Reviews
Graham Fuller
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman whose repressed trauma has confined her to a wheelchair for 20 years. She’s so querulous and demanding that whether she gets up and walks at the end matters less to the viewer than her frustrated caregiver daughter’s ability to free herself from Mum’s mind-forged manacles. The world belongs to the young, after all.Former librarian Rose (Fiona Read more ...
caspar.gomez
MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by dark brown rings. He looks peaky.“Why?” I enquire. Sweat nodules down my face, my body, everywhere. So saline-intense it leaves powdery white steaks.“My eyes,” he replies, “They’re wobbling about.”We pull over in Cannards Grave, a Somerset hamlet named for a thieving 17th century publican hanged here. Every third car passing contains battered detritus from the annual Worthy Farm pilgrimage.“You don’t look too good yourself,” says Finetime.“I’ll be fine.”But will I? Inside of my head Read more ...
Jack Barron
I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s increasingly unhinged approach to impartiality. Of course, similar sentences can be heard in cafés and pubs across the country, and on social media, and within our homes, as we struggle more and more to negotiate truth’s withering state.Poets have always wondered and worried about this, theirs being a world poised at the edge of meaning. Tom Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some world champion racing drivers make it look effortless, but it was never that way for Damon Hill. His path to the championship he won in 1996 had been fraught with difficulties, including not just his increasingly ill-tempered on-track battle with Michael Schumacher, but also the sometimes less-than-wholehearted support he received from the Williams team. Indeed, the team had already announced they were replacing him before he won the 1996 title.Director Alex Holmes’s film often resembles a therapy session rather than a traditional documentary, with Hill sitting on a darkened set in front Read more ...
James Saynor
“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past 50 years – not least his latest, The Shrouds, which was in competition at Cannes last year.As far back as the cheap and nasty Shivers, Cronenberg molested the line between the quick and the dead, pioneering horror motifs like inflamed-penis parasites bursting out of stomachs and plugholes and into people’s orifices. His films became famous for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first Jurassic Park movie now seems virtually Jurassic itself, having been released in the sepia-tinged year of 1993. Directed with pizzazz by Steven Spielberg, it was ground-breaking (and indeed ground-shaking) enough to earn admission to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry on account of being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.Six more Jurassic-themed movies followed in its wake (with Spielberg only directing 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park), but none of them managed to match the impact of the original. Indeed, most of them needn’t have bothered Read more ...
David Nice
Poor, slightly silly Semele fries at the sight of lover Jupiter casting off his mortal form, but in Congreve’s and Handel’s supposedly happy ending, everyone else rejoices that Bacchus is the offspring of this dalliance. Or do they? Not in the new production by Royal Opera supremo Oliver Mears, who’s always favoured the dark side. As in trendy dramas like TV’s Kaos, the gods are the callous rich, mortals their plaything servants.The style that guides the creepiness, with an ominous fireplace central in Annemarie Woods’ pointedly chilly, unpretty designs, isn’t always there in the singing ( Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In 2019, French-Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb flew to Sudan after the overthrow of hated dictator Omar al-Bashir, hoping to chronicle the dream of an Arab country shaken up by a feminist revolution. The young pro-democracy activists, mostly women, she met at a sit-in protest outside army headquarters in Khartoum became the focus of Sudan, Remember Us, which she filmed over the next four years.However, this sad and lyrical movie didn’t turn out quite the way she’d imagined. The revolution was hijacked by a violent military crackdown and civil war that have now left Read more ...
David Nice
Over 100 years ago, John Christie envisaged Wagner’s Parsifal with limited forces in the Organ Room at Glyndebourne. He would have been amazed to see it arrive on the main stage this year. But émigrés Carl Ebert and Fritz Busch persuaded him that Mozart was the real country-house ideal. Le nozze di Figaro remains Glyndebourne’s perfect opera, and Mariame Clément’s new production, launched last night with the 588th performance here, keeps it real.Clément has a near-perfect cast, with Louse Alder and Huw Montague Rendall as the Almavivas sure harbingers of success (pictured below in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The red, white and blue bull’s-eye on the front curtain at Sadler’s Wells tells us we are in the familiar territory of Pete Townshend’s rock musical about teenage angst in 1960s Britain. What follows isn’t so easy to recognise.Quadrophenia started life in 1973 as a double album, and six years later became a film; now it’s a contemporary dance piece with an outstanding cast. Yet it seems to be a case of diminishing returns.The powerful vocals of its songs are silenced, with just a heavenly choir in the closing numbers representing a human presence. And the thrilling axeman chords Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes, as the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio closes, the chorus of prisoners discreetly fade away backstage as their brief taste of liberty ends. At Garsington Opera, in Jamie Manton’s revival of a production by John Cox, they slowly descended, one by one, through a circular trap at the front of the stage. We see and hear freedom’s loss, person by person, step by agonising step.Then I strolled out onto the Garsington terrace as the evening sun set with its midsummer languor over the Wormsley estate’s vast acres of lake, woods and grazing deer. And thought, as Beethoven insisted we must Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe has long been an expensive gig for comics. But while stand-ups may need only a microphone to ply their wares at the world’s biggest arts festival, the costs they have to bear – among them venue charges, accommodation and marketing – don’t come cheap, and are growing year on year. Many people attending the Fringe are unaware of its financial eco-system – but the majority of performers there are self-funding.So it’s interesting to note the initiative taken by five Scottish or Scotland-based comics to broaden their fanbase. The five – Christopher Macarthur-Boyd Read more ...