Reviews
Chris Harvey
Back in 2001, after the release of their debut album This Is It, The Strokes weren’t just the most fashionable band in the world, they were also regarded as the group that could “save rock”. That was asking quite a lot.This Is It was 36 minutes of near-perfect guitar pop, delivered with New York cool, insouciance and sex appeal, but it was also as retro as their East Village thrift-store threads. It seemed to contain echoes of every guitar riff you’d ever loved. Didn’t "Alone, Together" sound like the Undertones? "Last Nite" like Tom Petty? "Someday" like the Buzzcocks?It didn’t matter. These Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Haley Fohr’s disquiet at the “wildly outmoded” sexual politics of this notorious 1923 Wilde adaptation led her to cut its intertitles, relying only on sometimes delirious imagery and her throbbing live score. The inherent misogyny of the story of Herod’s step-daughter erotically dancing to gain John the Baptist’s head is, though, already undercut by Alla Nazimova’s bizarrely beautiful version. The Jewish-Russian émigré was a major Broadway and Hollywood star when her uncompromising, ruinously expensive vision for Salomé, and the scandal of her fake marriage to its director Charles Bryant, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That delicate, unsettling tale of a romance between a younger woman and an older man had lost its original title (The Briefcase) for something more obviously offbeat. Allison Markin Powell’s finely-phrased translation appeared a dozen years after the Japanese original. Now, after the acclaim that greeted her version of The Nakano Thrift Shop, Markin Powell returns with another Kawakami work first published in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Debates about whether 1964’s Marnie presaged Alfred Hitchcock’s downslide as a force will run and run. It is however certain that it was the director’s last film scored by Bernard Herrmann, who had worked on 1963’s The Birds, 1960’s Psycho, 1959’s North by Northwest and, before that, a run of Hitchcock’s films back to 1955. After Marnie, the affiliation continued – for a while. Herrmann’s music was heard in the TV show the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and he provided a score for Torn Curtain which the director neither liked or used. The professional relationship was over.Although the music for Read more ...
Owen Richards
Blessed with a red sunset and an adoring crowd, Noel Gallagher brought life to the ruins of Cardiff Castle. With support from fellow 90s alumnus Gaz Coombes, and Wales’s next-gen prodigies Boy Azooga and Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, the evening provided a winning mini-festival affair.From first striding onto the stage, there was no denying that Gallagher is at home on stages this size. He possessed a knowing confidence as he broke into recent rock-pop single “Holy Mountain”, throwing cheeky shapes at opportune moments and always half a minute away from pointing a finger toward the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
They’re back and they’re looking and sounding good – and Spice Girls mania took over Dublin’s city centre for several hours before their concert yesterday. Hotels were booked out, every other woman I passed in the street was wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt or hat, and by mid-afternoon the whole city appeared to be moving as one towards Croke Park. Yet despite the fans’ enthusiasm, there’s always a worry that recreating a brand – as the Spice Girls became – from their mid-1990s heyday may make them seem dated or an irrelevance to a generation well versed in feminism and their own versions Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It has been ten years since Canadian auteur Xavier Dolan first debuted I Killed My Mother at the Cannes Film Festival. A decade on he returns in competition with a title that shows an evolution of his filmmaking that leaves behind many of the problems of his previous work.Matthias & Maxime is certainly more accessible, and will appeal to mainstream sensibilities as a tenderly rendered examination of male friendship. Thankfully, this feature allows Dolan to step away from the enfant terrible image that has been thrust upon him. It’s altogether more meditative – calmer, even – and all the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”? On a momentous day that seemed to push Britain further toward the perilous unknown, Mike Scott’s energetic performance of the song from the band’s 2015 album Modern Blues certainly struck a chord, and his recollections of youthful visits to London and lament of now long-gone delights surely resonated with many.There was the record store in Westbourne Grove where the teenaged Scott was invariably told Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s third feature is a beautifully crafted example of the kind of Latin drama that is slow-burn and sensorial, conveying emotion through gestures and looks rather than dialogue or action. Nothing much seems to be happening, but before you know it you’ve been completed sucked in. Prompted by the writer/director’s own childhood on an ecological community outside Santiago, it offers a pithy, bitter-sweet reminder that idealism doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and that children’s needs remain the same wherever they are: parental solidity, love, the freedom Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
By some strange alignment of the stars, Peter Sellars’s staged version of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St Peter) arrived at the Barbican Hall just as – next door in the theatre – Pam Tanowitz’s directed her dance interpretation of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Not only does Tanowitz’s choreography come with a commissioned score by Kaija Saariaho – a regular Sellars collaborator. Both works mix their media to present a spare and unflinching journey into age, remorse and grief. Those soul-searing lines of Eliot from Little Gidding about “the gifts reserved for age” – “the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Oh Sees have long been touted of as the perfect festival band. Their racuous, high-tempo rock'n'roll always riles up the drunken swathes, even if no-one recognises the song. However, going to a headline show is a different prospect - these swathes are the loyalists, not ready to accept anything less than carnage. After witnessing a relentless sold out show in Cardiff, maybe it's time to remove "festival" from that opening statement.Oh Sees have appeared under many guises, but their most recent form is pounding prog beast. Two drummers sat centre stage, orbited by guitar, bass and keys. Rhythm Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The first surprise is that this hasn’t been done before. The poems that comprise TS Eliot’s Four Quartets are so embedded with references to dance that presenting them alongside choreography feels inevitable. Perhaps it took an anniversary – 75 years since publication – for Eliot’s estate to grant permission: this is the first authorised production on a theatre stage of that great meditation on time and timelessness, memory and being.The second surprise is that the choreographer, Pam Tanowitz, is unknown this side of the Atlantic. An American whose work builds on the barefoot legacies of Read more ...