Reviews
Saskia Baron
Spike Lee’s ambitious tale of five American veterans returning to Vietnam to settle unfinished business, should have opened out of competition at Cannes last month. He was set to become the first African American film-maker to head the festival jury. Instead, coronavirus wiped out Da 5 Bloods cinema release and the film debuts on Netflix. Its 63-year-old director has had to self-isolate at home in New York, watching Covid-19's terrible impact on the BAME community and George Floyd’s murder rock the world. Under these circumstances, it would be great to be able to give Read more ...
Tom Baily
“Never get rattled”. For some, it might sound like a trite self-help mantra. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it was an essential daily memo and a practical self-affirmation. In recent public memory, she is the political figure who has been rattled the most, often with sinister intent. The four-part Hillary (Sky Documentaries, 11 June) delves into that life of rattles, placing her biography alongside an in-depth account of the most bewildering election campaign in history.Series director Nanette Burstein gives Hillary centre stage to recount her life the way she saw and felt it. Each episode Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The first series of What We Do in the Shadows, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary about vampires in Staten Island (a TV spin-off from their cult New Zealand-located film) was a joy, and although it’s a hard act to follow, it’s delicious to be reacquainted with these timeless Transylvanian transplants and their mission to conquer the Americas. At least, that’s what their master, a crumbling vampire baron, has told them to do. Trouble is, as Laszlo (plummy-voiced Matt Berry; Toast of London, The IT Crowd) noted in the last series, the New World is “fucking massive”. Best stick to Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone expecting, as I was, a reverend and slightly earnest miniseries about Sigmund Freud's early professional years will be in for a surprise, and mostly in a good way. This, in short, is horror-schlock directed by Austrian specialist in the genre Martin Kren, made superior by acting and cinematography on a level with that to be found in the rather closer-to-history Babylon Berlin, a literate script by Stefan Brunner and Benjamin Hessler that's done its homework on the fledgling psychoanalyst's work in 1890s Vienna and above all a visceral quality which makes all the blood and grotesquerie Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Wigmore Hall’s triumphant series of lockdown lunchtime concerts by the finest of local recitalists is not without an audience; it’s just that the performers can’t see them. Conversely, online viewers can watch the artists closely enough to see what fingering pianists choose for the awkward passages, and the sound quality is remarkably fine - though may also depend on your computer or smartphone (I heard Steven Isserlis’s recital the other day on my phone from the middle of Richmond Park). It’s welcome, as it’s all we have at present, but I, for one, refuse to accept that bone-chilling Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The master of crowd-pleasing comedy, Judd Apatow, returns with another on-brand tale of arrested development with The King of Staten Island. While it's near his signature anarchic charm, this comedy-drama shows that even a veteran director/writer/producer like Apatow has room for growth. Perhaps Apatow's development is down to his collaboration with 26-year-old SNL comedian and Staten Island native Pete Davidson, who combines his writing and acting talents to explore how he came to terms with losing his firefighter father during 9/11. Set in the working-class world of Staten Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Das Boot made an impressive debut early last year with its entwined narratives of war by land and sea. This second instalment (Sky Atlantic) looks set to be better still, exploring the strata of life under Nazi occupation in the German-run port of La Rochelle while also developing the American connection which we saw glimpses of last time around.It opened with a bang, or a series of bangs, as we joined Johannes von Reinhartz (Clemens Schick), skippering his submarine U-822 in an attack on a merchant ship on a dark and turbulent Atlantic. As the ship sank, von Reinhartz was horrified to see Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If any musical can live up to this title in these troubled times, it must be this show from Graeae, a theatre company whose mission is to champion the work of Deaf and disabled artists. Founded in 1980, its name alludes to the three sisters of Greek myth who shared one eye and one tooth between them, and since 1997 Jenny Sealey MBE has been its artistic director, and the company has embraced both plays about different kinds of disability and given new resonance to other work, such as revivals of classics.Graeae’s shows are always captioned and signed, which as well as being inclusive, also Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is friendship mightier and more durable than sex? That's the proposition put forward by the engaging if ultimately cautious Banana Split, the Los Angeles-set romcom in which two teenagers become friends unbeknownst to the long-haired himbo boyfriend whom they have shared. Co-written by Hannah Marks, who stars as the wounded (but maybe not) April, this feature film directing debut from cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke is sufficiently lively that one feels the timidity of its closing sequence that much more fully.Up until then, there's a lot that both surprises and satisfies about a movie that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience.Performing alone onstage in a concert space, the audience unseen and unheard, can’t be easy, which is perhaps why Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s something wrong with the picture above. It’s the sleeve of a French EP issued in August 1966 credited to a surly looking band called “Them”. The chap standing in the middle has what appear to be bullet holes in his shirt, but where’s the band’s frontman and main songwriter Van Morrison? Further confusing matters, the EP was also issued with the band credit altered to “The Belfast Gypsies”, where otherwise the sleeve was the same (pictured below left).The band on the sleeve was not Them, or drawn from the outfit Morrison was with in 1966. Them had split in Hawaii in June 1966 following Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Andrew Marr’s art show is a lot of fun, although engulfed in almost overwhelming banality and cliché. Our enthusiastic presenter is a self-confessed addict of art. As a pillar of television presentation, he is a natural for this series looking at individual paintings, 10 in all starting with Leonardo's Mona Lisa.The “greatest” in the title is misleading, as this handful of the world’s best-known paintings are not necessarily the best. Aesthetically, the jury has long been out as to the quality of this early 16th century portrait. Her enigmatic smile fascinates, but she only leapt into mega- Read more ...