Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s cool to see a car crash or a gunshot wound, it’s exciting.” Emergency medical technician Juan Ochoa, 17, loves his work, which is just as well because he doesn’t always get paid.Luke Lorentzen’s award-winning documentary (he directed, produced, shot and edited it) about the Ochoa family’s private ambulance in Mexico City is an extraordinary rollercoaster ride into the chaos of a metropolis where there are only 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. Private ambulances like the Ochoas’ take up the slack, and it’s a cutthroat business, with vehicles racing to be first at Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s hard enough to imagine hip hop set to the songs of Sting, but a hip hop show in which 27 songs by Sting laid end to end are made to tell a story about refugees? That’s the unlikely latest offering from the choreographer Kate Prince.She has form in this area. Into the Hoods introduced hip hop to Sondheim and Some Like it Hip Hop filched a plot from Shakespeare. Both were bright, funky, funny shows and it was easy to see why the mashup worked. Now she has wrangled streetdance and a string of jukebox hits into what is without doubt the most desperate story of our age, and frankly, it’s a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are any number of ways to perform A Number, Caryl Churchill’s bleak and beautiful play about a father and three of who knows how many of his genetically cloned sons. Since it first opened at the Royal Court in 2002, this hourlong two-hander has been staged in London with some regularity, as often as not with actual fathers and sons (Tim and Sam West, John and Lex Shrapnel). But director Polly Findlay’s entirely fresh take for the Bridge Theatre is the most literal I have yet seen, and also the most lacerating: this Number may not have family on its side, but it certainly boasts two Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Leif Ove Andsnes’s long-term partnership with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has already yielded rich fruit, and the Mozart quartets and trio he performed last night with members of the top-notch nomad band proved just as succulent. However, I would hardly have been alone in leaving the Wigmore Hall with my strongest impressions stirred by the single solo work that the versatile Norwegian master-pianist allowed himself. All of the items of the bill dated from 1785 and 1786: the two piano quartets (in G minor and E flat) with which Mozart effectively launched the form as a serious vehicle for Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner’s disquieting fifth feature, and her first English language one, Little Joe is a sci-fi drama that ponders the tangled choices faced by many modern women – Kubrickian though it is in its immaculate production design and cold, affectless tone.Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham), a driven thirtysomething bio-engineer, presides over table upon table forested with the leafless, infertile plants she has bred in a spacious greenhouse laboratory. She has developed the project with her colleague Chris (Ben Whishaw), the vaguely patriarchal atmosphere of their Read more ...
David Nice
So many performances of Mahler's most theatrical symphony every season, so few conductors who have something radically fresh to say about it. Two who do are London Philharmonic Orchestra chief Vladimir Jurowski, perfecting his vision over the years, and now the Philharmonia's Principal Guest Conductor, Jakub Hrůša. With total command, he captures the scope of a monumental canvas, every nuance in the phrasing – quite often it's simply that Mahler's meticulous instructions need following, but how rarely that happens – and pointillist jabs of colour.The breadth of Hrůša's interpretation – the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack London’s original novel was a brutal and Darwinian account of a dog's life in the Klondike during the gold rush at the end of the 19th century. Chris Sanders’s film, on the other hand, with a screenplay by Michael Green, is a family-friendly entertainment in the Saturday matinee tradition, delivering a message of lump-in-the-throat positivity reminiscent of earlier canine classics like Old Yeller or The Incredible Journey.Harrison Ford gets top billing and delivers the somewhat sententious voice-over which pushes the story along, but the real star is Buck (pronunciation of whose name Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While it is only right that Birmingham is finally getting well-deserved credit as the well-spring and self-proclaimed Home of Metal, the media coverage of the Midlands’ place in musical history might lead anyone to think that this particular story both began and ended with the mighty Black Sabbath. This, however, is far from the truth and tonight Grindcore originators Napalm Death made it clear that Ozzy’s mob are not the only locals to have made their mark. For, not only are they a band to have maintained the volume since the mid Eighties but, while Black Sabbath have pretty much called it a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Black Lives Matter movement is such an important international protest that it is odd how few contemporary plays even mention it. Since the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has been around since 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012, there is little excuse. Now, however, New York playwright Antoinette Nwandu's allegorical play about race in America, first staged in 2018at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre (and filmed there by Spike Lee, no less), has come to this Off-West End venue, opening the day after rapper Dave Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Steve Coogan’s long partnership with director Michael Winterbottom is probably best known for The Trip and its spin-offs, involving Coogan’s comic culinary excursions alongside Rob Brydon. But for its serious undercurrents and disreputable subject matter, their new film is more akin to The Look of Love, in which Coogan played the sleazy Soho entrepreneur Paul Raymond. Here he is again, playing a real heel. This time, their story doesn’t’ start in sex clubs, but clothes shops. Coogan is Sir Richard McCreadie, aka “Greedy McCreadie”, public school drop-out turned Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s a particular moment of a particular recording – I suppose every slightly over-obsessive record collector has one – that I just keep listening to over and over again. It’s in Fritz Reiner’s 1960 Chicago Symphony recording of Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome, and it comes right after the first flood of the Triton Fountain starts to recede. The violins glide up into their cadence; just two notes, but the gesture is so graceful, so effortless, and so gloriously, naturally stylish that it gives me shivers every time. I wondered if Kazuki Yamada would get the CBSO’s violins to do something Read more ...
David Nice
Not the musical then, worst luck. How timely it would have been to mark Jerry Herman's passing with a celebration of a great achievement. Just how brilliantly the pathos and panache of his score lift Jean Poiret's long-running 1970s farce about a gay couple and their St Tropez drag club having to "straighten up" for family values is only emphasised by this ultimately threadbare adaptation by Simon Callow. Was the French-Italian film as good as those of us who saw it in the early 1980s remember? Having been surprised by the hilarity of another humanising attempt, The Birdcage, with a laugh- Read more ...