Reviews
Graham Fuller
In the Middle profiles 10 football officials who referee and run the line of lower-league games in south-west London and north-east Surrey. Pondering what drives these apparently sane individuals to do such an onerous job, director-producer Greg Cruttwell's documentary is a vibrant study in diversity and concomitant prejudice that benefits from his light touch.As a film actor, Cruttwell made his debut as the sexually predatory gym bunny and landlord Jeremy/Sebastian, a correlative to David Thewlis’s Johnny, in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). Like Leigh, Cruttwell has a powerful radar for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An original pressing of 1979’s Thrust fetches at least £1000. Its 1980 follow-up Thrust Too can be a relative bargain at around £400. The prices are partly explained by J Dilla having sampled Thrust Too’s “Survival of the Funkiest” and Thrust’s “Summer Fun” being sampled by Daphni. Both funk-soul albums – the first credited to McNeal and Niles, the second to Wilbur Niles and Thrust – were barely circulated and barely sold. Text-book collector’s items.But without the music, potential buyers’ wallets would stay in their pockets (though the attraction rarity brings can, of course, sometimes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s hit show Drive to Survive has proved that F1 can grab ratings, but Villeneuve Pironi: Racing's Untold Tragedy (Sky Documentaries) is a more esoteric offering.It’s a story from the annals of early-Eighties Formula One, in which filmmakers Torquil Jones and Gabriel Clarke (both have pedigree in sports documentaries, and Clarke also wrote and co-directed Steve McQueen: the Man and Le Mans) flash back to the fatally entwined careers of drivers Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi. The film opens with the words of Villeneuve’s widow Joann: “This is a story about a very deep betrayal. It Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The urge to redesign a heritage ballet is a curious one, given not just the expense but the fact that the main draw of an old ballet is the steps and the music, which stay the same whatever the stage dressing. The Royal Ballet was keen, however, to mark the 75th anniversary of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella with a new look, and apparently found no shortage of private sponsors who felt the same. This was after all the first three-act ballet to be made in Britain, and had been out of the repertory for a decade. So Cinderella, a story about transformation, has itself been transformed, most Read more ...
Alice Brewer
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the mountain commit burglaries, and, "taking advantage of the rising ground, are perpetually throwing down rubbish, dirt, and stones upon us, never suffering us to live in peace."Against the declinism of Longinus’s first-century treatise On the Sublime, which Pope is parodying, the state of commerce in these lower areas has never been better: what is needed is an art of sinking which takes back these manufactures, Read more ...
David Nice
When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet the Dunedin Consort’s sequence seen and heard in Glasgow, Edinburgh and (last night) London followed a proper musical logic, running together an overture, a ballet and a cantata in the first half, and pulling focus on Handel’s early years in Rome, all supremely inventive music – though the later G minor Concerto Grosso which launched the second half is in a class of its own.The Dunedins are as classy as said guest, Nardus Williams: both are poised, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Here in Europe we mainly see subtle, lyrical Iranian films, targeted at international festivals or art house audiences, so it’s great to get the chance to see Law of Tehran, a gritty and relentless police thriller that was a hit in its home country in 2019. Saeed Roustayi cast Payman Maadi (pictured below, and best known here from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) as Samad, a ruthless officer determined to take down the drug dealers who enslave Tehran’s army of addicts. We first meet Samad on a police raid that rapidly turns into a dynamic chase through the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Complicité, the adventurous theatre company led today by Simon McBurney, one of its founders, is now 40. Over the last four decades, McBurney and his collaborators have changed the face of theatre.Rooted in the training of Jacques Lecoq, along with Robert Lepage, Ariane Mnouchkine and others, they have created work that combines poetry and intelligence, illuminating the stage in a way that combines the inspiration of the best story-telling with the play of the imagination.Their latest show, rich and multi-layered – perhaps a little too much so – is based on a wonderful and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One wonders if Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan pondered long over their debut musical’s title. Silvio might invite hubristic comparisons with Evita (another unlikely political leader), but Berlusconi feels a little Hamilton – too soon? They went with the surname of their anti-hero which appears a mite unwieldy on the playbill. Alas, that’s not the last unwieldy element of this sprawling, curiously unengaging, half-hearted skewering of Italy’s preening populist. We open on a stage all but filled with a bright white set of steps that half-reminded me of the Victor Emmanuel II Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s something about the Irish coastal village that makes filmmakers see it as a perfect locale for tales of human emotion in extremis, from David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter to Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. Perhaps it’s the tension between political discontent, privation and the gorgeous landscape that unsettles people, makes them behave badly. In the case of God’s Creatures, co-directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, you could even say it’s something in the water, literally: tides that can turn treacherous in seconds, making the work of the fishermen Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall, where the composer is cut free from a lot of acrobatic conceptual wriggling. And really, when it sounds like this, you need nothing more.Back in 2018 Jonathan Cohen and his period group Arcangelo brought Theodora to the Proms. Distant and correct in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, it never quite caught fire. Five years on and Cohen and leading lady Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sierra Pettengill has made the politest angry film I have seen. It has an incendiary quality that comes precisely from its calm stance towards its material. This is a polemic, but one that burns steadily under the surface and asks the viewer to take a measured approach to its material.Fans of Adam Curtis documentaries will immediately recognise the unusual flavour of the archive material Pettengill has assembled in Riotsville USA: it reeks of its era of origin yet today seems surreal and other-worldly. She researched her material from 2015 to 2021 in multiple archives, including the US Read more ...