Reviews
Owen Richards
British director Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete is a heartfelt and surprisingly stark affair. Based on the novel of the same name by Willy Vlautin, the film follows a young boy and his stolen horse across America. Despite its simple premise, Haigh and his lead Charlie Plummer (main picture) deliver a complex and moving piece of cinema.Charley is a quiet 15-year-old, malnourished and poorly supported by his father Ray (Travis Fimmel), who mostly drinks beer and brings home women. There’s an awkward but distant love between the two, both evidently still struggling from Charley’s mother walking out Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In bronze, marble, stone and plaster, as far as the eye can see, powerful figures and fragments – divine and human, mythological and real; athletes, soldiers and horses alongside otherworldly creatures like Centaurs – stride out. They pose, re-pose, twist, turn and captivate as that 19th century sculptor of genius, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), encountered and absorbed, with such sensual pleasure, the art of antiquity.This game-changing exhibition places a selection from the magnificent Greek marbles, taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin and now residing – not without controversy – in the Read more ...
David Nice
Insistence was the name of the LA Phil's first game in its short but ambitious three-day Barbican residency - insistence honed to a perfect sheen and focus, but wearing, for this listener at least, some way in to the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony played in the second half. The essence was a layered, ultimately blistering performance of Varèse's ever startling Amériques sculpted with the energetic rhythmic precision at which Gustavo Dudamel excels, and rich with sensuous perspectives not easy to achieve in this flattening, amplifying hall. That would have been enough to send us home bouncing and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Joe Penhall and the music biz? Well, they have history. When he was writing the book for Sunny Afternoon, his 2014 hit musical about the Kinks, he had a few run-ins with Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer. A couple of years ago The Stage newspaper quoted Penhall as saying that his initial “bromance” with Davies had “rotted into a cancerous feud”, and that the singer had wanted a writing credit for Penhall’s work. The pair have since patched up their differences, but the emotional fuel of this conflict powers Penhall’s latest play, whose production at the Old Vic gets a shot in the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Inside Tully – or maybe inside Charlize Theron’s massively pregnant belly – is a darker, more daring film trying to get out. There are startlingly original moments, but it’s as if writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, creators of Juno and Young Adult, chickened out in the end and plumped for whimsy and sentiment.Marlo (Theron) is swamped by pregnancy and motherhood. She and her lacklustre husband Drew (a mumbling Ron Livingston) have two kids aged eight and five already, and now they’re expecting a third. Possibly not a good plan. Unplanned, in fact. “I feel like a trash barge,” she Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"From today painting is dead" was the pessimistic outcry of Paul Delaroche on first seeing a photograph. Ever since its inception, photography has had a vexed but fruitful relationship with painting. Delaroche specialised in hyper-real historical scenes so he was right to be alarmed, and one could argue that photography's ability to record things in fine detail encouraged painters to seek new forms of expression, including abstraction. Photographers soon followed suit, though, and so the chase continued.Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art sets out to show how photography Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Its origins as a concept album cling stubbornly to Chess, the Tim Rice collaboration with the male members of ABBA first seen on the West End in 1986 and extensively retooled since then in an ongoing quest to hit the elusive jackpot. Following hot on the heels of a (separate) Washington DC revival earlier this year, Laurence Connor's projection-heavy production, presented in commercial collaboration with the ENO, reminds one of the soaring power of this famously lush score even as one wonders whether the story appended to it will ever fully land. In some ways, Connor's approach here Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If only there were more: that's a first response to Nothing Like a Dame, Roger Michell's affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of four of Britain's finest actresses, all now in their 80s. As the camera circles around Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins in conversation, it's impossible not to be swept up in a collective portrait of these remarkable careers alongside their shared awareness of the advancing years. Small wonder the one classic role they pause to debate at length is Cleopatra. Age really cannot wither this quartet's infinite variety. Due to be Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
When a “historically informed” performance leaves a lasting imprint on the memory, it does so like a good historical novel, by bringing to bear not only a wealth of period detail but the unarguable flavour of a time that is not our own. This was a particular strength of the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s recital at Kings Place on Sunday.It began with three excerpts from The Art of Fugue, often prized as some of the most “abstract” music ever written, whatever that might mean. The measured tread of the Chiaroscuro’s account, however, built in the mind’s ear and eye a mahogany chamber and an Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The good news about so-called black drama on British stages is that it has broken out of its gangland violence ghetto and now talks about a whole variety of other subjects. Like loss. Like death. Like mourning. So London-born actress Natasha Gordon’s warmhearted play, Nine Night, now making its first appearance at the National Theatre, is as much about family, music and mourning as it is about ethnicity or migration. Inspired by the ritual of Jamaican funerals, the play looks at grieving and tradition.Set in the London home of Gloria, who is dying of cancer, this rather traditional family Read more ...
David Nice
Reaching for philosophical terms seems appropriate enough for two deep thinkers among Russian pianists (strictly speaking, Kolesnikov is Siberian-born, London-based). In what Kant defined as the phenomenal world, the tangible circumstances, there were equal if not always predictable measures of innocence and experience in these Wigmore recitals two days apart. Lugansky's began, and Kolesnikov's officially ended, with Schumann reimagined; Debussy was at the core of both (or one of several cores). In the noumenal sphere, both pianists reach for the "thing in itself", Ding an sich, chose en soi Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forget write what you know: writing what you feel would seem to be the impetus driving Ella Hickson's often-startling The Writer, a broadside from the trenches that takes no prisoners, least of all the audience. Demanding and sometimes irritating, the play exerts a brute force across nearly two hours (no interval) thanks to a galvanic performance from Romola Garai and an impassioned production from Blanche McIntyre that powers through remarks like "you are not skewed toward a systemic awareness" (!). If comparable talk of "intersectionality and voicelessness" leaves you numb, The Read more ...