Reviews
Tom Baily
Another unnecessary sequel: we’re used to this sort of thing. The film knows it, too, as lead dork Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) meekly thanks the audience during the opening credits: “There are lots of options when it comes to zombie entertainment, so thank you for choosing us”. It’s a nice line, but feels like an apology for the film industry. “Bad films are everywhere, but this is the least bad”, he could have said. Fair enough. There are too many standard horror flicks, so shift the game (or try to).Zombie genre parodies have been on the rise (see also this year’s The Dead Don’t Die) since Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Early in the political drama Official Secrets, Keira Knightley’s real-life whistleblower Katharine Gun watches Tony Blair on television, giving his now infamous justification for the impending Iraq War, namely the existence of weapons of mass destruction. “He keeps repeating the lie,” she cries. “Just because you’re the Prime Minister doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts.”There’s simply no escaping the resonance. The current occupant of No 10 isn’t the first to be economical with the truth; the real shock is that we keep on putting up with it. And the power of the film resides Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Having exploded on to the scene like a cross between Queen and My Chemical Romance, Derby’s young glam-rock upstarts the Struts are on top of the world. They've cracked America, supported the Rolling Stones, the Who, Mötley Crüe, Foo Fighters and Guns N’Roses and delighted a home crowd at 2018's Download festival, and are currently thrilling audiences on their own ludicrously entertaining headline tour.Tonight they hit London, and judging by the fevered crowd jammed into the Kentish Town Forum there’s a good night to come. The lights go down and the band saunter on, fully aware that it’s Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It remains some of the most terrifying music ever written. Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony - the composer’s portrayal of the fear and anxiety felt under Stalin's regime - is a horrifyingly brutal musical portrayal of life lived under a totalitarian reign. The Moscow Philharmonic under the baton of Yuri Simonov gave a phenomenally accurate and moving performance of this work at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Tuesday night.The intense claustrophobia of the work was at once expertly captured in the orchestra’s strong yet subdued sound. Simonov slyly upped the ante with a gradual increase in both Read more ...
Richard Hawley, Barrowland, Glasgow - black clad crooner's songs remain full of atmosphere and heart
Jonathan Geddes
When Richard Hawley arrived onstage, he had a confession to make. “I like to talk”, he declared, before adding “and play rock n’ roll”. Both were delivered in ample supply during the ensuing performance, the black clad quiff wearing troubadour a natural fit for one of Scotland’s most famed rock n’ roll locations.Yet if the Sheffield native’s persona of a somewhat bruised crooner can flourish in his songs, then his regular chatter tended towards the lighter side. Anecdotes regarding his manager being asked if he had Viagra outside the venue, declarations that he fancied a move to Scotland Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Dust off the record player: Idris Elba’s Eighties comedy In the Long Run (Sky 1) has returned for a second series. Loosely based on Elba’s childhood, the show brings us into the day-to-day life of a West African couple, their British-born son, and the community in their Leyton council estate.Tonight’s episode picked up right where the last series left us. Amidst rumours of job cuts, Walter Easmon (Elba) has stepped up as union representative for his colleagues at the factory. His brother Valentine (Jimmy Akingbola) has moved into a bachelor pad — the junk-filled flat above their local pub. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s an uncomfortable feeling to find oneself completely at odds with an audience in a cinema, but it happens. The recent London Film Festival screening of The Peanut Butter Falcon came complete with the two lead actors and the co-directors and their film went down a storm with a crowd of happy viewers, many of whom had learning disabilities themselves. They were delighted to see Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down’s Syndrome, play one of the three main characters. An independently-produced comedy-drama, it won the Audience Award at South by Southwest and has been a sleeper hit in the US. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Lenny Henry, PhD and CBE, is scarcely recognisable as the teenager who made his TV debut on New Faces in 1975. He’s been a stand-up comedian, musician and Shakespearean actor, and even wrote his own dramatised autobiography for BBC One.A determined buster of boundaries, he has also campaigned tirelessly for more ethnic diversity on British TV. For this new three-part series, aided by film clips and a few talking heads, he uses the history of TV comedy to map changing attitudes to race and immigration. Programmes two and three will tackle stand-up and sketch comedy, while this opening Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Bill Frisell is all about sound and melody and enhancing whatever context he is in.” That quote, which defines both the American guitarist’s gentle and benign nature and his huge level of musicianship, is from Emma Franz, who recently directed and produced a film portrait of him.In Frisell’s new project, Harmony, which also, finally, marks his debut on Blue Note Records with an album in his own name, he applies that principle to working with singers. “I’m singing with my guitar and the rest are singing with their voices. But basically that’s what it is: we’re singing together,” he has said Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Dichterliebe is a song-cycle full of gaps, silences, absences. Where is the piano at the start of “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” when the voice enters first and so startlingly, ungrammatically alone? Where is the voice during the long piano postlude when the vocal line disappears but the singer continues to stand centre-stage? We even seem to join the cycle mid-conversation, unsure what has prompted the diffident, tentative harmonies with which it starts. Biggest of all however, are the gaps left by the four songs that Schumann excised between completing the manuscript version and publishing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently your odds of dying in a plane crash are about one in 11 million, while chances of death in a car accident are about one in 5,000. Therefore flying is theoretically safe, and supposedly getting safer. You wouldn’t know it from the TV schedules though, littered as they are with the likes of Air Crash Investigation, Seconds from Disaster and documentaries about Concorde’s hideous demise in Paris in 2000. YouTube hosts an apparently infinite number of air crash “greatest hits”.Chaos in the Cockpit is Channel 5’s contribution to the queasy cult of plane-wreck TV, and director Kim Lomax Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
David Greig’s reimagining of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel has brought a masterpiece of intellectual science fiction back to its philosophical core. Over the concentrated two hours of Matthew Lutton’s production, which reaches the Lyric Hammersmith from Melbourne via Edinburgh, we are compelled to contemplate, in the best tradition of the genre, ideas that go “beyond the reach of human beings”, as Lem himself put it. The experience is mesmerising. And if that sounds somehow cold or inhuman, the dramatic kernel of the story hits home at a deeply human level: Lem’s premise in this space Read more ...