Reviews
James Saynor
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.Like Schrödinger’s cat in quantum physics – dead and alive simultaneously – they’re both five stars and one star. Or at least that’s how many cineastes saw slasher movies in the romping, anything-goes era of postmodernism 40 years ago, when Quentin Tarantino was gleefully slinging work by Dario Argento or Abel Ferrara across a video-store counter somewhere.From that perspective, Read more ...
David Nice
Programming works from the same decade – in this case the 1940s – can reveal fascinating contrasts: what an impressive gulf, for instance, between two masterpieces by Hindemith and Strauss in this first half, and what sensitivity to very different styles from the NYOGB under Carlos Miguel Prieto. Be careful what you choose as the big symphony, though. I’d always had my doubts about Copland’s Third, and though it couldn’t have been more compellingly lit and shaped, it paled by comparison.Let’s get the elephant in the Royal Albert Hall room out first, for in every other respect, encores rich in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Seth Rogen-produced, Family Guy writers-co-scripted gross-out comedy with four Chinese-American women fully lives up and down to its description. With Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim as debuting director, it’s also another demographically pioneering work.Audrey (Ashley Park), a Chinese girl adopted by white American parents, bonds with Lolo (Sherry Cola) as the only Asian-American kids in their Seattle neighbourhood, growing into odd couple adult best friends, Audrey’s promising corporate law career contrasting with Lolo’s struggling sex-positive art. Audrey’s business trip to seal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Düsseldorf’s most famous band is Kraftwerk. Neu!, La Düsseldorf, and, a little later, D.A.F also helped mark-out the west German city as the home of musical boundary pushers – folks doing their own thing. Fellow Düsseldorf residents Die Toten Hosen took a different musical tack, but were as individualistic as those lumped in with Krautrock or kosmiche music. And where there’s the known, there’s also the unknown.In this spirit, Klar!80 - Ein Kassettenlabel aus Düsseldorf 1980-1982 digs so deeply into Düsseldorf’s post-punk musical underbelly that the names assembled are mostly unfamiliar: Read more ...
Justine Elias
Big bitey sharks and prehistoric monsters have tantalised the imaginations of summer moviegoers for decades, from Jules Verne to Jaws. James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water and the director’s recent scientific commentary on the OceanGate submersible disaster also serve to underline the public fascination with the dangerous deep.Alas, Meg 2: The Trench, based, like its predecessor, on Steve Alten’s hit novels about hungry megasharks, bellyflops and bores. Too bad, because leading man Jason Statham can be a most droll and reliable hero even when the movie around him becomes defiantly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Yuja Wang and Klaus Mäkelä, two of the classical world’s biggest hitters, have recently united to make that even more powerful item, the “power couple”. But much as they are both photogenic and charismatic, their reputations are also based on musical excellence, as was on display at last night’s sizzling Prom.But far from wallowing in romantic excess, they gave a reading of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that was refreshingly no-nonsense in its approach, nimble, mercurial and the opposite of self-indulgent.Wang’s playing had momentum from its very opening, which never sat back Read more ...
David Kettle
The Death and Life of All of Us, Summerhall ★★★★Victor Esses was 16 when he first discovered his grandmother had a sister – someone the family had never discussed. It was just a year after his own first illicit visit to a gay sauna.Esses’s deceptively slight show – just him, a couple of microphones, some clips of video interviews and characterful musical contributions from guitarist Enrico Aurigemma – might begin as something of a whodunnit mystery tale, as Esses tracks down the mysterious elderly woman to a golf club outside Rome. But it quickly moves on to profounder – and, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Every time you see Jewels, George Balanchine’s masterpiece from 1967, something new emerges from its treasure trove. What the Australian Ballet pleasurably bring to the fore is its playful, and play-acting, side.The story of how Balanchine came to write the piece is now engraved in, well, stones. Inspired by the wares on show at the high-end New York jeweller Van Cleef and Arpels, he decided to create a string of abstract gems, each section of the three parts to a different composer and each a tribute to a particular style of dance. And each would be made on one of his leading dancers at New Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
For those unable to travel to far-flung places this summer, look no further than Turner Contemporary. Featuring the work of Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, the exhibition transports you to the sandy beaches, vibrant streets and candle-lit cathedrals of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Aptly titled Maresias (a reference to the sea breeze of the coastal region), this rapturous foray into Milhazes’ decades-long career positions you in the everyday life and environmental fabric of Rio. There are multi-coloured beads of paint reminiscent of Catholic rosaries, and lace ruffles suggestive of flotilla Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted by Megan Gallagher from one of Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffery novels (the seventh one, apparently), Wolf might be described as Welsh Gothic, spiced up with a splash of gratuitous sadism. Episode two, for instance, is titled merely “Torture”, which might apply to some of the acting as much as the dramatic content.Not that it doesn’t have its fair share of notable thesps. Somehow they’ve lured Juliet Stevenson aboard as Matilda Anchor-Ferrers, preparing to be scared to death as she, her husband Oliver (Owen Teale) and daughter Lucia (Annes Elwy, all pictured below) find themselves the targets Read more ...
theartsdesk
theartsdesk team arrived at the WOMAD site with a degree of trepidation this year. Coming at the end of one of the wettest Julys in recent memory and the day after a serious deluge, was it going to be another Womud?Fortunately, Thursday was a day with enough sunshine and wind to dry the ground reasonably well and apart from the odd mud puddle, things weren’t too bad. However, once we’d consumed a welcome beer and started snacking on the fantastic food that was on offer, everything felt even better.At last year’s festival, there had been a discussion session that had involved Peter Gabriel and Read more ...
James Saynor
People have been making films about the unreliability of memory since, oh, I can’t remember. Often it’s a cue for a genre escapade, but here French filmmaker Alice Winocour gives us a social drama, telling the fictional story of a survivor of the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130.To recover, the lead character has to sort out an understanding of events from the Escher staircases of her upside-down recollections. It’s an absorbing movie that becomes slightly less so in the final third.Mia (Virginie Efira, pictured below) is a good-natured translator who one evening Read more ...