Reviews
graeme.thomson
Noel Gallagher is hardly renowned for his willingness to stand on the precipice and leap into the unknown. A songwriter happy to work well within his own limitations, he has embarked upon his solo career (don’t be fooled by the “High Flying Birds” shtick; this is a star-plus-hired-hands job) with due caution. Indeed, his new album conforms so precisely to the preconceived notion of what a solo Noel Gallagher album would sound like you half suspect the whole project may one day be outed as some conceptual prank.Likewise, last night’s Edinburgh concert was entirely risk-free, with no hint of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Miss Bala, just to clear it up at the start, does not concern itself with beauty pageants. Or not like Miss Congeniality. Beauty is indeed involved in the form of Laura, a pretty young Mexican woman from a poor family who aspires to win the crown of Miss Baja California. Never has the advice to be careful what you wish for been more apposite. Confronting beauty there is a beast in the form of the organised drugs trade which corrodes and toxifies all who come near it: police, military, civilians, indeed the whole body politic in a country which, in the final credits, advises that 36,000 lives Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Many of the images will be all too familiar. Captain Scott writing a diary in his quarters. Three of Shackleton’s men scrubbing below decks. The Endurance lit up in the long polar night. The ice cave shaped like an italic teardrop and shot from within its chilly maw (pictured below). Penguins, dogs, seals, ponies, mostly destined for death. Chaps – above all chaps – four who famously died with Scott, many more who famously survived with Shackleton.The photographs of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley may be stencilled into the collective memory after nearly a century of over-exposure. But it’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many commentators have professed bafflement at the tangled layers of Hidden, as it probed into a sick and murky past while apparently dead characters came back to haunt the present. Right to the end, writer Ronan Bennett kept his cards carefully concealed, so we still don't know who was really behind the sinister "Helpdesk" and its slick dial-a-killer operating system. Or at least it was slick at killing everybody except protagonists Harry (Phil Glenister) and Gina (Thekla Reuten), who somehow managed to wriggle away from their pursuers on a record-breaking number of occasions.But Hidden Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Everyone is working against type, or so it would seem, in Roland Emmerich's deeply bizarre Anonymous, which asks us to accept a celluloid slob (Rhys Ifans) as an aristocrat, a vaunted republican (Vanessa Redgrave) as Elizabeth I and a highly successful action film-maker (Emmerich) as a putative man of letters: well, one has to have something to read between set-up shots on Godzilla and Independence Day, so why shouldn't it be a Shakespeare sonnet or two to the Earl of Southampton?If you can accept the above catalogue of incongruities, then the film's central premise should come as a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been suggested that, come the revolution, the best possible of outcomes to the question of who shall be Head of State is the man off the goggle box who for innumerable aeons has been telling us about the birds and the bees, the silverbacks and the dung beetles, the fishes and the flytraps. But could we not, on reflection, do a bit better than that? If God does exist he is surely the spit of David Attenborough. White of hair, persuasive of voice, sagacious of mien, he is now to be found, in his ninth decade, standing at the top and the bottom of the world, more or less simultaneously.If Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simpson - widow of the abdicated King Edward VIII - lived as a recluse in a mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Despite the fact that a national treasure (Sheila Hancock) is starring in the play, is this a subject worth looking at again?OK, the story is intrinsically interesting. After the death of Edward in 1972, the Duchess lived in splendid isolation. Then, in 1980, The Sunday Times planned to publish a Read more ...
david.cheal
An aura of mystique surrounds Tinariwen. The members of this group’s shifting line-up are from the Tuareg people, nomadic Berbers of the North African desert regions, and several have taken part in armed Tuareg rebellions in the past. This air of mystery is enhanced by their garb – flowing robes and extravagant headdresses that mask most of the face (though singer/guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib keeps his head – and his fabulous frizz of hair – uncovered). Their music, too, has a mystical quality, its repeated refrains acquiring a cumulative hypnotic potency.All this was in evidence at this one- Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Abi Morgan is on something of a multi-platform roll right now. Between writing the Beeb's enjoyably hokey The Hour and scripting The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic which will be hitting our screens shortly before Christmas with all the force of a jet-propelled handbag, comes a new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. An altogether more esoteric offering, 27 raises questions of faith, morality, memory and the role of science by examining the lives of a group of nuns.Mother Superior Miriam and the younger Sister Ursula (“Jackie to her JFK”) belong to a convent in a remote part of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Isn’t it strange how national talent goes by subject? Put on a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch painting and the queue will stretch to the Embankment. But can you imagine a festival of Dutch music? Sweelinck (d 1652) and Andriessen (b 1939) more or less sums it up. The BBC brought together three living Dutch composers for this Portrait concert, and one of them wasn’t after all Dutch (“I’ve kept my Swedish passport,” he insisted rather unchivalrously in the pre-concert interview). And I’m sorry to report – as a lifelong fan of Speculaas biscuits and Dutch gin – that the Swedish work was the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The title is a warning, as is the cheesy grinning poster - this is going to be Fun with a capital F, and Feel-good too, and Family Friendly. And it is going to clean up hip hop’s badass image. I was already prejudiced against it before I sat down.Most of the best hip hop I’ve seen has been feel-bad, because anger and frustration is where all that ferocious physical articulacy, that satirical and defiant jousting with balance and tempo, comes from, and I haven’t fully bought into Kate Prince’s ZooNation and her team of dancers who always tend to look as if they're on children's telly. This new Read more ...
David Nice
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the one that can seem to whizz along under its own steam. At any rate, the impression Riccardo Chailly gave last night was of having fine-tuned his sleek Leipzig machine, turning on the engine and letting it fly. Only the extra stops I like to think a great conductor would usually have pulled out remained untouched.All of that was still enough for a packed and refreshingly diverse audience to stand and roar at the end, duly overwhelmed enough by the mighty engine that is the Seventh Symphony - straining at the leash 200 years on from its first Read more ...