Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the church of Mulvey. The sold-out venue is packed with a svelte crowd, mostly ranging in age between about 30 and 45. Nick Mulvey is playing a new number which has an air of lockdown-inspiration about it, with its lines about “missing every one of you” and “feeling grace in solitude”. The audience may not know the song, but they’re still in thrall, transported, a good few with eyes closed, hands reaching upwards as in evangelical service, swaying from side-to-side. One dark-bearded man and his guitar are held in esteem beyond the usual fandom.Mulvey, long-ago in Portico Quartet, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since the first John Wick film from 2014 became an unexpected hit, the Wick franchise has blossomed into a booming business empire, also including comic books, video games and upcoming TV spin-offs. The title role has transformed Keanu Reeves, who remains guarded about his spiritual leanings, into the Zen master of action heroes.At 58, Keanu may be getting a bit long in the tooth for these hyper-intense heroics, though he gently mocks himself by occasionally limping briefly after some especially taxing incident (falling off a tall building, for instance, or getting run over by a charging SUV Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The act of idol worship is, at one and the same time, both distantly ancient and compellingly contemporary. Whether it is Superman, Wonder Woman or Black Panther, our love of the superhero is both an aspiration and an abnegation. Looking at a star, the fan sees both their own potential and feels their own inferiority. In Olivier award-nominated actor and activist Danny Lee Wynter’s Royal Court debut, the attractively titled Black Superhero, the ambitious theme of black queerness is explored through the conceit of hero worship in a show whose cast is led by the author.Wynter is David, an Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
A small cottage vanishes into a surrounding bay, its walls apparitional against pale waters. In the background, a pier juts out into the ocean, equidistant to sea-green hills and a brown strip of land. The tide gently meets the shoreline, white on blue-grey wash. All is quiet, all is still, as nature slowly erodes every last trace of man.This is Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s White Cottage, Cornwall, 1944, one of the earliest works from her residence in St Ives. Though representational and naturalistic in style, White Cottage, Cornwall, captures Barns-Graham’s gradual turn towards a more Read more ...
David Nice
Anna Clyne’s engaging First Person here led me to two of her works in a Philharmonia rainbow. She curated a woodwind-based gem of a 6pm programme of works by four women composers, herself included, and her Clarinet Concerto could only gain from two other live wires, soloist Martin Fröst and conductor Pekka Kuusisto, the first time I've encountered the violinist in that role. Ultimately it was his way with two masterpieces by Tchaikovsky and Bernstein that stole the show.The main Philharmonia programme looked odd in prospect. There was no connection at all between the concerto, Weathered, and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It starts innocuously, with paint. A woman is sitting in a hardware store, studying a travel guide for colour ideas, while briefing the chap mixing her order. But then, amid the sound of the mixing machine, we hear a commotion on the street, a woman's voice cries “they are taking me”, doors are slammed. A dash of pink paint lands on the customer’s pristine blue shoe.These opening few minutes of Manuela Martelli’s exceptional debut feature, from Chile, typify its singular tone and approach. This is the kind of economical, elliptical political thriller in which Latin cinema excels, building its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White Lotus on bad acid.Infinity Pool is set in the fictional coastal nation of Li Tolqa – the film was shot in Croatia, but wherever it is, Li Tolqa is an impoverished police state with a draconian legal system which stipulates the death penalty for all crimes. Queasily inverted camera angles and shots of a menacing sunset and dark, roiling waves suggest Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Why do we come to concerts?” asks Brett Anderson, Suede’s ringmaster and vocalist, before launching into an acoustic version of “The Wild Ones” from the stage of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. “We come to concerts to feel something together, for a sense of community. So, if you know the words, please sing along.”Ordinarily, this kind of chivvying along really doesn’t hurt at concerts in Birmingham – where audiences frequently don’t move a muscle until it’s time for the encore, and maybe not even then. For Suede, however, any kind of hype from the stage always seems to be completely unnecessary Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Shimmeringly urbane, shifting effortlessly from intricate agility to muscular intensity, the music of the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne is remarkable not least in the fact that it has remained an obscure part of the repertoire for so long. This hybrid theatre concert, created by Bill Barclay, former director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe, is part of a growing swell of initiatives to recognise the dynamism of a composer who has been overlooked because he was black.The thrilling LPO performance – which took place last night at St Martin-in-the-Fields and premiered in Snape Maltings at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Learn to Burn” generates the loudest and most sustained applause. As it was originally the opening track of Robert Forster’s 2015 album Songs to Play, the response is unexpected. It’s preceded by a version of his old band The Go-Betweens’ “Spring Rain,” and this London show follows the February release of his most recent album The Candle and the Flame – which would be an assumed focus of attention. So would an old favourite. This is a dedicated, attentive audience.But still, the reaction is surprising. Just before “Spring Rain” – the set’s sixth song – Forster mutters “it’s going well.” Up Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did Puccini’s only really grand opera when it premiered in the 1920s, exoticism being mostly confined to operettas and musicals. What keeps it modern is the score, which made it vital to hear what Antonio Pappano had to say with it.The Royal Opera’s long-serving, much-loved Music Director will probably beg to differ from a position of infinitely greater Read more ...