Reviews
Adam Sweeting
With Gloria (2013), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Disobedience (2018), Chile’s Sebastián Lelio has earned a deserved reputation as a sympathetic director of women. It may seem a strange move for him to remake Gloria only a few years after the Spanish-language original, but Lelio claims he was inspired to do it by a meeting with Julianne Moore, who said she’d do it if he would direct.The action has been transplanted to Los Angeles from Santiago, with both the English script and many of the camera shots closely following the 2013 version. It’s the story of a 50-something divorcée determined to Read more ...
Tom Baily
Shane Meadows has said that he always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk. It’s homage to the European cinema he loves, with its preference for atmosphere over action, ambiguity over resolution, but it is also a way to confront an experience that lay dormant within his own life for too long. That is the trauma of the sexual abuse survivor, who is locked in silence and trapped by what cannot be said. If there were periods in The Virtues (Channel 4) that ambled along too slowly, or were simply too unbearable to watch, Meadows has achieved a redeeming climax in this final episode Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is somewhat formal but decidedly casual — trousers loose enough to bend in, a striped jumper with the sleeves rolled up, workman-like, and a shirt which looks like it has several top buttons undone. From the floral wallpaper, cornice rail and mantel mouldings, it’s clear this is a London residence, yet over patterned posies, he has mapped out his theory of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first film in this extraordinary series, Seven Up!, was made for Granada Television’s World in Action in 1964. It picked 14 seven-year-old British children from different social backgrounds, aiming to revisit them every seven years to see how their lives were progressing. Paul Almond directed the first programme, but ever since this has been Michael Apted’s baby.The slow, methodical progress of the series down the decades has meant that it has steadily accumulated a strange power, as these lives of others have in some ways become merged with our own. Those original seven-year-olds are now Read more ...
David Nice
"Waiting is always wearisome," declare the socialites as glitter-and-be-gay Manon Lescaut receives in the home of her nasty old "protector" Geronte. Despite the numerous sugar-plums Puccini weaves into his first fluent operatic masterpiece, waiting is very wearisome in the first half of Karolina Sofulak's new production for Opera Holland Park. Anticipation that glorious soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn will flourish is eventually rewarded; but laryngitis two weeks ago has left her not in best voice. And her love interest, tenor Peter Auty as Des Grieux, seems worried about catching it, since he Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In one lifetime, the many loves that once dare not speak their names have become part of everyday chatter. But it would be shortsighted to believe that ancient prejudices are easy to overcome, or that change does not run the risk of creating familiar problems. In this new play, Wife, Samuel Adamson explores several decades of the trials and tribulations of forbidden love in a piece of epic theatre that is also exquisitely personal. At the same time, he has also penned a fan letter to the theatre, taking Ibsen's A Doll's House as a template against which to measure social progress.The story Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The times they are a-changin’. On show at the Barbican is a retrospective of Lee Krasner’s stunning paintings and, for the first time ever, Tate Modern is hosting two major shows of women artists. At last, the achievements of great women are being acknowledged and celebrated.Russian artist Natalia Goncharova was both a trailblazer and a powerhouse of creative energy. 1913 was the year she took Moscow by storm. The first avant-garde artist to be given a retrospective at the Mikhailova Art Salon, she was determined to make a big impression. The exhibition was hugely ambitious – nearly 800 Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It’s quite a weighty concept, and one which could easily have buckled had both the music and its execution not been of the highest quality. Aurora Orchestra’s "Music of the Spheres" was a concert inspired by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras’s theory that each of the planets in our solar system must emit a particular sound through its orbit. The story goes that while passing a blacksmith at work, Pythagoras noticed that the sound produced by two anvils of differing weights was the same, though an octave apart. He weighed both the anvils and found that their weights had an exact ratio of 2:1 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you should happen to be loitering in London’s Knightsbridge at 4am, don’t panic if you find yourself surrounded by the massed horsemen of the Household Cavalry. When they need to rehearse for great occasions like the Queen’s birthday, they can only do it in the middle of the night when there’s no traffic on the roads.This was one of many factoids packed into this new ITV documentary series. Other gems included the news that the regiment’s horses produce 6,000 tons of “royal poo” every year, which the lucky troopers have to shovel down the “dung tunnel”, while the horses have their faces Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sun, snow, and some unadorned silliness danced to the music of Björk: no one can accuse San Francisco of casting an insufficiently wide tonal (or climatic) net in this second of four programmes on view from San Francisco Ballet as part of their Sadler's Wells season (continuing to June 8). Having largely thrilled to their all-Shostakovich opener, I found this line-up more of a literally mixed bag. And yet, just when the sobriety of Cathy Marston's take on the American novel Ethan Frome is beginning to pall, along comes the tinsel-infused, take-no-prisoners kitsch of Arthur Pita's Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Percussionist Pedrito Martinez is one of those musicians who forces you to re-think what instruments are capable of – while making you wonder if there is actually anything he can’t do. He plays congas, batá drums and bongos with breathtaking facility and flow. He sings everything from Yoruba chants to “Quizás”. He dances. And he can turn a side drum and a hi-hat (no sticks, all played with hand/foot) plus cajon drum as if by magic into a rock drum kit.Last night at Ronnie Scott’s was the first show of a duo tour with a fellow Cuba-born US-based musician, pianist Alberto Rodriguez, touring the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Only those who’ve just popped in from an early 20th century Tennessee cotton field will have recently observed more pairs of dungarees in one place than at Red Rooster. It’s a festival that prides itself on a rich diet of Americana alongside a defiantly retro aesthetic. Red Rooster offers up expertly curated, off-the-beaten-track sounds, but there’s a strong sense that it’s as much about hanging out, about having all day/all evening picnics soaked in bourbon cocktails while somewhere not too far away a banjo is twanged by a stetson-wearing someone you’ve never heard of.The festival runs from Read more ...