Reviews
bruce.dessau
It is a ridiculous idea but also a strangely appealing one. Five Australians recreate the music of composer Ennio Morricone's 80-piece troupe on a variety of traditional instruments as well as an instrument made out of string and a tin can, plus some bubble wrap, an alarm clock, two asthma inhalers and numerous other household items. Imagine a cross between Tom Waits in his junkyard phase and John Noakes building something on Blue Peter three decades ago. As I said, ridiculous, but strangely appealing.From the cod-Clint Eastwood whispered intro onwards this band successfully treads a parmesan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A capsule summary of Goon doesn't sound very appetising - slow-witted hockey player with awesome fighting skills helps lift the Halifax Highlanders out of their low-achieving doldrums. Yet within the film's oafish wrapping lies a touching little tale of oddball relationships and characters struggling to find their place in the world, set against a melancholy backdrop of small-town Canada in iron-hard winter weather.I know nothing about ice hockey, though I managed to grasp the basic premise that the side with the higher score wins. As presented here, the game consists of a few skilled players Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I had been planning to speculate about what might happen in the finale of Public Enemies, but its three-night run was shifted back a day to accommmodate a Panorama special about the Stephen Lawrence case. Thus we only have the opener to go on, in which convicted murderer Eddie Mottram (Daniel Mays, pictured below) was released after serving 10 years in jail, and was assigned to the probationary care of Paula Radnor (Anna Friel).It frequently looked as if Friel had been condemned to a repeat of her recent role in ITV1's Without You, where she moped about neurotically and became convinced her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. The heretical suggestion of Endeavour is that the grumpy old sleuth did not in fact spring fully formed into the world in the shape of John Thaw, with that slow world-weary lope and a withering glare lurking in those iridescent peepers.Well, at least the eyes have it. Shaun Evans is in most respects a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Robert Louis Stevenson's classic swashbuckler has been made into countless films and TV series in several languages, and has survived Muppet Treasure Island as well as an interstellar Disney animation called Treasure Planet. Pleasingly, Sky1's new version made a fine addition to the lineage, combining a shrewdly picked cast with lush production values while retaining much of the darkness and menace of Stevenson's novel.The opening scenes established an appropriate atmosphere of near-supernatural dread, as the crazed Billy Bones (David Harewood, pictured right) arrived at the Admiral Benbow Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We laughed. We cried. We cursed. We gulped. Not at fiction. But at fact. At the real world. The year's best theatre? Murdoch vs Watson. Thriller? The hunt for Osama. Horror? The Japan tsunami. Finest comedy? The Beeb's year long genuflection. Best opera/installation? The funeral of Kim Jong-Il. This was the year that reality trounced art.News channels thrived as their bulletins played out these teeth-janglers. Some were short explosive little numbers; others seemed determined to become five acters. Narratives were complex, characters unforgettable, visuals motley. The world mostly huddled Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was. There may be helicopters, webcams and Wi-Fi, and Dr Watson may be blogging rather than scratching away at the old pen and ink, but still the essence of what makes Holmes such an enduringly compelling fictional figure was evident in spades.The Read more ...
matilda.battersby
In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.In cinema I was most impressed by Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, a take on Michael Lewis’s book about baseball. I think it lives up to its reputation as the film of 2011. However, I must Read more ...
mark.hudson
2011 was a year when now was difficult to find. The YBA/heroic monetarist era was definitively over – though Tracey Emin was accorded a far better retrospective than she deserved at the Hayward (see image below right). Yet whatever will be replacing the dominant art trend of the last three decades, The British Art Show – a vast five yearly survey of cutting edge contemporary art – felt very much not the place to be looking for it. The work, mostly by artists a decade or so out of college, was bright, attractive and entertaining, but a touch callow, like good student work that strays little Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
mark.kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A slightly late arrival, this, but the fourth album from Richie Egan’s highly rated Irish electro-rockers has a calm, clear beauty well worth savouring in the early days of a new year. It's pop, but with a lemony twist, similar in its slightly skewed craftmanship to Egan's compatriots Villagers, although Jape - despite winning the Irish Choice Music Award in 2008 for third album Ritual - remain a much less celebrated proposition in the UK.It's hard to quite explain why, because Ocean Of Frequency is as lovely as it is accomplished. Aptly for an album fascinated by the connections between Read more ...