Reviews
Jasper Rees
There are certain film-makers who like to give themselves a headache. Buried confined its only character to a coffin. Phone Booth stuck Colin Farrell in – what else? – a phone booth. Essential Killing imposes another kind of confinement on its main character: it maroons him in silence. It could be argued that cinema has long experience of keeping its mouth shut. They did without dialogue until 1927. But give or take the odd bravura exception – say, the eloquent first 15 minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West - film has lost the habit of making do without words.The actor tasked with carrying Read more ...
joe.muggs
Often at gigs by bands of a certain vintage, the fans can look like they're on a special awayday: like they've dug their T-shirts out of the back of the drawer and geared themselves up for one last canter round the paddock. Not so for Killing Joke. At the Royal Festival Hall last night, a very large section of the crowd had the look of still actively living very rock'n'roll lives, and of having done so for at least the last 30 years. “How many times have you seen them?” asked a shaven-headed gent in the seat next to me. “This'll be my 46th Joke gig,” he continued with obvious pride. This is Read more ...
David Nice
What's this? Goosebumps? Tears? Surely not in the usually brittle world of the Savoy operas. Yet handle Sullivan's pathos with tenderness, make everyone believe in a recognition scene between a sinning fairy and her preening peer of a husband, and the spectators will be putty in your hands. It helps that they've already been softened by top-notch baritones, tenors and falsettists, tickled by dance routines and amazed by the freshness of Gilbert's lyrics - all suffused by the glow of Wilton's Music Hall, which can incline us to take even a spoof fairyland a little seriously. Lloyd Webber, eat Read more ...
howard.male
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of all the grizzly details. That is until I watched what turned out to be another of those cheap-to-make caffeine-charged documentaries which goes off on so many tangents that it’s hard to recall what it was meant to be about in the first place. For last night’s look at what was described as a pivotal year for the BBC’s once-essential weekly viewing Read more ...
David Nice
If you're going to put on a show about putting on a show, you gotta get a gimmick, as a wise man not unconnected with the late Jack Rosenthal's autobiographical comedy once wrote. Put it another way: if the show/film/TV series depicted is compromised, you need something or someone off-centre to stand out from the crowd. In Barton Fink, it was a hotel corridor and what the Coen Brothers did with it; in BBC Two's Episodes, it's Tamsin Greig's low-key, ironic bewilderment. Here it takes the shape of a five-minute comic turn from Carrie Quinlan as Mancunian room service.Let's not labour the point Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Matthew Bissonnette’s third feature Passenger Side is a mellow, honey-hued road movie which sees two discordant brothers combing the streets of Los Angeles with an initially mysterious purpose. A likeable diversion, for the most part it’s a nicely played two-hander depicting the rekindling of a sibling bond.The reluctant but ultimately obliging driver is Michael (Adam Scott), the older brother of Tobey (Joel Bissonnette), who takes his seat on the passenger side. Michael has agreed to chauffeur Tobey around for the best part of a beautiful sun-blushed day, without knowing why, and they make Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Of all the unlikely musical pairings in recent times, Jesca Hoop and Guy Garvey deserve special mention. The genial Elbow frontman, all northern charm and indie anthems, is like a favourite bitter. Hoop, on the other hand, former nanny to Tom Waits's children, is more like something Lewis Carroll's Alice might have drunk. Since she moved from California to Manchester, Garvey has been mentoring Hoop, and appeared on her best-known song. But last night’s gig was all her, with a little help from four friends.And the packed London bar was also shown why, in a scene saturated with high-quality Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I reviewed excerpts of Will Gregory's new opera, Piccard in Space, last year. His funky, plushly Moog-ed, concerto-like suite struck me as rather tasty. I even said that I couldn't wait for last night's fully worked-out operatic world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. How wrong I was.I've seen plenty of bad opera in my time. I've seen things that have offended my ears. Things that have offended my eyes. Things so nauseatingly rubbishy they panzer-attacked my nasal cavities and asphyxiated my soul. But nothing has made me want to pick out my cochlea with a blunt 50-page electronica guide Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to her website, Martina Cole is "the person who tells it like it really is". If it's really like this dramatisation of her 1997 novel The Runaway, it's unrelentingly brutal, squalid and frightening, a televisual blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Perhaps the fact that the series was shot on a giant set in South Africa helps to account for its strange atmosphere of reality assembled from an Ikea-style flatpack.The Runaway of the title is, or is going to be in episode two, Cathy Connor (Joanna Vanderham). It's the early Sixties, and Cathy has been brought up in London's East Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Love is no solution to life,” declares a line from Clifford Odets’s 1938 drama; and in straitened times, then and now, it’s a sentiment that carries considerable doleful weight. And yet every character here is in desperate search of that elusive something to elevate the banal business of day-to-day existence – a personal rocket to the moon. Without it, they are trapped in endless Monday mornings, soul-destroying work that doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills, and relationships in which they turn into “two machines, counting up the petty cash”.The piece is rarely performed, and it’s not Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night Murray Perahia played Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin, and we heard, quite simply, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin. Nothing more need be said, if one follows the Cordelia principle to love, and be silent.Still, as you insist, I will add that it was an ideally private experience between him and me, and I dare say, private between him and every other individual sitting in the Barbican Hall. Perahia, now 63, has always had an inclination towards translucency, for making himself the finest possible veil through which to show you the composers, and yet what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With his debut film, Moon, Duncan Jones demonstrated that a sci-fi movie doesn't have to depend for its success on fleets of warring spacecraft or flesh-eating alien monstrosities. He's done it again with Source Code, a cool and clever thriller in which futuristic anxiety and mind-bending scientific theory are firmly anchored in almost mundane reality.Indeed, what could be a more ordinary setting than a commuter train shunting its load of commuters from the suburbs towards their metropolitan destination (in this case, Chicago). This is where we first meet Jake Gyllenhaal's protagonist, who Read more ...