Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
“Nobody likes a Messiah…”, deadpanned Robert Hollingworth, with the timing of a practised stand-up. After a pause, “…more than I do.” At St Martin-in-the-Fields on Friday evening, however, the seasonal blockbuster did not, just for once, feature on the festive menu. Instead, Hollingworth’s ever-enterprising ensemble I Fagiolini served up a savoury and well-spiced alternative to Handel’s ubiquitous staple.Over little more than an hour, the versatile group – fortified by a posse of agile string players from Brecon Baroque – spanned the late-16th to mid-18th centuries in half-a-dozen stylishly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 21 June 1977, listeners to John Peel’s radio show heard a song titled “Pretty Vacant.” It wasn’t a preview of the forthcoming Sex Pistols single of the same name, which would be in shops on 2 July, but a different song. The band lifting the title was Chelsea, a UK punk outfit whose first single, “Right to Work,” had been released on 3 June.It was bizarre. Punk fans and scene insiders alike knew “Pretty Vacant” was a Sex Pistols staple. Demos of the song were in circulation before the single was out, as were live recordings. Chelsea’s selection of the title was equivalent to a psych-era Read more ...
Justine Elias
Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)In Treasure of Foggy Mountain, Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall (all in their mid-to-late twenties) portray bro-buddies housemates who embark on a lighthearted and lightly-plotted quest for buried loot. When they lose their map, tensions flare.Marshall, gangly and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier, and how his magical chocolate factory came into being. This Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is more elfin than goblin, a lovable chap with looks to set teenage girls swooning. It has a love story of a kind in it, but not the type that sets young teeth a-grinding. It’s essentially a comedy, with Britain’s sitcom finest popping up like wack-a Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject for our dark times. Unfortunately the intervening century hasn’t put an end to ethnic cleansing or to the plight of refugees.Grigoris Karantinakis’s 2021 costume drama, originally released in Greece as Smyrna My Beloved, seems to be aware of uncomfortable historical parallels. It begins in 2015, Titanic-like, with a nonagenarian survivor rescuing something from the deep. In this case, Filio Williams (Jane Lapotaire), whose grandmother fled to Read more ...
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.If Disney led the tradition of smooth-as-you-like animated artwork, Europeans often fancied the jerkier joys of stop-motion mannequins leaping around. The Polish-language The Peasants adopts a new form Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
"Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief", wrote Amy Levy, "it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new". In Mathias Énard’s sprawling, massy, magisterial tales of death and life, and love, this sense of endless decay and rebirth assumes many faces, only some of them cruel.The novel begins conventionally enough. We are introduced to the rather petulant, yet self-mocking voice of our protagonist and hapless anthropologist, David Mazon, via the form of his " Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and bewilderment of their parents. The myth taps into parental anxieties that rear up when their offspring doesn’t resemble them. Harsh rejection of this seemingly alien being, who has usurped the place of a beloved child and threatens family harmony, is traumatic. We don’t see the moment when Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) told one of her two sons that she can no longer be their mother. That denunciation happened long before the film begins, when Monica ( Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been a winner: a charismatic star soprano of great emotional and interpretative intelligence, a top pianist given a little space to shine on his own, a programme that looked good on paper, of distinguished German/Austro-German women composers in the first half, French dark versus light in the second. But Milton Court is an unwelcoming venue, like being inside a dark-wood coffin, and the singer seemed uneasy between numbers to begin with.The voice itself, that bright but far from light soprano, had settled by the time we reached three songs by Clara Schumann; the first group, by Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
A decade has passed since Paul Lewis concluded an endeavour of a kind never previously undertaken: to perform, over two and a half years and across four continents, every work Schubert wrote for piano between 1822, the year he was diagnosed with syphilis – ergo, knew he was dying – and his death in 1828.It was quite an odyssey for those of us who followed those concerts (in my case, across two of those continents), and apparently for Lewis too, as he revisits selections from that programme, adding other, earlier, Schubert sonatas for a scaled-down version of those tours, this time across Read more ...
Heather Neill
As the audience enters, thick mist envelopes the thrust stage and jazz music fills the theatre. The set, designed by Moi Tran, consists of a sparsely furnished but spacious room, backed by a staircase. It is a place in the past but also anywhere and any time, both naturalistic and imaginary.The outline of this work – shocking when first seen in 1965 but soon recognised as a gripping, enigmatic examination of the power struggle between the sexes – is by now familiar. Teddy, Max's eldest son, has brought Ruth, his wife of six years, to meet his father and brothers, Lenny who is a pimp, and Joey Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’s not what we find in Kin. This is a chilly, menacing Dublin, full of modern but charmless architecture and gripped by organised crime.Written by Peter McKenna and co-created by Ciaran Donnelly, Kin is the story of the Kinsella family and their fractious partnership with ominous crime lord Eamon Cunningham (Ciaran Hinds). The Kinsellas make their living by selling drugs supplied by Cunningham, so they’re at his beck and call. It’s a master-and- Read more ...