Reviews
Jasper Rees
How many more throats must be slit in 19th-century London before the river of blood starts to clot? The Limehouse Golem follows the gory footprints of Sweeney Todd and various riffs on the Ripper legend. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, this belated adaptation sensibly ditches the reference to a star of the music hall whose name recognition value isn’t what it was in the late Victorian East End.Uncovering the identity of the eponymous golem is the hospital pass handed by his superior to Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy). The so-called golem, a killer so Read more ...
David Nice
If individual greatness is to be found in the way an artist begins and ends a phrase, or finds magical transitions both within and between pieces, then Pavel Kolesnikov is already up there with the top pianists. Listeners tuning in midway through the peaks of his lunchtime Prom – the great Chopin Fantaisie or the Fourth Scherzo – might have thought they were listening to an old master, while what we saw was a modest 28-year-old who looks much younger, but who moves with total assurance and absence of flash. His performance of Tchaikovsky's massive Second Piano Concerto with the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Hearing that a music video director has just made their first feature film generally strikes fear into my heart. But in this instance, Geremy Jasper has done a pretty good job, directing a warm and quirky drama about a young woman from a working-class, chaotic family who dreams of being a famous rapper.Patti Cake$ is an archetypal indie film, the kind that are acclaimed every year at the Sundance Film Festival by critics sated on Hollywood formula. It won a hefty distribution deal there from Fox mainly because it ticks all the right boxes – it's a character-driven tale told with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill wrote Late Company when he was only 23. It would be an impressive achievement at any age, but it seems all the more remarkable that so stark a dissection of the consequences of a tragedy should have come from so young a writer. Written in 2013, it was his fifth play.Tannahill has said that its inspiration came from a real-life incident in his hometown, Ottawa, and that he had originally meant to write it more for himself, and perhaps a group of friends – as a kind of internal reckoning. But he has gone far beyond that: the skill and tightness of the Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
We’ve been here before, May last year to be exact. The lead characters are different but the locations look much the same. We’re still swinging on ropes, jumping into duck-and-cover gunplay, searching for lost treasures and solving rudimentary puzzles. But there’s no resentment for this premature trip down memory lane. This is, after all, an Uncharted game, a bulletproof, platinum-plated franchise that, just like a Strictly finalist, tries its hardest not to put a foot wrong.This cut-price spin-off – at £25 it’s almost half the price of Uncharted 4 – represents the first stand-alone Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s a tricky thing to get right, musical comedy. For every Victoria Wood, Tim Minchin or Bill Bailey, there are others – plenty of them at the Edinburgh Fringe, in fact – who find it more of a challenge to meld together the two forms so that they complement each other rather than compete.Comedian and composer Vikki Stone – trained at London’s Royal Academy, and a respected purveyor of comedy songs (as well as presenter of the BBC Proms podcasts) – is nothing if not ambitious in her Concerto for Comedian and Orchestra, which was given a one-off Fringe performance with the crack young Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a new ‘tec in town. Cormoran Strike may look like one of life’s losers – he’s on the edge of bankruptcy, sleeps in the office, and what passes for a personal life is a right mess – but in Tom Burke’s portrayal I suspect he’s going to be winning audiences in a big way. He’s the creation, of course, of JK Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith – the author’s chosen anonymity lasted barely three months – and her debut in crime writing is now a satisfyingly stylish BBC adaptation. Following on directly from these three episodes of The Cuckoo’s Calling come two based on its sequel, The Read more ...
David Nice
There we had it, in one extraordinary Proms day: the brave new world of contemporary classical music for all in a repurposed Peckham car park followed by the consolidation of the old order in all-Czech programming of remarkable originality and daring in the evening. You can't ask much more of an art-form thato many are claming dead in the water or not worth wide media coverage than those two sides of the same coin.Jakub Hrůša’s variations on a Hussite chorale with substantial chorus-based interludes, managing to squeeze in the five leading Czech composers, was always going to be a Proms Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s a road movie, a rites-of-passage drama, a romantic comedy (even a teen sex romp at times), by turns whimsical, brooding and downright dark. Moon Dogs seems pulled in so many directions at once that it’s a wonder the film holds together at all. But hold together it does, and it does far more than that. There’s plenty that’s downright preposterous (more on which later), but it’s a joy of a movie – honest, funny and genuinely touching.This is the feature debut from Welsh director Philip John, who cut his teeth on TV hits including Outlander and Downton Abbey. And it’s an all-Celtic co- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since the late 1980s, all of them featuring a lead female protagonist. She herself worked as a journalist and a crime reporter, and the atmosphere is grittily realistic.Insidious Intent is the tenth volume in the only McDermid series to feature a partnership – one both emotional, albeit reticent and repressed at times, and professional. Once again, as in all these novels, the title is a phrase from TS Eliot, here “The Love Song of J Albert Prufrock”: Streets that follow like a tedious Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
TV Tube Heart, the debut album from The Radiators From Space, was issued on 21 October 1977, a week before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. Each was a punk rock album and one, inevitably, has been subjected to greater historical analysis and many more reissues than the other. Of course, Johnny Rotten and co’s first and only long-player was significant but the other band’s album was important too. The Radiators From Space were the Republic of Ireland’s first punk band –The Boomtown Rats, if they were punk at all, were relative Johnny-come-latelies – and TV Tube Heart remains a Read more ...
David Nice
Last night was one of those rare occasions when I'd rather have heard Respighi's gaudy-brilliant Roman Festivals than Brahms's Violin Concerto. It wasn't just that concerts like Charles Dutoit's 2014 Prom had shown us that the Italian's Roman trilogy can actually work as a sequence when Riccardo Chailly was offering us only two of the three. Leonidas Kavakos simply didn't have the consistency to thread the lyrical with the virtuosic aspects and say something new about the Brahms staple, and he was surprisingly subdued at times. But then so was the orchestra in the tone-poems, beautiful of Read more ...