Reviews
Owen Richards
At a point in the early noughties, every third film was a teen comedy about a road trip to lose one's virginity. It’s a genre most were glad to see the back of. What a pleasant surprise Come As You Are is then, which brings much needed heart and relevancy to this tired trope.Based on a true story, we follow Scotty, Matt and Mo as they travel to Montreal to visit a brothel. But this isn’t some sleezy trip – each of the characters has a physical disability, and with their parents as their primary carers, having an active sex life has been nearly impossible. So, with the support of driver/nurse Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, this genre-defying Brazilian film suggests a peculiar amalgam of Angela Carter and Jean Genet, with dollops here and there of The Exorcist and even a brief nod towards Alien.The pregnant Ana (a sad-eyed Marjorie Estiano) finds herself falling for her baby’s serene-seeming nanny, Clara (a transfixing Isabél Zuaa). That the newborn turns out to be a werewolf sends Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It is 41 years since Peter Shaffer ripped off Mozart’s respectable façade to reveal a foul-mouthed verbally incontinent child-man with no more ability to control his behaviour than his genius. Inspired by a short story by Alexander Pushkin that put forward the theory that Salieri murdered Mozart, he fleshed out bare biographical bones with virtuoso obscenity as part of an extraordinary study of obsession, cut-throat professional rivalry and malignant jealousy.Michael Longhurst’s astonishing, exhilarating production for the National Theatre takes a stage-play that many felt was eclipsed by Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Presenting online concerts has been a Matterhorn-steep learning curve for the music sector. Now, after a few months in which imaginations have been tested to the limit, it’s becoming clear what works and what doesn’t. All the more power, then, to the Philharmonia’s many elbows: in yesterday’s webcast, the first of three for their Summer Sessions series, they showed exactly what is possible once one dives into the chilly water. In a programme slightly under one hour long, conducted by John Wilson (who has grown a lockdown beard), Sheku Kanneh-Mason, justifiably British music’s man-of-the- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell. In Blueprint Medea, a new adaptation premiered at the Finborough Theatre in May 2019 and available on YouTube until 2nd August, writer-director Julia Pascal gives us a 21st-century reworking of Euripides’ tragedy. This Medea (Ruth D’Silva) is a Kurdish freedom fighter who’s come to England on a dodgy passport; working illegally as a cleaner, she meets Jason (Max Rinehart) – or Mohammed, to his Iraqi-immigrant parents. They move in together and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, The Plot Against America flashes back to the global turbulence of the 1940s to depict a counterfactual America that turns to the dark side. Instead of the re-election of Franklin D Roosevelt for a third term in 1940, the aviation pioneer and wildly popular celebrity Charles Lindbergh is elected President, on a platform of keeping America out of the new war in Europe.The real Lindbergh had lived in Europe during the 1930s and was suspected of Nazi sympathies – he was awarded the Order of Merit of the German Eagle, which the Hitler regime gave Read more ...
David Nice
The Fidelio Orchestra Café is where you go for electric-shock and deep immersion therapy from the greatest of musicians. It happened last week with Steven Isserlis in Bach, and last night Alina Ibragimova sent high voltage shooting through the body with the very first gesture of Janáček’s Violin Sonata, joined in supernatural high wire acts by Samson Tsoy on the Bechstein now filling more than the space occupied last week only by the cellist. The two advertised sonatas are febrile masterpieces, but we hadn’t bargained for the deep-meditation extras by Arvo Pärt and Olivier Messiaen, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an opening line to BBC Two's new three-part series, “Rupert Murdoch is an enigma” failed to set pulses racing. It rather implied that after three hours of documentary TV, we may end up none the wiser about what makes the scary Australian media tycoon tick.Still, director Jamie Roberts and his team had done their due diligence in the research department, turning up a trove of nuggets from the archives interspersed with pithy interviews from assorted players in Murdoch’s extraordinary journey, including Alan Sugar, Hugh Grant, Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil. There were some chilling Read more ...
India Lewis
Characterised by jarring juxtapositions of intense, appalling violence and the serene beauty of South Africa, Oliver Hermanus’ fourth feature is the story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality against the background of apartheid and prejudice.It's set in 1981, over a decade before homosexuality was legalised in South Africa, when any expression of same-sex attraction in the military meant a trip to Ward 22, where Dr Aubrey Levin subjected his patients to inhumane "treatments". The threat of this punishment hangs over the protagonist, Nick van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), its Read more ...
David Nice
No happy family, surely, was ever quite like this one. Love and mutual respect bound up with music-making at the highest level make the Kanneh-Masons of Nottingham a role-model for this country in times of trouble, with their reiterated message that music is for everyone, something to be shared at every level. Tellingly, it isn’t “Sheku and his siblings” – that's been done brilliantly in a previous documentary – but a whole roster of successful and potentially successful performers among whom it happens to be the cellist who’s made it big. And it doesn’t look as if his modesty and intense Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hot on the heels of The Car Park Club and @TheDriveIn comes Car Park Party, a series of shows presented in partnership with The Comedy Store. Car Park Party presents an evening of four comics doing short sets, presented by an MC.The performance I saw in the beautiful surroundings of Henley Royal Regatta, where the cancelled Henley Festival would normally be held, was hosted by Stephen Grant, who jollied things along nicely and created as much audience participation as is possible at a drive-in – much helped here by the good weather, picnicking guests and the large proportion of the audience Read more ...