Reviews
joe.muggs
Oh BBC Four, we do love you, but this was an uncomfortable proposition from the start. We watch your pop music documentaries, because – let's face it – nobody else is making any, but so often they are pretty thin gruel. There are gems, of course, generally the ones focusing on an individual artist or label, or super-specific genre or time period. But the broad-sweep ones are more often than not a hodge-podge, seemingly governed in their narrative by what library footage was available, but also by a cripplingly old, white, rock establishment view of history.Even when soul and reggae are the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Rameau: Suite de Hippolyte et Aricie Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Harding (Harmonia Mundi)This is my new favourite Symphonie Fantastique on modern instruments, and it should be yours too. Daniel Harding doesn’t smooth over the music’s rougher edges. Bass trombone pedals blast out with refreshing inhibition, and the ball scene’s four harps are especially telling. Everything sounds superb (sample the church bell in the last movement), and Harding knits everything together with an impressive sureness of intent. A glance at the track timings shows that Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's one of those true stories you couldn't make up: in 1920s Kentucky, Floyd Collins, visionary cave explorer, happens across the spectacular sand cave of his dreams only to become trapped on the way back to the surface. The media attention he might have hoped would turn his discovery into a commercial proposition for him and his impoverished family is instead – irony of ironies – focused on his entrapment.Will he or won't he make it back into the light? While the carnival arrives above ground, Floyd's dark night of the soul is played out below. Billy Wilder turned it into a rather Read more ...
Helen Wallace
The Symphony of Psalms, which ended the Philharmonia’s Stravinsky series last night, is an indelible masterpiece, silencing the tired but persistent accusation that Stravinsky’s music is clever but cold. Abstract it may be, but suffused with an exile’s deep longing, spritual hope rising in harmonies of heart-stopping consolation until that final, revelatory C major chord. This performance (with three Swedish choirs) was of focused beauty and searing sincerity; I have never heard better. Its radical scoring sounded afresh, while spine-tingling intonation and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cliffhanger ending of series two – will serial killer Paul Spector survive his gunshot wounds? – has been quietly defused, since Spector (Jamie Dornan) now has series three stretching out ahead of him. What was less expected was that this opener would look like a homage to Sky One's appallingly graphic surgical drama, Critical.After a quick recap of the shooting incident which left our eminence noire teetering on the brink of oblivion and experiencing near-death visions of tunnels and car crashes, most of the action focused on the trauma team dealing with his injuries.There was a nifty Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m so tired of hearing that McQueen is the best show we’ve ever done. It’s become a bit of an albatross,” complains Andrew Bolton, curator of the New York Metropolitan museum’s costume institute (he’s from Blackburn, Lancashire, and loved the New Romantics as a teenager). Bolton’s huge hit, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, took fashion as art to a new level in 2011. “It would be nice if China was able to knock it off its pedestal.”Andrew Rossi’s behind-the-scenes documentary (his last one, Page One, examined the New York Times) charts the complex process of getting the Met's 2015 show Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are two ways of reacting to an opera company like WNO staging a musical like Kiss Me, Kate. You can ask yourself whether this is work that an opera house should concern itself with at all. Or you can take Confucius’s advice, and just lie back and enjoy it. Of course you could say the same if WNO put on an air display or a cricket tournament. But at least Cole Porter is sung drama of a kind, which is one definition of opera, and it’s also on the whole enjoyable, though that naturally depends on the how as much as the what.WNO’s Kiss Me, Kate is a revival of a co-production originally Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We haven’t been here before. Tehran in 1980, bombed by its Iraqi invaders and jumpy with revolutionary fervour, is a place preoccupied with ordinary fear. Showing the normal if pressurised life he remembers from childhood in this demonised country is debutant writer-director Babak Anvari’s first coup. Letting this slide slowly into Persian myth and cinematic dread opens a new door in horror. The more arch A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night introduced the genre to the Iranian diaspora. Under the Shadow’s politicised, feminist tale turns the Tehran flat it barely leaves into a terror landmark. Read more ...
Alison Cole
It was inevitable that David Shrigley's breezy new sculpture for Trafalgar Square – part of the popular Fourth Plinth Programme – would be appropriated for political purposes. As the giant seven-metre-high thumbs-up Really Good was unveiled by Mayor Sadiq Khan it was greeted with a sudden downpour, but exuded a defiant post-Brexit cheery optimism. "London is open to the world," declared Khan to the sodden onlookers, welcoming immigrants, EU citizens, people of all ages and backgrounds.Shrigley is equally aware that Really Good could be co-opted by a grinning Nigel Farage – but he is a fan of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In a world of terrifyingly serious news, the opening of the Royal Ballet season with Frederick Ashton's pastoral frolic La Fille mal gardée might seem like a wanton disregard for reality, like a brass band playing "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside" as the Titanic goes down. But that is to misunderstand the reason Fille is so beloved is that it has at its heart a perfectly serious and realistic topic: young love.The ballet's roots are in comédie sérieuse - meaning "true to life" - and it is true to life, in a rose-tinged, shiny photo album sort of way. Most young agricultural swains do Read more ...
Florence Hallett
While the Turner Prize shortlist can reasonably be expected to provide some sense of British art now, the extent to which British art can or should attempt to reflect a view of British life is surely a moot point. Art that is socially or politically engaged can all too easily tend towards the artless, its functionality placing it uncomfortably close to pamphleteering, with the certainties of propaganda drowning out the possibilities of art. Curious then, that the best of this year's four finalists are loosely united by an unmistakeable sense of life now, an engagement with the status quo that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Tim Burton’s fans always want him to hit the sweet spot again, to give them another Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is not quite there, but it’s not for lack of trying. The weakness lies in Jane Goldman’s script, adapted from the eponymous YA novel. There is way too much exposition – characters explain the plot to each other, not just at the outset, but throughout the movie. Leaden dialogue sucks the joy out of some outstanding fantasy sequences and an excellent cast – including Samuel L Jackson as chief baddie Mr Barron, hamming it up in Read more ...