Reviews
Adam Sweeting
A bunch of young-ish people stuck in a rambling house in the middle of nowhere, a hatchet-faced senior citizen guarding a hoard of murky secrets, assorted missing persons, a derelict sanatorium, lots of creepy noises and no telephones… hang on, isn’t that exactly the same formula as in the first series of Black Lake? The sense of deja vu in this second season was further enhanced by the presence of Johan (Filip Berg), the arrogant young businessman who was planning to buy the haunted ski resort in series one.The reason Johan has managed to return from the dead is that this is a prequel, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Releases dedicated to previously unisssued live recordings can be tricky. The variables at play don’t necessarily ensure that what’s in the shops is worth investigating. The audio sources may be of sub-standard quality or capture an off night. Some live performances are by rote: touring acts can do the same set night after night and things get stale. Who wants to hear yet another version of a familiar composition or song? It goes on.Equally, there may be a chance that what’s heard for the first time (officially) might be an essential addition to a stellar back catalogue. Then, there are Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is amused when her gay secretary and minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) dresses as a woman while dancing with her gentlewomen in her private quarters. Straining credibility, Mary is even tolerant when, on her wedding night, Darnley takes Rizzio to bed instead of her. She responds, a day or two later, by thumping his chest so hard that he angrily Read more ...
David Nice
Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir: three names on quite a list I reeled off earlier this week when someone asked me why the compositions of Rebecca Saunders, in the news for winning the €250,000 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, make me lose the will to live, and whom I’d choose instead. Saunders gets a look-in at the very end of this Kings Place year of music by women, Venus Unwrapped, so I'll just have to try again. Meanwhile the first three, communicators all - as Saunders is not, for me - kicked off Bang on a Can's affably presented gallimaufry celebrating 27 years of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
M Night Shyamalan is the Orson Welles of twist-ending fantasy, forever condemned to reach back to his first two successes. The Sixth Sense still stands alone, though its haunted chill shivers through much recent horror. His surprise 2016 hit Split, though, not only boosted the director’s career, but also twisted back to Unbreakable, that most exhilaratingly thoughtful film about superheroes. In fully splicing Split and Unbreakable, Glass expands the Shyamalan-verse in perhaps satirically Marvel style, while confirming its creator’s own reduced powers.We rejoin Unbreakable’s David Dunn (Bruce Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The big news on this programme was Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande. This early score, completed in 1903, is a sprawling Expressionist tone poem, making explicit all the passions in Maeterlinck’s play that Debussy only implies. The story plays out through a handful of chromatically complex Leitmotifs, but such technical considerations are soon overwhelmed by the sheer urgency of the musical drama.The piece is a rarity in concert, unsurprisingly given the immense demands it makes on the orchestra, so this performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was particularly welcome. Conductor Ryan Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This well-crafted addition to the films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is subtler and less commercial than last year’s The Hate U Give but covers similar terrain. Writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green sets Monsters and Men in Brooklyn and structures his narrative into a triptych, following three young men’s different reactions to the same police killing. In the process he sets the audience questions about complicity and loyalty. Drawing on the death of Eric Garner, choked by police officers when they caught him selling loose cigarettes in 2014, Green’s approach is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The multi-costumed Lucy Worsley is television marmite, loved or loathed: her gesticulating enthusiasm can grate, as can her stream of bland platitudes. Typically the title is Worsley-twee, evoking fibs instead of lies and falsehoods; are we in the nursery, as smart Nanny Worsley seems to think?Ms Worsley’s thesis was that history is the knitting together of rival interpretations. But every assertion where the viewer might flinch was accompanied with startling facts, in a narration filled with enough surprises and new emphases to be worth your time. The underlying theme emerged at the climax, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As the January chill began to bite around the Barbican, Sir Mark Elder and the Britten Sinfonia summoned memories of spring and summer – but of sunny seasons overshadowed by the electric crackle of storms. On the face of it, they offered us a pleasing, even serene, pastoral spread to mitigate the chill outside. It began with Britten’s late folk-song suite and continued through early Mahler songs to conclude with Brahms’s bucolic Second: one of the cycle of Brahms symphonies that Elder launched last year with this tight-knit and fine-toned ensemble. Although Elder – whose unfussy authority Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast. On the road to his second consecutive Oscar nomination following his breakout performance last year in Call Me By Your Name, Timothée Chalamet confirms a degree of sensitivity rare in actors of any age, and Steve Carell finds numerous ways to furrow his brow even when the film as a whole leaves you checking your watch. Based, unusually, on a pair of memoirs by a father and son, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Nadia Fall is a good thing. Her appointment as the artistic director of this venue, with her first season having begun in September last year, has been widely seen as part of a new wave of cultural leaders who are expected to shake up the country's theatre. Already, her building has enjoyed a hipster-inspired cool facelift. And this visiting show, produced by Frantic Assembly and Theatre Royal Plymouth, takes up one of her favourite themes: youth. The play takes a broad view of war, men and home. But does it have anything new to say about the rather familiar theme of agonised masculinity?The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Wigmore Hall audiences really ought to know, silence can be golden. Especially at the close of Schubert’s Winterreise, as the uncanny drone-like fifths of the hurdy-gurdy in “Der Leiermann” fade away into – well, whatever state of mind the singer and pianist have together managed to communicate over the preceding 24 songs. So much remains ambiguous – and open to plausible re-interpretation – in this cycle that the traditional pause for reflection as it ends makes good sense. Last night, however, the star (even, perhaps, cult) status of the German Lieder virtuoso Christian Gerhaher Read more ...