Reviews
Saskia Baron
There was always something a little diffident about teenage Marion Elliott-Said, who created her on-stage persona Poly Styrene after putting together her band X-Ray Spex from a small ad in the back pages of the NME in 1977. Male fans and the music press wanted her to be a punky sex kitten thrashing around on stage, but she was always more thoughtful in her lyrics, which touched on slavery, gender stereotypes, genetic engineering and our limitless hunger for shiny plastic goods.Born in ‘57 and raised on a council estate in South London by her English mother, she didn’t see much of her Somalian Read more ...
David Nice
In amongst the heavy-hearted duty of supporting orchestras by watching their concert streamings – not something I’d do by choice – there are two real joys here. One is the discovery of Austrian composer Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony of 1916. The other is witnessing the London Symphony Orchestra's co-principal oboist Juliana Koch playing to an audience – obviously not a group of lucky people sitting upstairs, as we were allowed to do in better times, but her fellow players, most of whom she’s allowed to face, thanks to the special distribution of the LSO in St Luke's.Koch’s is, in any case Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eddie Murphy – one of the biggest stars of the 1980s – has taken his time in making a sequel to the enormously successful Coming to America, which was released in 1988. In that film, directed by John Landis, Murphy played another of his cheeky, quick-talking and knowing comedy roles; as Akeem, a prince from the fictional African nation of Zamunda.It was an amusing fish-out-of-water, culture-clash comedy, as Akeem escaped an arranged marriage and, with his best friend Semmi (Arsenio Hall), fled to Queens, where he fell in love with Lisa (Shari Headley), who loved him for himself and not his Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can a film be both too long and too short? If so, Into the Darkness definitely fits the bill. Anders Refn’s long-nurtured family epic follows Karl Skov (Jesper Christensen, more famous as a Bond villain), a self-made Danish industrialist who struggles with his conscience when his country surrenders to Germany in 1940. Should Skov refuse to manufacture the goods required by his new masters and risk losing not only his comfortable home but also deprive his loyal workers of their livelihood too? And what choices should his sons and daughter make about who they consort Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
A word about grief. Many of us have learned a lot about it this past year; many knew about it before that. When someone we love dies, we grieve. This is normal. This is human. It is agony, but it’s not actually a mental illness. Having Paul, the hero (or anti-hero) of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt be marched off stage by those in white coats at the end is therefore not only a directorial cop-out. It also prevents this overwhelmingly emotional opera from doing what it does best: providing catharsis. Premiered in 1920 in a world shattered by the First World War and the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of brevity, we’ll call Loony Porn.The film has not only been made during the pandemic but fulsomely features the life of a city outdoors – namely Bucharest – as its citizens routinely engaged in social distancing, face covering and the rest. Accompanied by a plot that touches on parenting, the worse aspects of social media and cancel culture, the result Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Admittedly, Antarctic explorer Captain Scott was at the other end of the earth from the protagonists of The Terror (BBC Two), but they would surely have concurred with his anguished observation: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Based on Dan Simmons’s novel, The Terror is a fictionalised account of the 1845 attempt by Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean. This ended in disaster when his Royal Navy ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus became stuck in pack ice, with the crews subsequently dying slowly of disease and starvation.A Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A teen comedy with a thematic difference, Moxie has enough memorable moments to firmly establish comedian Amy Poehler as a director worth reckoning with in what is her second film, following Wine Country in 2019. Telling of the teenage Vivian's coming-of-age as a rebel against the landscape of #MeToo, the Netflix movie goes enough of the way towards transforming this genre's familiar tropes that one only wishes it had enough, well, moxie to go still further. There's undeniable pleasure to be had from the collective awakening that transforms the female student body of Rockport High in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nice to find Bryan Cranston taking the lead in a TV series again (this is his first since Breaking Bad ended in 2013), and the role of New Orleans judge Michael Desiato fits him like a well-tailored suit. Our first glimpses of him at work in his courtroom guide us succinctly to the conclusion that this is a decent man with a conscience, since he has taken the trouble to personally visit the home of a woman accused of drug-dealing, and what he saw has persuaded him that the police officer delivering evidence against her is telling a pack of lies.A judge prepared to risk antagonising the local Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pioneering is an attractive adjective in this context, alerting the spectator to what has been, over the past half century, an extraordinary body of contemporary ceramics produced by women. Underlying the notion of a gender-defined exhibition is a question: are there feminine characteristics to be looked for in an art form, if so what are they? Pots and bowls don’t sound very glamorous, alluring or exciting, rather prosaic, dull and quotidian. This is so in spite of the exalted sphere oriental ceramics have historically inhabited, or the recent flurry of interest surrounding artists such as Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives; she joined the men on risky forays into other communities “that had never seen a white person before, but she never recorded any animosity from them”. Later, in 1936, she relocated to the remote interior of New Guinea. There she lived among the “remarkably inscrutable” Anga people, fabled for their ritualised violence, in a region feared and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata’s performance with Jess Gillam at Chetham’s School of Music was filmed in private on 9 January (and the sound was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the 19th), but to see it in its full visual glory we had to wait until a one-off streaming on Friday. No harm in that: good things are worth the wait, and it was all well filmed (credit to Apple and Biscuit Recordings) and very well presented by Linton Stephens. His interviews with the Camerata’s new leader Caroline Pether and principal cello Hannah Roberts, and later with Jess Gillam and Pekka Kuusisto, were intelligently presented Read more ...