Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
The Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, which have plagued thinkers for around 2500 years, tell us that super-speedy Achilles can never outrun the tortoise and that an arrow in flight must always occupy a fixed position at intervals of time – and so can never hit its target. My introduction to these favourite brain-tanglers came when, as an easily overawed teenager, I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers and learned that, thanks to that arrested arrow, “Saint Sebastian died of fright”. Stoppard doesn’t take a bow in Joseph Mazur’s far-reaching and idea-crammed tour of the meanings we Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Orange Crate Art makes most sense in the context of Van Dyke Parks’s solo career rather than that of Brian Wilson’s. For the former it was preceded by Tokyo Rose, an orchestrated set tackling the intersections of American-Japanese cultural and socio-political relations. All the way back to his debut album, 1967’s Song Cycle, Parks has created albums with American signifiers as their pegs. With Orange Crate Art, the theme is symbols evoking mythic California. The punning title is literal: an inspiration is the graphics on crates of California-grown orangesBefore Song Cycle, when Parks and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has evinced more wolf-cub-like fierceness or childlike purity of purpose than does Lise Leplat Prudhomme. That’s because Prudhomme was 10 when she portrayed Jeanne from age 17 onwards in Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont’s sequel to his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc.Prudhomme appeared in the first half of Jeannette as the little girl shepherdess Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Loneliness haunts the solo song – not simply all those solitary wanderers and defiant wayfarers of the Lied tradition, but the forsaken lovers and questing pilgrims who fill the folk-song repertoire of many lands. So, amid the general poignancy of the Wigmore Hall’s lockdown concerts for Radio 3, the vocal performances have carried a special frisson. Warmly communicative voices have projected their anguish over, or resignation to, solitude into ranks of seats empty save for one or two engineers and announcers. This week, both soprano Ailish Tynan (accompanied by pianist Iain Burnside, on Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A British-Jamaican man is confused. It's the Second World War, and he signed up for the RAF on the understanding that he would serve as a pilot overseas. But instead he's ended up as ground crew in a grey Lincolnshire village. "You are overseas, aren't you?" sneers his sergeant. That question – of how great the distance between Jamaica and Britain was and is – lies at the heart of Small Island, Rufus Norris's epic, big-hearted production of Andrea Levy's 2004 ode to the Windrush generation, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson. It's also one of the reasons that the National Theatre Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever made, that of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1922.The news went worldwide, a 5,000-year-old burial bringing some sunshine to a world traumatised by World War One and the Spanish flu. The newly-coloured images made the narrative of this awesome discovery feel stunningly immediate. The charming Oxford Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Frenchman Olivier Assayas is a writer/director who can produce small-scale, cerebral dramas (Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sil Maria) and muscular genre pieces, such as five-hour true-crime epic Carlos. Wasp Network falls into the latter camp, though given its spectacular, real-life material, it’s a disappointingly unengaging political thriller. The story concerns The Cuban Five, a pro-Castro spy ring based in Miami in the 1990s and charged with infiltrating Cuban-American organisations responsible for terrorist attacks on the island. Carlos star Édgar Ramírez Read more ...
Davide Abbatescianni
After the success of the sci-fi crime drama 1983 (2018), another Polish original series has landed at Netflix. The Woods, directed by Leszek Dawid and Bartosz Konopka, is a six-part mystery thriller adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel, set in two main time spans: 1994 and 2019. The story centres on the Warsaw prosecutor Paweł Kopiński (Grzegorz Damięcki), who is still grieving the loss of his sister Kamila (Martyna Byczkowska) 25 years earlier, when she walked into the woods at a summer camp and was never seen again.In 2019, the discovery of a homicide victim – presumably Artur Perkowski, a boy Read more ...
David Nice
"Touch her and you die," sings Masetto in telling Don Giovanni to keep away from his Zerlina. There's certainly trouble, though not instant death, when fingers briefly meet. Mozart's dark comedy has much in Da Ponte's text about hands-on business but only a few points where it's actually seen; love and sex don't really happen, though there are two skirmishes, one fatal. So Andrew Staples' Swedish Radio studio staging can just about pass as the first social-distancing ensemble opera of the C-19 era (★★★★) - when it works, it's excellent - and Daniel Harding palpably fires up a team of world- Read more ...
Owen Richards
Thank goodness no-one’s going anywhere this year, because 7500 does for planes what Jaws did for bright yellow lilos. Set entirely within the cockpit of a passenger jet, this thriller trims all the fat, leaving a taut nightmare that pulls no punches.Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Tobias Ellis, a mild-mannered pilot on a routine flight from Berlin to Paris. His biggest worry is his child not getting into a preferred kindergarten, something that far more bothers his partner (who also happens to be part of the flight crew). Both character and actor aren’t your typical action protagonist, but Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Yoram (Menashe Noy), a vet in a Tel Aviv safari park, knows how to treat a sick jaguar (startling to see such a magnificent beast in an oxygen mask) but he has no idea how to comfort his troubled 17-year-old daughter Roni (a powerful Zohar Meidan). Both are mourning the death of Roni’s mother a year ago, but all they can offer each other is a tortured silence.Writer-director Nimrod Eldar’s first feature, which premiered on HBO in February in the USA, is quirky and atmospheric, with extraordinary desert scenes and a bracingly unpretentious, understated feel to Yoram and Roni’s knotted Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal with the nerve agent novichok in 2018 was one of the more bizarre episodes in recent memory, a kind of delayed-action echo of the Cold War. Sergei, a former Russian military intelligence officer who acted as a double agent for Britain’s MI6 in the 1990s and early 2000s, had relocated to the UK in 2010 under a spy exchange agreement and was living in Salisbury, but evidently never felt entirely safe. As he was quoted as saying in this BBC One dramatisation of the affair, “Putin’s gonna get me”.Typically of the goings-on in the worlds of espionage and Read more ...