Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Luckily, the budget for this two-part adaptation of Andrea Levy's prizewinning novel stretched to some location shooting in Jamaica. The contrast between the Caribbean's luminous skies and brilliant colours and crushed, monochrome, half-dead 1940s London is almost too painful to watch. It's the perfect visual metaphor for a story about Technicolor dreams crashing to earth"Why would you leave such a place to come all this way and fight for us?" Queenie Bligh asks Gilbert Joseph, who has come from Jamaica to join the RAF. Gilbert (David Oyelowo) gives a poetic reply about how Jamaicans regarded Read more ...
David Nice
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton.As things rather stiffly stood on the concert platform racial issues, Love thy Neighbour-style or otherwise, could be left Read more ...
graeme.thomson
While we’re busy falling over ourselves in the rush to laud the latest beard-and-guitar export from Wisconsin tundra or Williamsburg tenement, it’s easier than ever to undervalue home-grown talent. Lau formed in 2006, a coming together of three British traditional musicians with outstanding individual pedigrees but little in the way of mystique. Featuring Orcadian Kris Drever on clear-blue vocals and beautifully fluid acoustic guitar, Oban-born Aidan O’Rourke on the fiddle, and token Englishman Martin Green, who proved there’s very little you can’t do on the accordion, Lau have won Best Band Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Beware the ids of kids: Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's film of Maurice Sendak's seminal children's picture book, centres on a hyperactive nine-year-old boy, Max (Max Records), who’s so angered and frustrated by the reverses of a winter's day that he destroys a keepsake he gave his adolescent sister and ends up biting his single mother (Catherine Keener) while she’s entertaining her boyfriend at home.This first and best section of the movie sets up Max’s voyage that night to a faraway land occupied by a handful of huge two-footed beasts who speak in urban Americanese, are Read more ...
David Nice
To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages. That, at least, seemed the conclusion to draw from the latest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's perilous but admirable "Total Immersion" days exposing a curious audience to the style of one composer, and here giving us the chance to compare the grandiose and the intimate. If the intimate won hands down, that's no reason to Read more ...
robert.sandall
After years of cultish acclaim and enthusiastic reviews, the American singer-songwriter and star of New York's “anti-folk” scene Regina Spektor has now reached a career tipping point where mainstream acceptance beckons - and her detractors begin to sharpen their knives. She is, depending on your taste, either an idiosyncratic, piano-charming genius, or a contrived and slightly irritating kook cut from similar cloth to that of Tori Amos. With her heavy red lipstick and mane of auburn hair she even looks like her.Unsurprisingly, the sell out crowd who filled the Hammersmith Apollo last night Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Passion, pain and loss: they are companions in life more faithful than many a lover. This duo of solo dramas by Stefan Golaszewski, which opened last night in London after success in Edinburgh, turns its perceptive gaze upon them through the eyes of both eager youth and desolate old age. Poignantly, true emotional maturity remains elusive.In the first piece, titled with apt adolescent awkwardness Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved, it is 1999 and Stefan is an 18-year-old gap-year student doing work experience backstage at The Lion King. He’s hanging out in a pub with his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.There is already a CD and DVD set out of this, which I Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Though he has yet to make a perfect film, the director Tim Burton’s choice of Gothic and fantasy subjects and his deadpan, post-expressionist approach to them rightfully designate him an auteur of considerable genius. His 14 movies to date have earned him a cohesive retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But not content with this, the museum has also mounted an exhibition consisting of over 700 items, including scores of paintings and drawings, as well as costumes and figures from the films, Polaroids, videos and student films, and specially created installations; there's also a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Fun! Laughs! Good times!" Anyone remember them? That snatch of lyrics from Sweet Charity, the 1960s musical that lifted Broadway to newly brassy heights and has been frequently revived on both sides of the Atlantic, serves as an apt summation of the Menier Chocolate Factory's latest musical crowd-pleaser, which, like Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, and La Cage aux Folles before it, surely has the West End in its sights.Those expecting the stuff of revelation from Matthew White's slick staging, choreographed within an inch of its life by Stephen Mear, should think again Read more ...
sheila.johnston
It has hardly been a vintage year for Christmas movies so far (click here and here to read our respective reviews of Nativity! and A Christmas Carol). But Michael Keaton's absorbing first film as director, in which he also stars, finally nails the true spirit of the festive season: it is about a suicidal hitman.For the benefit of the five people still reading, seasonal goodwill is compounded when the killer encounters a sweet young women fleeing an abusive marriage (she is played by Kelly Macdonald to whom the film properly belongs). It starts when, out on a job, he spots her through the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Nesting gay men and posh female totty by the bucketload in the audience last night. Fill any programme with Baroque opera and that’s what you get. Why? Because the Baroque is aspirational pop. It's grounded in the same musical tricks that drive on the chart-topping hits of Kylie or Madonna: pumping ostinati, unshake-offable tunes and harmonic Häagen-Dazs - obvious harmonic loops that you can't get enough of. Though last night the hook was even simpler: a beddable boy.Looks weren’t the only or principal draw. French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky is joli-laid: lanky, boyish and chinny. But Read more ...