’s virtually impossible to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It became clear, midway through support act Toddla T that this was going to be a bit special. With a view from the front of the first tier balcony, I could see the melee below and the two balconies above. The Shepherd’s Bush Empire is a gorgeous 109 year old theatre that’s been a music hall and BBC studio in its time but no-one was sitting down tonight, far from it. Those on the upper tiers were leaning forward over the balconies, whooping and waving their arms, everyone everywhere seemed to be moving. I turned to my companion and ventured, “This is a bit like a rave.” Within a short time I Read more ...
Ismene Brown
William Forsythe's position as the most articulate, fascinating, provocative ballet choreographer of the past 25 years is demonstrated by the Royal Ballet of Flanders' brief visit to Sadler's Wells for three nights with his epic, maddening, engrossing creation, Artifact. The cutting edge of theatre and ballet at its premiere in 1984, it is a four-act ballet, no less, that pays homage to the early court spectacles out of which ballet was born, and the superb physical elegance into which classical ballet then evolved.I append below Forsythe's own explanation to me of what it's about, but in Read more ...