Reviews
Graham Fuller
Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang. The discerning among them would likely be bowled over by the outstanding feature debut of the Ankara-born, French-educated filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven. On the other hand, our daughters would be irked by having no grounds to complain about anything again after realising how fortunate they are not to be subjected to the restrictions imposed on high-school Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.It’s also when Green Room becomes less interesting than Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, Blue Ruin, which was saturated in inexorable sadness and dread, with an unpredictable, steel-trap plot, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Complete Deaths refers to the complete onstage deaths in Shakespeare’s work, all 75 of them, including the “black ill favour’d fly” in Titus Andronicus. The latter becomes a persistent theme throughout, appearing even as the audience take their seats, a joke shop plastic approximation attached to wire, being poked up the nose of a prostrate cast member. The whole is the work of two respected Brighton-based theatrical entities, the four-person physical comedy troupe Spymonkey and writer/director Tim Crouch. And it’s a fantastic, hilarious, consistently imaginative hoot from start to finish Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
A 28-year-old British composer makes his name with a new four-hand opera, set in contemporary Britain but underpinned by classical legend, pushing the boundaries of operatic subject matter and launching a glittering career. This was Mark-Antony Turnage and his breakthrough work Greek in 1988, showing uncanny parallels with Mark Simpson and his new opera Pleasure.Where Turnage set the Oedipus story in the 1980s East End, Simpson and his librettist Melanie Challenger, tell an original story, based on the myth of Hephaestus, and set it in the toilet of a gay nightclub. Although seeming at first Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The pre-title sequence – in which a middle-aged man without any trousers lies trussed up on the floor – immediately tells us that we are not to take Billions too seriously. A woman in thigh-high leather boots with killer heels towers over him. Removing a cigarette-holder from her lips, she tells him he’s in need of correction before stubbing out the fag on his bare chest.All that’s missing on the soundtrack is Disco Inferno by The Trammps. Burn, baby, burn… As if this weren’t enough, the dominatrix then puts out the fire by urinating on him. That’s right: someone is taking the piss.A turn-off Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Elasticity is a surprisingly reliable test for great art. How far can you stretch, bend, or reshape a work before it loses its essence, its identity? Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Antigone, Pride and Prejudice can all take almost anything you can throw at them, but what about Winterreise, Schubert’s song-cycle of lost love?Katie Mitchell has dehumanised it in her staged interpretation, One Evening, Thomas Guthrie has explored the identity of the poet-lover in his puppet-driven version for New Kent Opera, David Alden has made a television film of it for Channel 4, and now director, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right.Linklater has observed that, as well as being a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, this starts where the Oscar-winning Boyhood ends, with a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital. Fitting it into the venerable “city symphony” film genre, defined by the magically evocative Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), is a challenge Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things – maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age – but, at core, they’re all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their latest project is no different. The Encounter takes its audience into the remote depths of the Brazilian rainforest, beyond language and civilisation, but the narrative that emerges is one about tale-telling and the connections we forge through stories, empathy and imagination.Taking the story of American photography Loren McIntyre, and his extraordinary account of his expedition to document the Amazon’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Parodic ignoramus Philomena Cunk has been flaunting her narrow cultural horizons on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe for many years, and more recently extended her shallow range to such weighty issues as feminism and the financial crisis in her Moments of Wonder series. Shakespeare, though? There is plenty of opportunity to be dumb, but could it still be funny? Actually, it was a delight.Cunk’s stock-in-trade, the faux-naif misunderstanding, delivered completely deadpan, worked a treat, but that’s only the start of her comic journey. The best lines emerged in a baroque concatenation of idiocy, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Today we amuse ourselves with Facebook clips of talking cats, but in the 1850s they had stereographs, pairs of identical photographs that, viewed through special lenses, become suddenly and gloriously three-dimensional. Vistas open up as if by magic, the illusion of space all the more beguiling for its transience. The act of looking through a special pair of glasses is a little bit like peeping behind a curtain, the intimacy of the encounter adding a slightly voyeuristic frisson to all manner of subject matter from landscapes to mock-ups of popular paintings. Stereoscopic photographs have a Read more ...
David Nice
Sunlit golden mean or slightly hazy middle-of-the-road? Conductor-director Iván Fischer's fully costumed and imagined concert of The Magic Flute - or perhaps it would better have been titled Die ZauberFlute given its intelligent mix of sung German and English dialogue taken by six excellent young British-based actors - was always going to be hard pressed to match the recent, hyper-communicative English National Opera/Complicite revival.In fact, its concept shaped up rather well in comparison. But whereas ENO had at least two world-class singers in the Tamino of Allan Clayton and Lucy Crowe's Read more ...