Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
Harvey Weinstein is never mentioned in The Assistant, but the former movie mogul and convicted rapist looms large over this savagely relevant drama, which offers a vivid picture of what life might have been like for every one of the employees – male as well as female, victim or no – trapped in Weinstein’s evil little world. Kitty Green’s film could be viewed as the indie counterpart to the recent Bombshell, which was first out of the blocks in the aftermath of #MeToo. Where Bombshell was a glossily-packaged, all-star satire, The Assistant is low-budget, low- Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
DI John Major (Daniel Mays) has been dead a year, shot in the line of duty, though we’re far from that series in terms of tone. Now he’s back at the London Met, artificially augmented, but not very intelligently. If anything he’s a bit more shit than he was before, as one of those involved in the shooting observes.“Think of me as Oscar Pistorius,” he encourages his wife Kelly (Anna Maxwell Martin) who’s strangely reluctant to welcome the new part-AI him back home, probably because she and his partner DI Roy Carver (Stephen Graham) are in a relationship. In fact on the night he was shot, they’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Veterans of the first series of Blood will be familiar with writer Sophie Petzal’s fondness for leading the viewer up the garden path and round the mulberry bush as the story develops. Get ready to go through it all again.The setting is the rural heart of Ireland, and this sequel resumes the year after the tragic events of its predecessor, as disgraced doctor Jim Hogan (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below) returns to pick up the pieces with his family. It was the death of Jim’s wife Mary that fuelled the drama of the first series, with the truth about Jim’s complicity or guilt kept hanging Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Paul is in Japan to eat,” announced Rebecca Front’s smart-alecky voice-over, introducing this new series for Channel 4, but he was also there to do that very British thing of wallowing in blissful ignorance of foreign customs and traditions. A Very British Travelogue, in fact.Hollywood undertook his Big Continental Road Trip and has made cooking shows in the USA, but this was his first trip to Japan, a country about which he seemed to have made a point of knowing nothing. Perhaps he hasn’t had time to catch up on Giri/Haji, but it isn’t as if Britain is devoid of sushi bars and tempura Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The great Chilean director Pablo Larraín specialises in dark psychological reflections on the past, notably his trilogy of Chilean dictatorship dramas – Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No – and his English-language debut about the personal aftermath of the JFK assassination, Jackie.So Ema is a departure, a contemporary story, focused primarily on young people and with a familiar topic: parenthood. It’s looser, sexier, more playful than his other films. What remains, though, is the narrative invention, Larraín’s penchant for the diabolical twist, and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Portmeirion, the Italianate village created by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis on the River Dwyryd estuary, might have been designed to provide the perfect surreal setting for the 1967 TV series The Prisoner. But though it resembles an opium dream of doll’s houses and fairytale landscapes, Portmeirion has proved remarkably sturdy, and with its selection of hotels and self-catering cottages functions successfully as a holiday destination.This new series will chart a year in the village’s life, and this opening episode was like following the local postman round the houses, and being Read more ...
Normal People, BBC One review – adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel evokes the deep cut of first love
Joseph Walsh
Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, was a psychologically rich, emotive journey into the psyches of two Irish teenagers who fall in love. Only two years on from publication, it has been turned into a 12-part series from the BBC and Hulu. Rooney’s plot was simple. Working-class boy Connell, who’s popular at school, catches the eye of the socially awkward rich girl Marianne, and we follow their on-off relationship from upper-sixth to university. The novel had its detractors, but for most readers the way Rooney elegantly rendered the inner lives of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anyone lucky enough to have a garden will be newly appreciative of the oasis that even the humblest of outdoor spaces can provide. Based on the Royal Academy’s hugely successful 2016 exhibition of the same name, and broadcast on Monday evening by Exhibition on Screen via Facebook, Painting the Modern Garden opened the door to a different world. As the camera lingered on constellations of dahlias, banks of lavender and waterlilies, tended by contented insects to the twitter of birdsong, the film’s opening sequences plunged us into the living artwork that is Monet’s (not humble) garden at Read more ...
David Nice
Maybe you can't compare incomparables, but it was instructive to watch this Broadway lockdown gala feting nonagenarian Stephen Sondheim a night after the Metropolitan Opera's galaxy of stars welcoming us into their homes. More slick, no doubt (once it started, an hour late), with all the accompaniments clearly heard and sassily done, equally blissful in its funny spots, but somehow less warm and spontaneous-seeming: odd that many of those opera singers on Saturday came across as more companionable than some of the more self-regarding or intense show folk here. But again, carping is unfair: Read more ...
aleks.sierz
London’s Hampstead Theatre has recently been very successful in bringing some of its best shows to a wider public – despite coronavirus. This week, it’s the turn of Howard Brenton’s #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, which was first staged at this venue in April 2013, and in the intervening years it has gained in resonance and relevance. Because of COVID-19, the ideology and mentality of the Chinese government has become once again deserving of keen scrutiny. So what exactly happened to this fêted Chinese contemporary conceptual artist when he fell foul of his country’s regime?On 3 April 2011, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The absence of live concerts is not just affecting the "in the flesh" audiences, but also having a knock-on effect for the Radio 3 audience, used to hearing a live or as-live concert every night of the week. The BBC have instead gone to the archive of recentish concerts to keep the In Concert strand alive, and last week’s schedule (20-24 April) presented an array of appetising concerts showing the best kind of enterprising programming. Familiar music alongside the unfamiliar, a range of orchestras in a range of venues, and for me a delightful voyage of discovery and re-discovery.I don’t have Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The national treasure that is Grayson Perry, CBE, RA, is hosting a six-episode national art club on Channel 4 for professional artists, amateur artists and the public. Since Perry came to national attention when he won the Turner Prize he has been happily ubiquitous. He may well be the country’s most effective proponent of the visual arts, as well as its most famous transvestite.Perry has written many books, delivered the Reith Lectures, curated exhibitions including the British Museum’s ground-breaking Tomb of the Unknown Craftsmen, was a bold curatorial innovator for the RA summer Read more ...