Reviews
Tom Birchenough
Definitely no standard biopic, Russian director Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half captures part of the life, and a great deal of the spirit, of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in a rare and rather brilliant gallimaufry of forms – from archive material (some of it skilfully doctored), via plentiful animation, to re-enactment scenes. It also catches the cultural milieu that formed the winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for literature, and the double city - Leningrad/St. Petersburg - of his birth.Brodsky was born there in 1940, and the film opens with the post-WWII return of his father, a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wonder of wonders - a really cracking triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night. The best of the year, by a country mile, and probably the best for several years: a top-notch beauty from Christopher Wheeldon, the love-it-or-loathe-it Marmite of Mats Ek’s Carmen, and in between a comely and reverberant new ballet from a very young Royal Ballet choreographer who looks set to go places.Liam Scarlett is only 24 but has spent long enough in his schooldays choreographing feverishly to count as an alumnus of best Royal Ballet values. Like Wheeldon, he sculpts graceful, organically flowing balletic Read more ...
David Nice
Poland's most imaginative composer after Chopin, and his natural heir in the realm of sensual reverie, certainly knew how to yoke a full orchestra to his dreams and fantasies. Yet the work by Szymanowski I've most longed to hear in concert is the three-movement Mythes for violin and piano. A recording of it by Kaja Danczowska and the great Krystian Zimerman quickly acquired cult status in the 1980s. So it seemed like a heaven-sent gift to hear it live in the hands of an even more rounded violinist, young Norwegian Henning Kraggerud, and another maverick Polish pianist, Piotr Anderszewski. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Why make a documentary about Italia 90? It’s just another tournament that England didn’t win, isn't it? If the World Cup hosted by Italy in 1990 deserves exhumation, it’s for its trickle-down impact on football as we live and breathe it now. Hence the subtitle that won't make it onto the billboard outside cinemas: The Inside Story of a World Cup that Changed Our Footballing Nation Forever.This is the film of the book of the tournament which has a lot to answer for. Gazza cried, Pavarotti opened his lungs, and football became irreversibly commoditised. Attending as a reporter for the freshly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Idris Elba’s screen career is going so swimmingly that you wonder what can have tempted him back to Blighty. Probably not the weather, since the former denizen of Canning Town now lives in Florida, and is in perpetual demand Stateside thanks to the extreme hotness engendered by his portrayal of Russell “Stringer” Bell in The Wire. He was in the American version of The Office, co-starred with Beyoncé in Obsessed, has several movies in production and will executive-produce a new legal drama series for NBC.So, Idris Elba, where did it all go wrong? I jest, of course. Slightly. Luther is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Since the passing of Luciano Pavarotti, there’s been a gigantic hole for a tenor of gold-plated opera chops and the gift of communication, and Rolando Villazón - young as he is, at only 38 - already appears to have sealed that gap up effortlessly. His stint as judge on the lamentable Popstar to Operastar on ITV recently left everyone tarnished but him. Villazón not only has a dazzling voice and uniquely electric hair, but sports about on the platform with a puppyish vivacity that brings dead places to life around him and endears him widely. Roger Federer meets Groucho Marx, said my companion Read more ...
Anonymous
Eight hours of “improvised and experimental music” would not be on everyone’s list of Bank Holiday essentials, and the marathon programme that constitutes the first half of the two-day Freedom of The City festival could have proved daunting for even the free jazz faithful. That the experience turns out to be very far from gruelling is, then, in no small part thanks to the curators, among them such luminaries as Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost.One of the accusations frequently levelled at this type of music is that it all sounds the same, yet the eight acts offer an impressively diverse range of Read more ...
fisun.guner
I wondered how long it would be before Andy Warhol’s "15 minute" quote came up. From the whizzy, flash-bang opening credits I knew it wouldn’t be long. I was right: but less than seven minutes? Less than five? I didn’t time it, since I was still somewhat mesmerised by the sight of perky presenter Alastair Sooke doing a kind of disco-dancey, pointy-arm manoeuvre in front of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon during the intro. (Oh no, Alastair, I wanted to cry, you can’t out-cool Andy, so don’t even try.)Art critic TV presenters come in all sorts of guises these days. Read more ...
colin.mckean
Sir Mick Jagger was not, by any means, a street fightin’ man, but his charisma and the conviction with which he sang the line, allowed us to suspend our disbelief. The song would have seemed ludicrous, pathetic even, if it had not. Iggy Pop is not, in fact, a street walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm, but when he sang the immortal opening line of “Search and Destroy” last night, he embodied every word.All Tomorrow’s Parties were celebrating five years of their Don’t Look Back events with a double bill at the Hammersmith Apollo, and had invited Iggy and the Stooges to play Raw Power Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a loss of confidence in dancing itself has allowed expressive and aesthetic exploration to become increasingly replaced by undemanding scenic gimmicks and numb circus derivations, subtle matters by dim clichés. My depressed thoughts after watching two of the middle scale shows that used to be common all over Britain and now are scarce as hens’ teeth. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The fountains have been switched on at Somerset House, and I watched a group of tourists giggling as they picked their way through the water jets. They obviously hadn’t noticed the cheerful sound of running water coming from the edge of the courtyard, which encourages you to descend some narrow stairs down to the light wells that illuminate the lower floors of Somerset House.Loud gurgling and trickling noises conjure vivid images of babbling brooks and mountain streams tumbling headlong over glistening boulders – of water in its natural state, in other words, which is a far cry from the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s an accepted truth that Chris Morris is a comedy genius. Now the word "genius" is so overused in some quarters as to be rendered meaningless, but in Morris’s case it's a richly deserved description; he created or co-created some of the funniest, cleverest and most original comedy on British television, including The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam. Not a bad CV, even if it also contains the rather less amusing Nathan Barley. So what of his feature-film debut, Four Lions, which he directed and co-wrote with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Peep Show fame)?Well it has the Morris trademark of a Read more ...