Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
Lisa, the kindergarten teacher in question (a mesmerising Maggie Gyllenhaal), is taking evening classes in poetry. Twenty years of teaching and raising her three kids, now monosyllabic, mean teens, have left her desperate for culture and a creative outlet. Her stolid husband (Michael Chernus) tries his best to be supportive, but he doesn’t really get it. “My teacher says I need to put more of myself into my work,” she sighs, as she picks at a dull salad at home in Staten Island after class. Well, that’s not going to happen.Director Sara Colangelo’s adaptation of a 2014 Israeli film of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's a lovely, quietly subversive musical lurking somewhere in Waitress, and for extended passages in the second act that show is allowed to shine through. The flip side means putting up with an often coarse first act that seems to have taken its cue from its sister show in female emancipation, the Dolly Parton-scored 9 to 5, playing down the street. The advantage for Waitress is Grammy ceremony semi-regular Sara Bareilles's eclectic and catchy score, and a clutch of winning performances capable of taking even the hoariest material (you've seen almost all these characters before) and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The limitless goodwill generated by The Office earned Ricky Gervais the right to do and say as he pleased. Thus, hosting the Golden Globes, he was toweringly rude to Hollywood royalty. In Extras he gleefully portrayed celebrities as vain and ghastly. In The Invention of Lying he explored the logical consequence of a world in which people say what they really think. Add to that the brisk frankness of his stand-up shows, in which he insulted the religious and derided the overweight. Speaking the truth was his self-styled superpower.His misanthropy arrives at a logical terminus in After Life ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a parental nightmare that’s virtually impossible to comprehend – a missing child. But however disturbing, that dilemma is not the chief concern of the Iranian writer/director Ashgar Farhadi’s latest drama. As ever, he’s interested in the psychological scars and relationship fault-lines that a crime or misdeed can expose. Farhadi is a master at building tension from moral dilemmas, behavioural detail, awkward family relations that are complicated by the past, by secrets, by lies. He’s won two foreign language Oscars, for A Separation and The Salesman, both set in his Read more ...
David Nice
Hallucinatory theatre has struck quite a few times in the Barbican's international seasons. On an epic scale we’ve had the Shakespeare compendiums Kings of War and Roman Tragedies from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, newly merged with the city's Stadsschouwburg to form this present company. Most concentrated in intensity of vision, in my experience, have been director/playwright Simon Stone's Belvoir Theatre Sydney adaptation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, and now his Dutch Medea for our times. They almost make a diptych, with the same hermetic acting space - this time white and open, not black and glassed Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been two relatively recent, welcome correctives in what is grandiosely referred to as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” – a move towards diversity (Black Panther) and a sharp injection of comedy (Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok). With Captain Marvel the studio combines the two elements, resulting in one of the more breezily enjoyable and emotionally satisfying of the franchise. And in Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, it has an actress and a heroine ready to take over from Robert Downey Jr/Tony Stark/Iron Man as the Avenger’s top dog. What a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Okay, so this is the play that will be remembered for the character names that have unusual spellings. As in Alys not Alice, Kyte not Kite, etc. Anyway, Lucinda Coxon's adaptation of journalist Harriet Lane's 2012 bestseller for the Bridge Theatre starts off with Frances (Downton Abbey's Joanne Froggatt) coming across a fatal car crash in which Alys, a woman she doesn't know, is killed. As all those who have read the book will recall, Frances finds that her life changes when she is contacted by Alys's family, especially her husband Laurence Kyte (Hustle's Robert Glenister), who turns to her Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album, followed up by Heaven and Earth, which similarly explored esoteric conceptions and abstruse riffs. Now firmly established in the jazz firmament, their heterodox sound appeals far beyond the standard audience; it owes an enormous debt to John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders but goes far beyond even their most Read more ...
Owen Richards
When Derry Girls premiered on Channel 4 in early 2018, there was little fanfare. But it’s been a whirlwind year for the four girls from Derry (and the wee English lad), capturing British hearts before conquering the US through Netflix. Their return in 2019 heralds a much bigger reaction, with faces plastered on front pages and buildings (including a traditional Derry mural). Can these comic upstarts meet the considerably raised expectations?Well, leave it to the ethereally oblivious Orla to quell any early reservations. Interrupting Erin in the tub as she wistfully imagines Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dear Clean Break, Thank you very much for your latest, called Inside Bitch, a show which is billed as "a playfully subversive take on the representation of women in prison". It's a great celebration of your 40th anniversary. I saw this at the Royal Court tonight and I will remember it because the cast were clearly having great fun, and so was the audience. And I could see why. Some bits were really funny — and I couldn't help myself: I laughed too — which is all a bit weird because the subject of prison, and the incarceration of women, is really no laughing matter. In fact, *spoiler alert*, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ray’s world has shrunk to a single room in a council flat. His life consists of drinking home-brew, smoking, gazing out of the window, listening to Radio 4 and sinking into an alcohol-induced stupour. There’s no need ever to leave his bedroom because his neighbour Sid does all the necessaries. A lone alcoholic asleep in a dingy room may not be the most gripping opening to a new British film Ray & Liz, but the scene is shot with such compelling attention to detail that a kind of squalid dignity is conferred on Ray’s solitary existence. The drama comes later when his estranged wife Liz Read more ...