Reviews
Jasper Rees
The Shepherd – original title El pastor – is a Spanish film which carried all before it at the Raindance Festival. It’s a very Raindance kind of movie. Shot on a low budget with a small cast, a single handheld camera shaking like a leaf, it sticks up for the little guy against a big bad corporate world. And it’s very much the vision of one sensibility: Jonathan Cenzual Burley wrote, shot, directed and produced it. It’s his third film - not bad for someone who only six years ago was a junior research on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.The shepherd of the title is Anselmo (Miguel Martín), a solitary Read more ...
David Nice
When are the big international opera houses going to wake up to the great British talent that is Elizabeth Llewellyn? With her opulent soprano – shaded middle register, full bloom at the top, cutting chest voice – she was born to sing Verdi and Puccini, and her stage presence is undeniable from the moment she steps out. English National Opera threw her a few roles – Micaëla, Mimì, Mozart's Countess – but then seemed to pass over her in favour of American sopranos. Now Opera Holland Park has showcased her brilliance in an opera made for a London summer night – Puccini' Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is a master of family drama, carrying on the traditions of his illustrious predecessors Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. But these are not films of raised voices or open conflict, rather highly nuanced studies of the emotional dynamics between parents and children – differences across the generations – or partners whose relationships have cooled. There’s always a gently melancholic tinge, and Kore-eda has a particular gift for working with his child actors, movingly presenting their point of view on the issues that divide the adults who surround them.In Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Oh dear, writing this review is a bit like being mean to a small cuddly animal. Dough has such very good intentions – characters separated by race, religion and age can find common ground in a bakery – it’s a shame that it doesn’t rise into a tasty loaf but instead remains just a bit wholemeal and stolid. The excellent Jonathan Pryce plays Nat Dayan, an orthodox Jewish widower whose sole reason to get up every morning at four is to work in his beloved shop. He inherited it from his father and still bakes traditional bagels, pastries and challah bread. But the neighbourhood’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After dipping a toe in the new-look DC Comics universe to brighten the otherwise leaden Batman v Superman, now Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman gets a chance to shine in her own Hollywood movie. Gadot makes a pretty fine job of it too, bringing a bit of soul and empathy to the proceedings, but sometimes it’s more despite than because of the production surrounding her.Even in this rationality-defying context, WW’s origin story is one of the more implausible. She was raised by the Amazon women on the island of Themyscira by her mother, Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen, pictured below), with plenty of help in Read more ...
David Benedict
On 8 April 1952, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were chatting to Charlie Chaplin at a party when he started raving about a picture he’d seen the previous night at Sam Goldwyn’s house. It was called Singin’ in the Rain – had they heard of it? “Heard of it? We wrote it!” But then, this dynamic duo had form: five years earlier they wrote On the Town. But if you’ve only ever seen that prototype sailor-on-shore-leave movie, you’ll have missed the thing from their original stage version that catapulted Comden & Green to showbiz fame: the dynamite score they wrote with their Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
How to change the way we hear Chopin and Beethoven: play Bach first. Richard Goode opened his Royal Festival Hall recital with the Partita No.6 in E minor, perhaps the most enigmatic and challenging of its siblings. Its intricate contrapuntal lines and harsh, crunching harmonies cast a long shaft of light over the rest of the programme. Without Bach, it seemed to suggest, neither of the other two composers would have written as they did.With Goode, a recital is all about the music (that might sound like stating the obvious, but one can’t guarantee it with every pianist these days). The Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bard of Metroland and scourge of Slough, John Betjeman is, alongside Philip Larkin on parenthood, still one of the 20th century’s most-quoted poets. Hugh Whitemore’s play, part highlights reading and part biographical drama, offers a hugely charming account of a poet who, for many readers, epitomises a nostalgic but conflicted view of England. While the bonhomous atmosphere, similar to a Tony Benn or Alan Bennett diary reading, is part of the appeal, Whitemore focuses too much on the whimsy, and too little on the lust and vanity, creating an ever-so-slightly sanitised portrait.As Betjeman, Read more ...
David Nice
Hitting the essence of a Fellini masterpiece in a different medium is no easy task. Try and reproduce his elusive brand of poetic melancholy and you'll fail; best to transfer the characters to a different medium, as the musical Sweet Charity did in moving the action of Le notte di Cabiria from Rome and environs to New York. The film version even managed to find in Shirley MacLaine an equivalent to the unpredictable charm of Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, a great actor. But no one can really rival Masina’s most compelling role, the waif Gelsomina sold to a travelling strong man in La Strada Read more ...
Alison Cole
This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later this year. The exhibition sits slightly tangentially within a celebratory year marking 100 years of Dutch design, from the founding in 1917 of De Stijl – an artist magazine and school of thought/movement founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, and whose most famous member is Piet Mondrian – to the present day.In this context, the German-French Arp Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is Jimmy McGovern, so it’s no surprise to find ourselves up north and feeling grim. The prolific screenwriter’s latest drama series is located in what is described only as “a northern city” (though apparently it’s 60 miles from Sheffield, which would take you to McGovern’s home town of Liverpool as the crow flies).Here, wherever it is, kindly Father Michael Kerrigan (a sotto voce Sean Bean) does his best to minister to his depressed and impoverished flock, who are struggling to make ends meet both physically and spiritually. In particular, we zero in on Christina Fitzsimmons (Anna Friel Read more ...