Reviews
Florence Hallett
From her fourth floor flat, which is also her studio, the painter Celia Paul looks out over the British Museum, the figures of the Muses carved into its pediment huge and present compared to the antlike, and usually teeming, human life below (main picture: British Museum and Plane Tree Branches). Up here, it is pigeons not people who provide company and entertainment, their springtime rituals carrying on as usual in the balustrades and gutters.Paul has lived here since 1982, and though married, she has never lived with her husband, preferring she has said, to maintain her own private space. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The nightmarishness of the M25 motorway is well known, especially if you get stuck on the Heathrow section on a wet Sunday night, but as she perambulated around the motorway’s circumference for this idiosyncratic BBC Four documentary, naturalist Helen Macdonald showed us how skilfully nature deals with man-made monstrosities. For instance, an international cast of aerial predators and exotic waterfowl has made itself at home in the rubbish-strewn Rainham marshes, while great tits have modulated their calls upwards to make them audible above the booming traffic.In this languid 90-minute film Read more ...
David Nice
In her surprisingly self-revealing collection of essays and interviews Frantumaglia (Neapolitan dialect word for a disquieting jumble of ideas), the writer who calls herself Elena Ferrante often ponders the metamorphosis from novel to film. “The real problem for a director,” she writes, “is to find solutions, the language with which to get the truth of the film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force.” Her trusted collaborator Saverio Costanzo achieved that in his fluid, poetic-gritty adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, the first of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 15 years since two schoolfriends with a passion for acoustic music opened Green Note in London’s Camden Town, their goal to create “somewhere friendly, comfortable, intimate, and with the best music on offer every night of the week”. It quickly established itself as the go-to club for talented musicians at the outset of their careers – Amy Winehouse and Ed Sheeran played early gigs, and Diana Jones made her UK debut on the Green Note stage. Leonard Cohen once came by for a private gig – his picture hangs on the wall along with other shape-shifting musical icons. No surprise that Green Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In July 1966, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s life changed. As punishment for participating in a peaceful student demonstration against the authoritarian King Hassan II of Morocco, he was detained and sent to a military encampment at El Hajeb, “a village where there are only soldiers,” to undergo military training.For the next year and a half, Ben Jelloun, a leftist political prisoner and supposed military recruit, served time in a prison camp. There he, along with other political prisoners, was subjected to conditions marked by “savagery, stupidity, and degradation”. The toll was physical and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Of course, we just had to end with a midsummer Winterreise. The Wigmore Hall’s month of lockdown concerts for BBC Radio 3 had begun with a legendary elegy – the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita, written according to musical folklore in memory of his first wife, with which Stephen Hough so gravely, beautifully, broke the pandemic silence on 1 June. It finished, perhaps inevitably, with Schubert’s farewell journey of a forsaken spirit through storm, ice and snow, while the sun blazed down outside over a fretful, still fearful city. But art, even on the level that Mark Padmore and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Razorcuts formed after Tim Vass discovered Alan McGee’s Living Room club. In the booklet accompanying the reissue of his band’s first album Storyteller, Vass says of the weekly London promotion that “The headline act would often be someone like The Membranes or Alternative TV, but it was the unknown support acts that blew me away: The Jasmine Minks, The June Brides, The Loft.”Suitably inspired, Vass brought his friend and fellow Luton-dweller Gregory Webster along to The Living Room and Razorcuts were soon in business. Both were previously in the Television Personalities influenced outfit Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Icelandic film begins in the titular land of steam, as rain and mist envelop an erratic car which soon tumbles to its doom. The wife of rural policeman Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) was driving, and the mystery of her death and open, infinite wound of their love consumes him during the course of this gripping dissection of damaged masculinity and desperate devotion.Ingimundur’s relationship with his 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (the director’s daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, unsentimentally superb, pictured below) just about anchors him in the present. So too does his affectionate Read more ...
India Lewis
The Museum of Whales is an unfolding: a slow process of describing a country, its people, and its past through its esoteric and bizarre museums. The book is structured into galleries and cabinets, like the museums it describes, and the text is accompanied by often mysterious line drawings with their own key at the end. There are just a few museums that are the main focus, beginning with the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which is just as delightfully and childishly funny as it sounds. Greene is very good at gentle humour, with a particularly memorable description of "necropants" (you’ll have Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed for NT Live at the Bridge Theatre last summer, is – as it gleefully acknowledges – completely bonkers. But it doesn’t start out that way. A troop of actors trudge through the audience, singing dirge-like psalms in dark suits and The Handmaid’s Tale-esque headwraps. This is Athens, a terrifyingly patriarchal society in which a woman can be killed for refusing to marry the man her father chooses. It’s the part of the play you always forget: the waking nightmare, which makes the flight into the forest all Read more ...
On the Record review - #MeToo turns its lens to the music industry, gives the mic to women of colour
Jill Chuah Masters
On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godfather of Hip Hop.’ It centres on interviews with Drew Dixon (pictured below), who — as a twentysomething music executive — launched Whitney Houston hits and scouted a young Kanye West. She left the industry after Simmons allegedly raped her.This is an elegant, stinging addition to the #MeToo dialogue, which gives due emphasis to black women and the music industry — a Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Dead and the Others won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes in 2018, perhaps due to the supreme devotion to subject and place that this macabre work exhibits. It is a film of startling visual power and mood, with a drifting storyline that becomes bizarrely captivating. Directors João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora spent nine months living with the Krahô people of northeastern Brazil, and their dedication has brought an anthropological touch to the drama.Part of the documentary effect comes from the directors’ patient observation of landscape. Shot in 16mm in a rural region of Read more ...