Reviews
sheila.johnston
Roman Polanski's vice-like paranoid thriller received its world premiere in Berlin in February amid the Chilcot inquiry and headlines about MI5's complicity in torture at Guantánamo Bay, and its topical echoes will rumble on uncomfortably (for some) in the run-up to next month's UK elections. Based on Robert Harris's best-seller, The Ghost (or The Ghost Writer, as it's titled in certain territories), it features an ex-prime minister accused of precisely such crimes and the perhaps even more heinous ones of being in possession of bouffant hair, a cheesy, unconvincing grin and a manipulative, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Once upon a time, they all laughed at Inspector Morse because it was felt to be too "highbrow". In 2007, ITV axed Foyle's War, despite regular ratings of about 7 million, allegedly to go in pursuit of a "younger" audience. But people power swung into action, and a surge of protest caused ITV to think again. Hence, DCS Christopher Foyle returned for a sixth series, and now here he is again in a seventh.Although that means only three episodes, a two-hour Foyle can normally be relied on to pack in a nutritious mix of whodunnit, plausible characterisation and (the trump card) a well-researched Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week's birthday musicians include Dusty Springfield singing “Son of a Preacher Man”, Joel Grey advocating polygamy, Mikhail Pletnev playing Rachmaninov, early hip hop from Herbie Hancock and Afrika Bambaataa, Henry Mancini and Bessie Smith. Videos below. 16 April 1939: Dusty Springfield in her Southern soul phase singing “Son of a Preacher Man”. {youtube}dp4339EbVn8 {/youtube} 11 April 1932: Joel Grey has two ladies in arguably the best song from the film Cabaret. {youtube}oPOiaAU_vJg {/youtube} 12 April 1940: Herbie Hancock had one of the earliest hip-hop-influenced hits “ Read more ...
david.cheal
Earlier this week, when the line-up for Richard Thompson’s Meltdown festival was announced, one name in particular will surely have raised a few eyebrows: Paolo Nutini. Among the appearances by serious old folkies and earnest young Wainwrights and an “evening of political song” that Thompson has planned for his stint as curator of the annual festival on London’s Southbank, a show from this young Scottish singer and songwriter seemed a bit of a lightweight choice; perhaps even a controversial one.With two hit albums to his name and a fascinating back-story – he was spotted when he made an Read more ...
David Nice
Why, a modish reader might ask, did I go to hear a rum-looking cove conducting a classical lollipop at the Festival Hall when I might have tasted the latest fruits of a controversial prodigy over at the Barbican? First, because there's plenty of time to wait and see whether bumptious wunderkind Alex Prior will get beyond the derivative, lurid monsterworks he's currently producing. Second, because the immensely likeable cove, French-born Stéphane Denève, is so busy transfiguring his Royal Scottish National Orchestra that we Londoners all too rarely get to see him. And last, because you can't Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Somehow the title sounds more sonorous in Italian. Io Sono l'Amore is a big, fat, full-blown melodrama, a film with the button marked "passione" forced up to 11. It looks exquisite, is a glittering showcase for Tilda Swinton as the restless Russian trophy wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist and is elegant in spades: the cuisine, the couture, the shoes, the decor, the diamonds, the lipstick, they're all to die for. So what if it's also just a bit kitschy around the edges?The film, by the hitherto little-known Sicilian director/co-writer Luca Guadagnino, opens in style with a series of Read more ...
james.woodall
No stars, minimal hype, a long afternoon into the South Bank night: the National Theatre is staging back to back two little-known plays by two 20th-century American masters, and the result is a bit like opening an old trunk in the attic to find pristinely laundered shirts and suits, and perhaps a pair of perfect spats. Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O'Neill and Spring Storm by Tennessee Williams are early works by each playwright, from 1920 and 1937 respectively, and while the O'Neill feels somewhat stretched, even lugubrious, it's astonishing to learn that Williams' ebullient piece was first Read more ...
David Nice
One girl can hit a high C, and how; the other would surely melt the iciest-hearted in Rodgers and Hammerstein torchsongs. That's Roberta Alexander, on the evidence of her "Somewhere" last night. Together with classy lyric-coloratura Claron McFadden, the beaming high Cs girl, and sophisticated pianist-animateuse Reinild Mees, she ran the gamut of Bernstein's song-and-dance cornucopia. With such physical ease and high spirits from these total artists, even the occasional archness in Lenny's heart-on-sleeve songbook passed with a relaxed sense of fun.Not that it was all about just having a good Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mark Haddon is rather making a habit of writing about mental-health issues. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was about a boy with Asperger’s and his TV drama Coming Down the Mountain had a character with Down’s syndrome. He charts similar territory with Polar Bears, which also features a character with a mental-health disorder.The play begins with philosophy teacher John (Richard Coyle) telling Sandy (Paul Hilton) that he has killed Kay (Jodhi May), his wife and Sandy’s sister, who is an emerging artist. John has found living with someone with mental health Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Justin Kerrigan was only 25 when he made Human Traffic. A bristling portrait of rave culture at the dawn of New Labour, it did well enough commercially and enjoyed a cultish afterlife on DVD. That was 11 years ago. Kerrigan hasn’t made another film since. Or hadn’t. With I Know You Know he returns with a script from his own pen. Whenever a promising debut is followed by a long silence, the question is always the same: was the wait worth it?It’s hard to say, and that’s partly to do with the character at the heart of a perplexing portrait of psychiatric breakdown. Robert Carlyle plays a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“It’ll be tricky to write about,” said the man next to me last night, a Cubaphile. “It's the good, the bad and the awful.” The Cubans’ second programme, The Magic of Dance, is an old-fashioned warhorse of showstoppers from the classics, a tapas bar of Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Coppelia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Gottschalk Symphony. Come again, the last one? It’s a company conga by Alicia Alonso. Enough said.The awful we know about - epitomised by last week’s Swan Lake, the bodging of text and exigencies of decor, permissible to put down to accidents of history and economics. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, it makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.
It's also emphatically not the status wished for by a celebrity-mad society whose varying levels of rot are anatomised via Atkins's eclectic Read more ...