Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a serious film about nuclear war based on the 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom, he decided to turn it into a comedy with the help of porn-obsessed satirist Terry Southern.The distinctive result – as remarkable for its futuristic War Room design as its weapons-grade humour – brazenly evoked the madness of a world on the brink. It’s not hard to see why – when human self-destructivity is breaking records on the Doomsday Clock – Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci thought this Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey, but only Jonathan Coe has channelled that annoyance into literary form.A satire on contemporary Britain, an analysis of the political tectonics of the last 40 years, a thoughtful meditation on why writers write – The Proof of My Innocence is all these things, but its starting point is a howl of rage about the fact we can’t just enjoy a quiet train journey any more.Coe operates partly through Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made a run of screwball comedies, starting with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), and ending with All About My Mother (1999), that were full of life, language and the aberrant behaviour of strong female characters.In his new movie, The Room Next Door, his first full-length feature in English – adapted from the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez – the two main characters are once again a pair of indomitable women facing up to a crisis, but somehow both Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong’s third Bridgewater Hall concert with the Hallé in his inaugural season as principal conductor consisted of just one work: Bruckner’s Symphony no. 9 – but not in the incomplete three-movement version that until quite recently has been the norm in Manchester (and elsewhere).The story that only three of four planned movements were completed, with mere sketches for the last one being found at the composer’s death, was widely accepted, and when Cristian Mandeal performed and recorded it with the Hallé in 2007, and Ryan Wigglesworth played it with them in 2017, that was the version we Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kiri Pritchard-McLean has spoken on stage before about her interest in helping young people – including in her 2017 show, Appropriate Adult, in which she talked about being a mentor to a vulnerable youngster. In Peacock, her latest touring show which I saw as part of the inaugural Brighton Dome Comedy Festival, she talks about how she and her partner, Dan, came to be foster carers.There are, the comic informs us, more than 100,000 children in the care system in the UK. It's a subject that in less assured hands could be dull, preachy or an exercise in virtue-signalling – she Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Don’t take a piss in the house of a woman you have made a widow.” The mixture of earthy comedy and tragic pain in this piece of parental advice is typical of the tone of Richard Bean’s Reykjavik, his new work play which explores the lives of the Hull trawlermen of the mid-1970s.As its title suggests, the story revisits the long-lost world of fishing in Arctic waters, and an industry which Bean also explored in his 2003 play, Under the Whaleback, which premiered at the Royal Court. Now a regular at the Hampstead Theatre, his new work has the distinct feeling of a throwback not only to his own Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The name is so familiar it inhibits analysis. Gerry and the Pacemakers – Gerry Marsden and his band, a group with a designation pronouncing they made the pace, were with the trends. For a while, the case can be made that this is how it was. After The Beatles smashed into the charts, Gerry and the Pacemakers occupied the rung below them as the UK’s second-most commercially successful new band.Famously, and noted so often it’s a cliché, they were the first British group to score three number ones with their first three singles: "How do You do it?" "I Like it" and "You’ll Never Walk Alone." All Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Ellwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects are out on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. His debut documentary’s protagonist Warren Ellis is a contrastingly loving renegade, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who became Nick Cave’s wild-maned right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist, and journeys here to the Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle.Ellis Park divides halfway between Ellis’s reluctant return to Ballarat and his subsequent sanctuary visit. Skittish time Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
What’s it like to be in the middle of an orchestra, hugger-mugger with the violas, looking directly over the flautist’s shoulder? Last night’s immersive concert by Sinfonia Smith Square gave the us the chance to find out, the players spread around Smith Square Hall on podiums, with the audience encouraged to wander round as the performance unfolded. It was at once a revealing but also somewhat frustrating experience.The hour-long programme explored the plight of the UK’s temperate rainforest. You may not (I didn’t) realise the UK had any temperate rainforest, but it does – and centuries ago Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! While such tales are seldom far from a screen, they are often far from a stage, the challenge of scaling down just too intimidating for most adaptors. Not so Shaun McKenna and Lion Couglan who took on the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.Sony sparked the super-boom with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), only for their reliance on related properties to hasten its end with the calamitous Morbius and Madame Web. Venom’s ace is Hardy’s unlikely double-act as gloomy, whiny journalist Eddie and his capricious beast inside’s bombastic, Read more ...