Reviews
Jasper Rees
In the end, what makes a good drama series? It’s probably that you want more of it. This is the end of Cold Feet until a next time which has already been promised, and more is certainly what’s wanted. No one was quite sure if a reincarnation of Cold Feet was a good idea eight episodes ago. Back when the characters were in their 30s the show slowly turned into a bit of a weight round its own neck. Fay Ripley opted out of one season. Helen Baxendale was written out of another. The show began looking under rocks for characters to replace the ones who weren’t there. Eventually it ran out of steam Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Television is not a medium we much associate with any sense of the "sacred". It grapples with "momentous" frequently enough, in snatches of news tragically reported; it rings in, and out, the history that defines our lives. We may debate, equally, whether the small screen is replacing the big one as the bringer of what was once considered cinema art. But for that far most elusive thing, the miraculously elevated experience shared across a nation, and somehow revalidated by that breadth of audience – rarely, so rarely.But I cannot think of any better term than sacred to describe the 60 Read more ...
Liz Thomson
To settle down on a darkening evening with a new volume of Alan Bennett is to be in the company of an old friend. Someone you don’t see as often as you’d like but with whom you immediately pick up where you left off. Midnight will come and go and you’ll still be chatting… or reading.Keeping On Keeping On is the latest volume of diaries and writings from the man who first impinged on public consciousness more than half a century ago, when he stepped out with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe. Having grown out of the Oxford Revue, it was a success in Edinburgh Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the reformed Undertones, with Paul McLoone replacing original singer Feargal Sharkey, have been a popular live draw since 1999, John Peel’s anointing of “Teenage Kicks” from their debut EP as his favourite recording suggests this is what they were about: a single, timeless song.Of course, it was not. The singles or lead EP tracks which followed – “Get Over You”, “Jimmy Jimmy”, “Here Comes Summer” and “You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It)” – were as wonderful. So were their first two albums. The recent publication of the engaging Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone, bassist Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Loudon Wainwright III, a going concern as a singer-songwriter since the start of the Seventies, has long since been occluded by the commercial success of his brood, Martha and Rufus. Their old man is still enough of a draw to pack out the Palladium with just a guitar, a banjo and a back catalogue of cranky songs only he could have composed.For subject matter Wainwright has tended to commute, he cheerfully conceded, along a well-trodden path between “shitty relationships” and “death and decay”. There was a bit of both here – a compulsory outing for “Unhappy Anniversary” and his medical comedy Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leonardo Leo: Sacred Works Ensemble &cetera/Ulrike Hofbauer (soprano and direction) (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)Leonardo Leo lived and worked in Naples in the early 18th century, effectively running the city’s musical life alongside Francesco Durante after the death of Alessandro Scarlatti in 1725. He didn’t enjoy a long and successful career, dying relatively young after a botched skin operation. His music, at least on the basis of this anthology, deserves to be much better known. Much of why it sounds so attractive here is down to the quality of these performances. Soprano Ulrike Hofbauer Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Most of the crime Ken Loach investigates with compassion and humour happens off-screen right at the start. As the opening credits roll, a woman’s voice with sing-song affability perhaps appropriate to a child, if not for its bureaucratic, box-tick chill, asks Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) a sequence of questions wholly irrelevant to his problem. He can lift his arms, he can walk on his legs. So never mind the heart attack which almost made him tumble off a ladder at his work as a carpenter. The outsourced US firm employed by the Department of Work and Pensions has more opaque, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some have responded to the very notion of a musical about cancer as if the idea itself were breaking some unwritten code of what is permissible to put on stage – which seems a bit rich given that the same genre has accommodated pieces about AIDS (Falsettos, now being revived on Broadway), cannibalism (Sweeney Todd) and even singing-dancing pussycats (um, Cats).At the same time, the National Theatre has among the various strings to its capacious bow an interest in experimenting with musical form: one thinks of London Road, a defining production for the theatre's current artistic director Read more ...
David Nice
Even that most unpredictable of fantasists Nikolay Gogol might have been surprised to find his Nose, wandering far from the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, sung by a high tenor in an unlikely operatic adaptation of his wackiest story. Give the singing role, as Barrie Kosky does, to another character, and show the giant-sized Nose – here a boy dancer – without any token apparel of his supposed high rank before which lowly official Kovalov absurdly grovels, and you miss the point of a vintage scene in Shostakovich's The Nose. Fortunately Kosky has plenty of ingenious riffs of his own, not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser, of Twilight fame) and her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). With Mr Zander having been killed by a drunk driver, Alice and the girls are eking out a living with their fake spiritualist act, conning bereaved punters with bogus spirit visitations, sputtering candles and wobbling furniture. It's an Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Mafia III starts strong, really strong. You find yourself in the blood-stained boots of Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam veteran, returning to his Deep South homestead after a last tour of duty. It’s 1968, racism is rife and New Bordeaux, a faux New Orleans, isn’t a pleasant place for an African American to reside. Clay lives in the poor part of town; his old crew have got themselves mixed up with mob heavyweight Sal Marcano, who double crosses the gang, leaving the soldier's homecoming drenched in the blood of his fallen friends, a reminder of what he left behind in 'Nam.The narrative isn’t Read more ...
Alison Cole
This is an inspired and beautifully curated exhibition. It is subtitled The Essence of Movement, but it could equally be called The Essence of Art. What marks it out is not only the sensitively selected and tightly focused content, but also its close exploration of Rodin’s artistic process. It also benefits greatly from the fact that the exhibits – drawn largely from the last 20 years of Rodin’s life – reflect a period where the then famous sculptor could afford to work for the sheer pleasure of it, exploring and experimenting with exciting and potentially shocking new ideas.The exhibition Read more ...