Reviews
sue.steward
Dazzling and surprising, this Tate Britain retrospective by the 1998 Turner Prizewinner Chris Ofili should erase memories of the media sniping about him making money from using the so-called "gimmick" of incorporating elephant turds in his paintings. It will also confirm his status as one of the greatest contemporary British artists.A chronological journey through his relatively brief career charted from the early 1990s, the exhibition leads visitors along his painting time-line into three final rooms devoted to work produced since he moved to Trinidad in 2005. Astonishingly different and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This isn’t Atom Egoyan’s first road accident. In The Sweet Hereafter he portrayed the agony of a small rural community after a school bus crash deprives almost every household of its young, like some disembodied edict from King Herod. This time it’s the other way round: in Adoration a child has lost his parents to a mysterious car crash, leaving him and the uncle who brings him up to live in its long dark shadow. But that’s not the main difference between the two films. The Sweet Hereafter was based on a novel. Adoration is almost entirely a product of Egoyan’s imagination.It was suggested by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
As was hoped, Osmo Vänskä, the livewire music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, showed us exactly why he's the greatest living Sibelian last night in the first concert of the London Philharmonic's Sibelius cycle. Ducking and diving, crouching and corralling, Vänskä worked the podium like some mad ant, scurrying now over to the violas, gesturing now manically to the horns, his hands rattling fiercely like a jilted Old Testament prophet, sculpting, harrying and rousing the orchestra to peaks and troughs of ecstasy and despair. Sibelius's First Symphony has never sounded so spontaneous or Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The second season of BBC Four’s artiest import began uncertainly, but season three took off at the gallop. The opening scene of the first episode prised open Don Draper’s closely guarded past with a flashback to his Depression-era infancy, depicting his adoption after the death of his mother (a prostitute). Then we jumped back to the present, where his wife Betty’s pregnancy picked up the childbirth theme. His employer, ad agency Sterling Cooper, is reeling from job cuts in the aftermath of a takeover by a British company, a problematic union which could spell rebirth or stillbirth.Some argue Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Synaesthesia is a tricky beast. It’s basically a neurological condition which condemns those afflicted with it to a life in which words evoke colours, and emotions can be experienced as colour. Sometimes it is almost playful, with the mere names of the days of the week evoking tonal sensations; at other times it is intensely painful, with the mere glimpse of a buzzy pattern causing dizziness or strong feelings conjuring up great blasts of colour, an unbearable onslaught of confusion and derangement.In James Graham’s empathetic and engaging new play, which opened last night, twentysomething Read more ...
sheila.johnston
What an odd and provocative coincidence that black women - hardly a demographic over-represented in mainstream cinema - should be at the centre of two high-profile American films opening this week. One is The Princess and the Frog, also reviewed today on theartsdesk. The other is the multi-award-winning Precious. In the former, the princess is a brunette edition of Disney's pretty Barbie prototype. Near the beginning of Precious, by contrast, when you first spy this sullen, seriously obese figure waddling into view, you might be forgiven for asking, "Do I really want to spend 110 minutes in Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Early yesterday evening on that bastion of biting cultural analysis The One Show, Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark was reflecting on how his band was inspired by German techno-wizards Kraftwerk. If OMD were the children of Florian Schneider und co, then Delphic, led by another singing bassist James Cook, must be the grandchildren.This fresh-faced Mancunian combo - a studio trio augmented when gigging by drummer Dan Hadley – has been tipped as one of the bands of the year, having come third in the recent BBC Sound of 2010 poll, won in 2008 by Adele and in 2009 by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those of us brought up on classic Disney animation - from the first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, through The Jungle Book and Lady and the Tramp to, more recently, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast - it’s sad to think that a whole generation of children have seen animated films only through CGI and Pixar. But now comes The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s first entirely 2D, hand-drawn animation since 2002, which, with its sumptuous drawings, soft colours and Jazz Age setting, could almost be seen as a retro exercise. That is underlined by the fact that the film’s co-directors are Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you were looking for a director for the movie version of Edge of Darkness, you'd have thought you couldn't do better than Martin Campbell, who made the original 1985 series for BBC television. He's now a bona fide Hollywood ace, with a string of major TV credits and hit movies like Casino Royale and the Zorro flicks to his name. But not even a Tinseltown budget can bribe lightning to strike twice, and whatever fortuitous combination of timing and subject matter turned the BBC series into an instant historic event, it's difficult to imagine that happening to its big-screen incarnation. Read more ...
sue.steward
In another lifetime, I walked into the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town through a portal into a new world: the cavernous dancehall was packed, and the "audience" being choreographed by cross-rhythms of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian ancestry in an atmosphere created by a 17-year-old jazz funk DJ called Gilles Peterson. I was witnessing the dawn of the New Jazz Age.The mostly black dancers wore baggy suits, white shirts and braces like the 1930s jivers at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the Forties mambo-niks at Manhattan’s legendary Palladium Ballroom, and hats like the Jamaican rude boys in (London) Soho Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Early on in Michael Samuels’ unremittingly sombre film about Winnie Mandela, the star-crossed heroine made the observation that being married to Nelson meant you were also married to “the struggle”, and would inevitably end up in Nelson’s shadow. So it proved. Even as she went to meet Nelson (David Harewood) as he was finally released after 27 years in jail, Winnie (Sophie Okonedo) was advised to learn from the example of Prince Philip and the way he walks dutifully one step behind the Queen.With her husband sweating it out either in hiding or subsequently in Robben Island prison, Winnie was Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Are we British turning French, shrugging our shoulders at political sex scandals? Or did Major and Prescott finally made the idea of the pants-down MP seem so grotesquely mundane that we have had no option but to laugh and concentrate on their second homes instead? Either way, for a good old-fashioned sex scandal these days you need to travel to America, where politicians still espouse (a word, ironically, from the same Latin root as “spouse”) family values to fundamentalist voters.The cleverly scripted and thoroughly entertaining new US drama series The Good Wife could have been inspired by Read more ...