Reviews
Adam Sweeting
This is writer-director Warwick Thornton’s third feature film, his first since 2017's excellent Sweet Country, and it took him 18 years to bring it to the screen. He describes it as “a really special one” with “a lot to say”, though viewers may find themselves having to ponder long and hard to figure out The New Boy’s layers of meaning.It’s a mysterious parable about an Aboriginal boy (Aswan Reid) who we first see involved in a fierce struggle with a mounted police patrol amid miles of Outback countryside, which comes to an end when he’s knocked unconscious by a boomerang. The story is set in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like Hamlet or Fidelio, Schubert’s Winterreise can withstand and overcome (almost) any kind of re-imagining. In the case of Hans Zender’s 1993 “composed interpretation” of the work for chamber orchestra – and sundry sound effects – the new model has itself become a near-canonical classic. Allan Clayton first brought his large, lustrous but vulnerable and involving tenor to the re-orchestrated song cycle in 2015. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, Jane Mitchell’s production (with Clayton billed as co-director) confirmed that Zender’s music, and the panoply of stage effects that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Monster is one of those films that you really shouldn’t read too much about before you see it, and if you are anything like me, you’ll want to watch it all over again when it ends. It’s an intricately told psychological drama that grips from the start; a fire breaks out in a high rise building in an unnamed Japanese town. Neighbours watch from their balconies and gossip about the hostess bar in the building.One of the gawpers from a nearby flat is Saori (Sakura Andô below, last seen in Kore-eda’s Shoplifters). Struggling to balance work and home, Saori is upset when she finds that Minato Read more ...
David Nice
“Spring Awakenings” promised as the theme of this year’s London Handel Festival began with a big if messy vernal bouquet of “Alleluia"s and “God Save the King”s. Esther, Handel's first London oratorio, seemed like an appropriately jubilant way to celebrate Laurence Cummings' 25th and final year as festival director.That meant cramming more than 60 musicians in to the east end of the not exactly commodious St George’s Hanover Square, and some curious balances for many of us in the packed church. I got an earful of the four oboes, with attendant squeaks from time to time, and their pulsing Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a Coen brother directing, plus a cast that includes Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo and Margaret Qualley, the standout hitchhiker in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… so why does Drive-Away Dolls feel so insubstantial?Ethan Coen has co-written the script with his usual editor, also his (gay) wife, Tricia Cooke, and the talent has duly signed on. But even they can’t provide enough ballast. It’s a film of sporadically funny moments that strain to be bad-ass. The first such moment comes in the opening scene, a Philadelphia bar in 1999, where a jittery well Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In a sixth-floor gallery, flooded with natural light, four paintings and a handful of works on paper compete with views across the River Garonne in Bordeaux. They also vie for attention amidst a history of abstract painting, in which it can feel that everything has been done. The English painter Jane Harris (pictured below right), who sadly passed away in 2022, did find an unexplored niche, however. And that is amply demonstrated by this tight group of her paintings which, we are told, embody a philosophy in which less is more.In some respects, here less remains less. There is little overt Read more ...
David Nice
Face scarred, baby murdered – both crimes committed by those closest to her – village girl Jenůfa rises again with extraordinary strength of will. Of all affirmative endings in opera, Janáček’s has to be the most moving, and all the more so in this revival of David Alden’s clear and perceptive production as Jennifer Davis uses the power behind her beautiful lyric soprano to go the extra mile, as she always does.The central battle of female energies is as strong as ever I’ve seen it, even if the balance is slightly shifted. Susan Bullock, in the role of Jenůfa’s stepmother or Kostelnička ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Is it just coincidence, or something about the post-Covid theatrical landscape, that one-person shows are becoming commonplace; don’t producers know that it’s OK to share a stage again? Hot on the heels of Andrew Scott’s Vanya, in which the actor played eight parts, and Sarah Snook’s whopping 26 characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, American actor Billy Crudup makes his London theatre debut with eight or so of his own, in a play he premiered in New York in 2017. Though certainly entertaining, this is the most modest and least satisfying of the three productions, the issues Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley, the woman who put the punch in punchline, has what she would call a “mooth” on her. It delivers pith and grit and lots of short words needing asterisks. Though possibly not for much longer, as she is in the throes of ovarian cancer.But that didn’t stop her doing a tour called "Not Dead Yet" last year. The title is an echo of the mordant humour she has purveyed since embarking on a comedy career in 1994, after the family pub she and her husband Sean ran was taken over by his brothers. That the family was more the Sicilian kind is typical of Godley’s CV. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A single pair of swans glided serenely under the bridges of the river Ill as I walked to the premiere of the Opéra National du Rhin’s new production of Lohengrin in Strasbourg on Sunday.It felt like an auspicious omen for Michael Spyres’s first full performance of a major Wagnerian role. Spyres’s initiation comes after the Missouri-born singer’s acclaimed flights across huge tracts of the Baroque, classical and Romantic repertoire – a journey taken on the mighty but sensitive wings of his category-busting, three-octave-wide “baritenor” voice.The packed house in the 1820s theatre (many of them Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
Towards the end of his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann deploys a cogent expression: “chasing history, before it disappears”.Last time the Nash Ensemble devoted a weekend here to music from the Terezín concentration camp, in 2010, there were discussion panels with survivors of that strangest, eeriest of narratives from the Shoah. Zdenka Fantlová (pictured below, then living in Bayswater Road, having survived the camp, Auschwitz and Belsen) described the performance of music and plays when doomed to die as “dancing under the gallows”.With hindsight, that is: no one, she says, knew Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Welcome back to Guy Ritchie’s Geezerworld, familiar from such slices of lurid villainhood as Lock, Stock…, RocknRolla and The Gentlemen (the movie). The Gentlemen (the TV series) takes some cues from the similarly-named big-screen event from 2019, but becomes its own distinctive self as it unwinds across eight episodes.Mind you, it does display signs of mild schizophrenia. The first two episodes punch the clock at just over an hour, but then the running times throttle back to around the 40-minute mark. It’s as if Ritchie and his collaborators, who include co-writer Matthew Read and several Read more ...