Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
What was the audience on? They tittered when the bicycles came on, nearly cried when the whip was unleashed and virtually pissed themselves when the warring sides in Handel's crusader fantasy Rinaldo started fighting it out with hockey and lacrosse sticks (I know! Too-oo funny!). After last year's randy bunnies, Glyndebourne's Prom visits are fast becoming the nights to bury bad comedy.The one joke director Robert Carsen did get spot on was the libretto. I have some admiration for the drama's restlessness. But on the whole its unique mix of holy war, sorcery and Jackie Collins-like sauce Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinematic virtuoso Pedro Almodóvar’s contribution to the body horror subgenre is a sumptuous nightmare with the precision and looming malevolence of its psychotic surgeon’s blade. His 19th feature is a film for our age – an age which has seen radical and sometimes grotesque surgical reinvention - concerned as it is with the troubling question: what actually lies beneath?Based fairly loosely on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In reunites Almodóvar with his former leading man of choice, Antonio Banderas. Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a cutting-edge (excuse the pun), Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Ramsey, Pleasance Courtyard ****It's easy to see why the Edinburgh Comedy Awards panel shortlisted South Shields comic Chris Ramsey. He's personable, very funny, has a well-constructed show - and is destined for a big television career any day soon. He used to allow the incorrect description of him as Geordie pass, he says, because he couldn't be bothered to explain the difference between Geordies, Makems and his own tribe, Sand Siders, until the television series Geordie Shore came along – and there was no way this working-class lad made good was going to be associated with that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to understand that two times two makes four.” Oddly enough, repetition is the lifeblood of Stravinsky’s own music, though he rarely makes two times two equal four, and his symphonies don’t last two hours (nor, incidentally, do Mahler’s).Sir Colin Davis did, it’s true, make the Symphony in Three Movements last longer than Stravinsky thought it should. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although billed as “a fresh look at the Middle Ages through the eyes of children”, presenter Dr Stephen Baxter had to admit the bulk of historic evidence for how medieval children lived their lives was written by adults. Unfiltered accounts from a child’s perspective are rare. Poring over the 1086 Domesday Book, the census of who, what and where, he noted that children aren’t mentioned. Evoking the barely known is a hard log to roll, and this frustrating programme barely nudged it along.Dr Baxter spent most of the programme striding purposefully, following the director’s yen to inject a sense Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.In fact, there’s little that looks specifically Danish here (though the film swept the board at this year's Danish Oscars), except a certain Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sam Simmons, Gilded Balloon **** Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests to her mother that this may not be the show for them, so they leave. And just in good time, as what follows is a load of cock and balls as Simmons is dressed in vest and pants which, after he is drenched during a gag, become increasingly, er, figure-hugging.Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than a main by way of welcome. Sound unfair? Sure, but love - indeed life, as it is honestly and genuinely lived - hasn't a prayer up against the breathtakingly vacuous conceit that drives One Day, a film that makes zero sense except where these things matter most: the box office. I recognise that not all will share my scepticism, if the reaction Read more ...
David Nice
"Whoring after the public taste" is how Ingmar Bergman described some rather funny hanky-panky in one of his most singular films. It's what showbusiness thrives on, and it's fine if done well. Yet a decade ago Trevor Nunn crowned the National Theatre's trio of keenly observed Rodgers and Hammerstein stagings with South Pacific characters of flesh and blood, as its creators had surely envisaged. Here, despite strong delivery of a string of hits and fluid, evocatively lit designs, Bartlett Sher's Lincoln Center Theater revival too often takes us back to the Broadway whorehouse.Admittedly the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Part of the fun of watching The Hour, in the absence of a coherent plot, convincing characters and plausible period dialogue, was ruminating on the myriad different ways it could be sliced: a grown-up Press Gang meets Mad Men? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold versus Spooks? All the President’s Men crossbred with Foyle’s War?What a confused and cross-eyed load of old nonsense it was, but oddly enjoyable nonsense for all that. What it did well it did very well: the drab, shabby, hospital pallor of Fifties London was convincingly evoked. The casting was excellent and the attention to detail Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and her expression intense and concentrated as she screws a breech ring as part of the manufacture of the Bofors gun at a factory in Newport, is a famously captivating image of the Home Front in the last world war.Dame Laura Knight’s painting Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1943 (main picture), a portrait of the young woman choreographed among her Read more ...
fisun.guner
This was the sort of science programme that an interested non-science person like me finds immensely irritating. It began with a series of statements which were, in fact, meaningless overstatements. Not only this, but these overblown statements tripped each other up: “Scientists think they’ve discovered the secrets of a healthy, happy, long life – for all of us” (don’t you just hate this kind of teasing nonsense that treats us all either like fools or Daily Mail readers?) was followed by, “This is one man’s struggle to unravel our destiny.” So what was it to be? A dramatic narrative about one Read more ...