Reviews
mark.kidel
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.Loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter, probably Germany’s foremost visual artist, his new film Never Look Away, epic in scale, the story spanning several decades over more than three hours, is a dramatic rollercoaster, both a pleasure and shocking to watch. It is also very moving. And yet, although made with great brio – the camerawork, editing Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This lovingly lo-tech visit to galaxies far far away is a curious proposition, which, while neither dark, nor sublime, does have its moments. Framed as a tribute to Seventies sci-fi in all its polyester-clad absurdity, it in fact reveals itself to be an exploration of the parallel emotional worlds we all inhabit, with hat-tips to Star Trek and Blake 7 along the way.Dark Sublime, running downstairs at the Trafalgar Studios, is the first play by the writer Michael Dennis, and has scored itself a considerable coup in persuading Star Trek’s Counsellor Deanna Troi, Marina Sirtis, to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“We didn’t come all the way from Nashville, Tennessee with just one fiddle,” says Carrie Underwood, halfway through her Glasgow show. The onetime American Idol turned multiple Grammy award-winning country superstar isn’t one for doing things by halves: hers is a show with a big band, big boots, big earrings and her gigantic, arena-filling voice.Despite hints to the contrary (Guns n Roses as her entrance music; feelgood Saturday night southern party anthem “Southbound” as the opening track) a breakneck opening streak hits all the country cliche greatest hits: good girls and casanova cowboys, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC is pleased with itself for having insinuated a documentary team inside the Bank of England, but was this august custodian of the nation’s finances really going to let slip any juicy revelations? The Bank’s role is too powerful and too political for its employees to be anything other than extremely tight-lipped. In fact a major theme of this film (the first of two parts) was the lengths the Bank goes to to protect its secrets, with a strict “purdah” regime in place to prevent leaks and electronic sweeps for listening devices a routine occurrence. It was safe to assume that director Rob Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Michael Frayn's Noises Off is a modern classic, a backstage sex farce that pokes affectionate fun at a profession he loves. And now Jeremy Herrin, one of our most accomplished directors, revives it for Lyric Hammersmith, where the play was premiered in 1982. He also directed a production in 2016 on Broadway, so this is his second bite of the cherry.At the press night, the theatre gods appeared to be in on the fun when, two hours in, the lights failed and a member of the crew came on stage to tell the audience there was a technical hitch in this play within a play, and there was a short delay Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ecological awareness has become de rigueur for any self-respecting celebrity, and if the chances of saving the planet were in direct proportion to the number of renowned personages criss-crossing it on well-intentioned missions, we could all stop worrying. Still, one would much prefer to have Dame Judi Dench doing it than…. others we might mention.Having adopted a trio of orangutans in Borneo, Dame Judi ventured to the Malay Archipelago to immerse herself in the island’s astonishing array of wildlife and vegetation and see the animals in their natural habitat. But you can’t just drop an 84- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s no rest for the webbed wonder in Spiderman: Far from Home. It’s just a few months since Marvel wiped out Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame and his protégé Peter Parker is being hounded to fill Tony Stark’s place. Iron Man didn’t give the teenager his high-tech Spidey suit just for him to stuff it in the back of the wardrobe and get on with being a normal teenager, not when the planet is in danger (again). Tom Holland, so endearing in 2017’s Spiderman: Homecoming, is a little overwhelmed by the responsibilities thrust upon him. The young British actor is adept at Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best kind of two-hander is the play about couples. And the most dramatic way of saying something about relationships is to show a couple who are in trouble, bad trouble. Crisis. Especially if they start off well together. Kenny Emson's smart, sharply written new play, which arrives at the Bush on its way to the High Tide and Edinburgh fesrtivals, does just that. Its main theme is honesty in personal relationships and if you think that its title, Rust, suggests a corrosive decay of hope you wouldn't be far wrong.The couple are Nadia and Daniel. Both in their late-30s, she is a middle-class Read more ...
Owen Richards
With the fabled fields of Glastonbury on the horizon, The Killers chose the equally mythic Cardiff Castle as their practice run. While Stormzy was making history on the Pyramid Stage, the Welsh capital played witness to a precision-engineered pop-rock spectacular, complete with pyros and an extravagant light show. Well, if you can’t make history, make memories.They began big with a one-two punch of first-album bangers. “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” led straight into “Mr Brightside”, a power play to drop their generational lads anthem so early, but it mainlined adrenaline straight through the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
When you think of the extravagant, violent, super grown-up subject-matter that stalked the operatic stage round about 1900 - the Toscas and the Salomes, the Cavs, the Pags and the rest of the verismo pack - you might find it strange to contemplate the ageing Dvořák still messing around with fairies at the bottom of his woodland pool, a subject that surely went out with the early Romantics. But you’d be wrong. His Rusalka is just as much a creature of the distressed mind as the heroine of Schoenberg’s Erwartung or, for that matter, Debussy’s Mélisande, who could well also be a stranded Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with Soviet and post-Soviet citizens who were children during the second world war. They recount strange and terrible experiences which — even as adults — retain the force and candour of childhood memory.Unsurprisingly, many coalesce around abstract, sensory features which, along with spare brutal episodes, attest to deep sadness and thinned living. “What has stayed in my memory is colour,” says Lenya Khosenvich — a common admission. Faina Lyutsko remembers how “The death Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Belém’s population is one-and-a-half million. Located 100km south of Brazil’s north coast on the east bank of the Amazon feeder river Pará, it’s the capital of the state sharing its name with the waterway. The city is only 160km south of the equator, an entry point into the rain forest and closer to Trinidad and Tobago than Brazil’s cultural magnet Rio de Janeiro.Named after Bethlehem and founded in 1655, Belém’s economy is defined by its role as an incoming and outgoing port and has its roots in an early 17th century Portuguese fort. Its location and the attendant potential for the Read more ...