Reviews
Jasper Rees
In recent months Woody Allen has been publicly disavowed by a conga line of major film stars. The latest who seems to have expressed regret for working with him – if not by name – is Kate Winslet. She stars in his latest film, and may also feel slight regret for artistic reasons. Set in Coney Island in the 1950s, Wonder Wheel has the jaded flavour you get off an old-timer playing oldies on a thinner, reedier instrument.Its nearest stablemate in Allen’s filmography is Blue Jasmine. That also attracted an actress of stature in Cate Blanchett. More pertinently, it channelled the spirit of a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Survival is hard work. If you’re not desperately trying to hunt and forage food you’re dying of thirst or trying to scavenge materials to make the most basic weapons and tools. Who needs Netflix and Deliveroo when you can roast a gerbil and wash it down with a rusty bucket of dirty water?Then there’s a base that needs building, people to take care of, stuff to repair and missions to undertake. It’s a long day. Chuck in a plague of zombie-like Wanderers and you’ve got Metal Gear Survive – a bit like Bear Grylls meets The Walking Dead. It’s a slog of spectacle but at least you don’t have to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fair is foul and foul is drab, gory and tricksy in Rufus Norris’s first stab at Shakespeare direction at the National Theatre, Macbeth. It embodies the play's most clichéd quotation (the one about sound, fury, and nada), though whether that's intended as a joke is hard to work out. Lovely Rory Kinnear plays Macbeth like a third Mitchell brother from EastEnders, bullheaded and thick-necked, all short jabbing breaths, strapped into his jerkin with parcel tape. His castle is a pile of old backpacks and broken chairs in a grotty shed reigned over by a starved-looking Lady M.Eyes and ears are Read more ...
David Nice
A political prisoner is brutally initiated into the life of a state penitentiary, and leaves it little over 90 minutes later. Four inmates reveal their brutal past histories with elliptical strangeness - each would need an episode of something like Orange is the New Black - and two plays staged during a holiday for the convicts take up about a quarter of the action. I won't say that director Krzysztof Warlikowski makes complete sense of Janáček's maverick take on Dostoyevsky's semi-fictionalised prison memoir - occasionally he even rather overloads it - but everything on stage has a feverish Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.Even its running time is designed to provoke. At a mere 85 minutes, it rejects the creeping bloat which has become endemic in Hollywood, and the shock of its abrupt ending leaves you feeling as if you’ve just staggered out of some terrible accident, and you’re trying to put Read more ...
Marianka Swain
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a case for director Frecknall as a luminous rising talent in British theatre.During a long, hot summer in early 20th century, small-town Mississippi, minister’s daughter Alma (Patsy Ferran, pictured below) – whose name means “soul” in Spanish – yearns hopelessly for the boy next door: dissolute doctor’s son John (Matthew Needham), who believes Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There are good musical reasons why it might never have occurred to you to wonder how Lady Gaga would sound if adapted by Duke Ellington; Radiohead by Sidney Bechet; or Bruce Springsteen by Frank Sinatra. Even if you still think those reasons are aesthetically valid, you need wonder no more, because chances are that the extraordinary YouTube phenomenon that is Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, touring UK now, will have made that adaptation, and several million people will have liked it.Sometimes the transformations are uncanny. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” has a completely different vibe even Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is it possible to get too much of American politics? With Donald Trump’s daily tweets invading our digital space, a new Kevin-Spacey-free House of Cards on the, well, cards, and new films set in Watergate times, it might be that few will have any appetite for this revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 play set during a Democratic Party convention, and now making its West End debut. But to dismiss it completely would be a pity because, for all the creaks of its plotting, this is quite a watchable account of political in-fighting. After all, any show that has Maureen Lipman and Martin Shaw in the cast Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Launched into an already crowded choral scene in 2016, the professional choir Sonoro has marked its second birthday with the release of a debut CD. Last night was the launch concert, featuring items selected from the disc. On the evidence of both CD and concert Sonoro is a very welcome new addition to the roster of excellent London choirs, with its own distinct sound and ethos.This was the second time I have heard Sonoro, but their relaxed and good-natured Christmas concert was in a different world from the serious-minded religiosity of last night. In the excellent acoustic of St Botolph- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a revelatory interview for the Royal Court’s playwright’s podcast series, David Hare admits to a thin skin. In his adversarial worldview, to take issue with him is – his word – to denounce him. He’s quite a denouncer himself, of course. In Collateral (BBC Two), the denunciations were directed at something rotten in the state of, in no particular order, the Church of England, the Labour Party, the British Army, the Fourth Estate, the security services, the body politic, the establishment, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Somewhere in there there was also a police procedural. This has been a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Mortality inflects commemoration. So it is with portraiture: the likeness – particularly those which celebrate lives of status and accomplishment – will always be limned with death.The National Gallery’s tiny exhibition of Murillo’s two known self-portraits (Self-portrait, c. 1650-55 pictured below, and Self-portrait, c. 1670, main picture) – brought together for the first time since they were separated from the private collection of his son, Gaspar – is not only a tight and elegant reflection on Murillo’s art as he aged, but also a meditation on the purpose of Read more ...