Reviews
Adam Sweeting
When business and politics collide, the result may very well be corruption. Such is the case in this taut, streamlined thriller from Norway, one of many gems from the Walter Presents stable.Ida Waage (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, pictured below) is the Chief Financial Officer at Oslo law firm Biermann & Gude. A diligent wife and mother and a level-headed professional, she seems the perfect fit for this seemingly exemplary and prestigious outfit. However, when she’s asked to pay an invoice for 450,000 kroner to a company called Klant Consulting, which supposedly Biermann & Gude don’t do any Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A Hero, set in the ancient city of Shiraz in southwest Iran, revolves around Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a weak man with gleaming white teeth and a permanent smile. He’s on leave from prison for the weekend, an odd concept in itself, as there are no restrictions to his movements and the whole set-up seems surprisingly lax and polite for what we might expect from an Iranian jail. As soon as he gets out he runs for a bus and misses it, still smiling, which serves as a kind of metaphor for his limp stance in life. His criminality isn't very intriguing, as he's just serving time for owing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“Will they never learn?” people must have been screaming as they watched the opening episode of the 16th series of The Apprentice – I certainly was. After all these years, the hopefuls vying to take Lord Sugar's £250,000 to invest in their business idea seem blissfully unaware of how daft they look with their strutting boasts. I know it's a competition, but not in how to sound the most foolish.So we had the usual bombast bingo list. “I'm the complete package”, “I would compare myself to a Ferrari”, “Failure is not an option” and “I'm so confident to the point people think I'm deluded”. Bless Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Cecil Sharp, heritage hero or imperialist appropriator? If you attended school in the first half of the 20th century, you would have sung from his collections of English folk songs, and probably gritted your teeth and performed the country dances he recorded, too. Not far from the Hampstead Theatre, where Nell Leyshon’s play about him, Folk, has premiered in the Downstairs studio space, there is a world-renowned centre named for him and dedicated to the English folk traditions he helped salvage.Or did he? Sharp’s legacy has divided academic opinion since the 1980s, attracting complaints that Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
In 2021 TikTok became the most visited website in the entire world. Spending too much time on TikTok is probably bad for all sorts of geopolitical, ethical and spiritual reasons. But if you want to understand how we listen to and discover music in 2021 - it is the most important place to navigate.The app is not just a tool for record labels and artists to push new singles. It’s also become a space where music from the past is constantly being repurposed in bizarre and fascinating ways. For example, this year a Fleetwood Mac song re-entered the charts and became a Zoomer hit thanks to a guy on Read more ...
theartsdesk
Like every other artform, cinema suffered greatly in a year of lockdowns. But despite an ever-changing outlook, theartsdesk still managed to review over 130 films in 2021!Long-awaited blockbusters and no-budget indies fought for screen space big and small, but only a select few achieved five star status. Here are the 2021 releases our critics deemed perfect:The Dig (28 January 2021)This adaptation of John Preston’s novel features Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and Lily James in a haunting exploration of time and timelessness.Our reviewer Adam Sweeting said: “The Dig really is a story for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback.The opening sequence of episode one was a blinder, a self-contained mini-drama about a motorist stopping at a decrepit service station to use the facilities, then finding himself pursued by a malevolent articulated truck, looming ever larger in his rearview mirror as he sings along to "Bette Davis Eyes" on the car radio.The cat-and-mouse pursuit was shot with filmic grandeur, as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens would clash with damaging consequences, a forewarning acknowledged that year by Culture’s Two Sevens Clash album.Yet Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing Everywhere collects “Voices,” “Hong Kong Garden’s” B-side, and Two Sevens Clash producer Joe Gibbs’s single “Prophesy Reveal,” a version of "Two Sevens Clash" voiced by Marvin Pitterson in his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The restrictiveness of conventional gender identities explains the extreme body horror of Titane, in which a pregnant rookie firefighter frequently invoked as Jesus bleeds car oil from her vagina and from the stigmatic splits in her swollen belly. The miracle of Julia Doucournau’s luridly beautiful Palme d’Or-winner is that the memory of the violence puncturing the film's first half recedes as loving tenderness takes hold.Protagonist Alexia (first-time actor Agathe Rousselle magnificently channelling punk snottiness and catwalk hauteur) may be a serial killer who’s been impregnated by a car, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells ★★★★Shirley Ballas (main picture), released from her day job as head judge on Strictly Come Dancing, certainly knows how to make an entrance, and as the Wicked Queen she does here in a range of fantastic costumes. She swashes her buckle – well, swishes her frock – with aplomb.Although Ballas's is the name above the title, the driving force of the show is Leon Craig in the Dame role as Nurse Nellie. He's terrific, much aided by a sparkling, family-friendly script by Paul Hendy (who can't resist a pun), and Damian Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was never going to be a bumper year, just a bumpy one. With theatres dark until May or later, the usual 11 or 12 months of potential live-dance going was reduced to four or five. There was one bright shaft of optimism in late spring, and another in the autumn, when the gloom-clouds parted to allow a few weeks of almost-normality. But now we seem to have come full circle. In the past 10 days three out of London’s four Nutcrackers have either closed or been drastically postponed – one of them to this time next year. The show must go on, it will go on. Just not yet.That doesn’t mean that, for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everybody in the comedy industry started out with so much hope that, finally, things could get back to normal in 2021 – and for a while they did, and there were some gems as live comedy returned to clubs and theatres.In live comedy, which operated for part of the year, Jason Manford and Alfie Brown – two comics who couldn't be more different if they tried – delivered great shows, while it was clear that Olga Koch (pictured right) had been using her enforced layoff to work on some very solid material for her new show. Sadly, not all comics had used the time wisely, and there were a few Read more ...