Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Learning that your band’s demos are being issued as an album must be infuriating. Add to that the discovery that the deal to release the LP was made without your knowledge. Then, there was the further surprise that the record was to be released by Parlophone, The Beatles’ label. The complications were compounded by subsequently realising the release wasn’t limited to the UK – inexplicably, the record was also issued in VenezuelaThis is what happened to the unwitting High Wycombe quartet Rainbow Ffolly, whose sole album Sallies Fforth was issued in May 1968. Released in mono and stereo Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is it with all these new films based on biographies? Vice, Green Book, The Mule, Stan & Ollie, Colette… and that’s before we even get to the royal romps queening up our screens. At least Can You Ever Forgive Me? brings a lifestory to the cinema which isn’t too familiar to audiences outside literary America. It’s based on the autobiography of a professional biographer, Lee Israel, who made her living writing about people like Katherine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead before coming a cropper on an unauthorised account of Estée Lauder and ending up broke and desperate. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In the fourth performance of their UK tour, with Vassily Sinaisky replacing an indisposed Yuri Temirkanov, the St Petersburg Philharmonic gave a warm and rousing performance at Symphony Hall, Birmingham. Prokofiev’s First Symphony – written in "classical" style as a homage to Haydn – saw the orchestra start off with a deep and meaty tone, which gave a welcome depth to some of Prokofiev’s music, though it proved a bit bulky for many of the symphony’s light touches.The orchestra’s interpretation of the work was certainly more rooted in the romantic era than the classical. Sinaisky’s conducting Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. The addition of a Porsche-driving third millennial with a swanky apartment in Seoul’s Gangnam District not only ramps up the tension between the two instantaneously but creates one of the most infernal romantic triangles in modern Asian cinema. Entering its third act, the movie morphs into a noir-steeped Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ghosts of previous B-movies flit through this low-budget lesbian vampire flick. Part Hammer horror, J-horror, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, it is ultimately about a young woman in a very large house full of unpleasant people out for her blood. Director/co-writer Iain Ross-McNamee’s suggestion of a Brexit metaphor may not be wholly far-fetched, as we busily rip ourselves apart in a frenzy of auto-cannibalism. At least the cast here look good doing it.The titular crucible is used in a black-and-white, English Civil War-set prologue to keep a female vampire’s undead flesh alive, till Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Last spring, Imagining Ireland took a fresh, shamrock-free look at contemporary Ireland’s cultural scene, with spoken word and alt-folk mixing with indie rock and jazz, classical, gospel and rap, with the line-up led by Bell X1’s Paul Noonan and Lisa Hannigan.One year on, and Imagining Ireland returns, but with a new brief – to examine the Irish life in England – and a new line-up. And for contemporary Irish folk fans, this line-up will be your ticket to heaven – led by The Gloaming’s genius fiddler Martin Hayes and sean nos singer Iarla O'Lionaird, alongside two of the best younger singers Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Off Broadway production of Cost of Living two years ago brought Martyna Majok the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the height of acclaim of which most new writers – Majok, with four plays behind her, has yet to turn 35 – can only dream. High expectations then for Edward Hall’s production, the work’s trans-Atlantic premiere, which demands, and deserves engagement in a variety of ways, some very good indeed.As the title suggests, it shines a light on sections of American society that are increasingly challenged by economic circumstances, here the post-industrial subsistence suburbs of New Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With five nominations, Green Book is cruising optimistically towards Oscar night, but it’s not all plain sailing for director Peter Farrelly’s mixed-race fairy tale about a posh black musician and his thuggish Italian minder. The film is being called out in some quarters for its glib and simplistic attitude to racism, while relatives of the real-life black protagonist Dr Donald Shirley have contested the factual accuracy of the script.Which is a shame, because if you were able to ignore the bubbling undercurrent of unease and take it as a slice of mainstream movie-going, Green Book is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When British sitcoms head west anything can happen. For every success – The Office had a happy second life with Steve Carell – there are half a dozen others that got lost in translation, including Coupling, Getting On, Gavin and Stacey, The It Crowd and The Vicar of Dibley. The UK version of Camping was broadcast for Sky Atlantic in 2016 and, while not as savage as her very darkest work, clearly bore the kitemark of Julie Davis, who doesn’t have the highest opinion of the middle classes. Lena Dunham, looking for something to do after Girls, has fallen on it and reincarnated it with regular co Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Sitting somewhere between Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Final Destination, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a satirical supernatural thriller that goes for the jugular of the LA art scene.We open at the Art Basel Miami Beach, where art snobs with fat wallets glide from room to room with glazed eyes as they gaze at the objet d'art. There's a talking robot exhibit Hobo Man, and a giant polished silver orb pocked with holes you can stick your arm into - what it does it mean? No one cares much, it’s about how much it’s worth. It’s all incredibly pointed and fun, with Gilroy showing up the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The heart of the V&A’s sumptuous Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is a room dedicated to the workmanship of the fashion house’s ateliers. A mirrored ceiling reflects dazzling strip-lit cases which hold the ghosts of ballgowns, slips and jackets — adjusted prototypes, haute couture maquettes — made in white toile by the seamstresses of Dior’s Paris studios before they begin work on the final garment. The pieces tower overhead, stacked in an apparently infinite iteration of shoulders, waists and necklines, cuffs. Over here’s a grouping with jester fastenings, over there, jerkin Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Is there a connection between revolution and theatre? The answer has to be yes – a visceral one. The supremacy of symbols, the collective strength of a crowd, a sense that some kind of pressure valve is being released to challenge the dominant social narrative. The Ancient Greeks understood this – it was from such impulses that theatre had its birth. So how does that work amid the populist turbulence of the twenty-first century?Counting Sheep explodes on London’s theatre fringe scene with rave reviews from Edinburgh about its recreation of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. For a Brexit-broken Read more ...