Reviews
Gavin Dixon
Personality is essential for Schubert’s piano sonatas. Listen to two recordings of the same one and you could easily think they are different works, such is the performer's input. Daniel Barenboim would therefore seem ideal. He’s a huge personality – he even has his own name emblazoned in large gold letters on the lid of his piano: a personality verging on a cult. But it’s not quite right for this music.Barenboim always trades in big passions; Schubert does not – or only in late works, and even then not exclusively. To negotiate the more delicate music of the early B major Sonata, D575, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It seems a peculiar conceit to pack up a full symphony orchestra and choir and take them the length of the UK solely to perform suites of music from a popular television show – and I say this as a fan of the show in question. Yet I left the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular with a newfound appreciation for both the soundtrack as an art form in general, and for the work of Murray Gold – the composer responsible for the show’s music since its return in 2005 – in particular.The aptly-named “spectacular” mixed live-action appearances from some of the show’s most iconic nasties, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A long time ago I went out into the field to research a feature about the three ages of obsessive fandom. At the entry level was a bog-standard legion of young teenage girls who simply hung around outside the mansion block in Maida Vale where one or possibly both of the Gosses (of Bros) lived. I also met three young women who had access to Jason Donovan’s diary and were traipsing around town in the hope of glimpse. Donovan’s star had waned but they hadn’t moved on. Most tragic was my dinner in Soho with a Boy George lookalike, a dolled-up marionette who gave himself airs and got chauffeured Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time gets called on California in San Andreas, a bone-headed disaster movie that sends huge swathes of the West Coast toppling to its doom even as one particular family not only makes it through intact but is even enriched in the process. Who'd have thought that the demise of several cities full of unnamed people would act as a perverse sort of marriage counselling for a couple in nuptial distress? The real fault here isn't the tectonic one that gives Brad Peyton's putative summer blockbuster its title but the perverse logic of a creative team clearly indifferent to mass suffering but willing Read more ...
Simon Munk
1972, a South American revolution, seen through the eyes of a cleaner. Sunset neatly side-steps the usual banana republic videogame clichés by shifting focus. You are neither the Generalissimo lording it over a strategy game, nor the first-person soldier running through the jungles. You're a cleaner.Of course, you're not just any cleaner. You're a US engineering graduate who has, in seeking a better life, ended up working a menial job in the fictional Anchuria, for a rich man with links, it emerges, to the current dictator – General Miraflores. And a dictator facing an increasingly forceful Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
American actress Lake Bell turns in a rather charming performance in a romcom written by newcomer Tess Morris, who handles the insecurities of a thirty-something woman looking for love in a funny and energetic way.There's a manic screwball edge to the comedy and some witty one-liners but also present are some of the worst pitfalls of this genre. The Inbetweeners director, Ben Palmer, takes the reins in a film which dashes across famous London landmarks and the back roads of suburban England with verve. When Nancy (Lake Bell) is gifted a romantic self-help book by a woman on a train who’s due Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sylvie Guillem is retiring in exactly the same way as she does everything: in her own time and on her own terms. She turns 50 this year, but it’s not that age is finally catching up with her – at least, not in her body, which she acknowledges has potentially many more years of dancing in it. She just wants to go out at the top of her game, and for this most intelligent of ballerinas, that also means a new programme: no easy wallowing in the back catalogue for her, but new commissions from Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, receiving their UK première in this run at the Wells, which will be Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s not often that you arrive for a piano recital to see members of the audience on the stage, clustering around the instrument and taking photos of it. Those curious about the newly unveiled, straight-strung Barenboim-Maene concert grand (the name above the keyboard is simply BARENBOIM) were periodically ushered away from it; it was closed and reopened several times before it was time for the maestro himself to take control.The first event in Daniel Barenboim’s four recitals of Schubert sonatas involved several component parts that added up to a distinctly odd evening. Let’s dispatch one Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To begin at the very bizarre ending. Fleetwood Mac, finally reunited as a five-piece with Christine McVie stage right on luscious vocals and keyboard, had just thrashed out a show of great finesse for two hours. It had all gone peachily. McVie was given a last lovely encore - “Songbird” – crooned solo on a grand piano. That should have been it. Many were already going, or gone.But after one last bow Stevie Nicks, as ever an accident in a taffeta factory, had a rambling tale to tell about McVie’s prodigal return after 16 years. This bathetic oration lasted about three minutes. Then Mick Read more ...
aleks.sierz
St Paul’s Cathedral is an icon of national identity. The building that rose up from the fire and smoke of the Blitz has also witnessed the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Di some twenty years later. In October 2011, this temple of God found that the Occupy anti-capitalist movement had set up camp outside its monumental front steps. Steve Waters’s new fictional account of this episode of protest shows how the Dean of St Paul’s responds to this action — and it stars Simon Russell Beale in the main role.In a panelled room, heavy with oak, that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The imposition of a brutal jihadist regime is relayed with formidable articulacy and a surprising lightness of touch in this gut-wrenching drama from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako. Although its narrative events are as horrifying as those of any thriller Timbuktu avoids the manipulative tricks of genre cinema. Sofian El Fani's sun-kissed cinematography mirrors the defiant beauty of the landscape and its people, while the screenplay - from Sissako and Kessen Tall - gently draws out the hypocrisy and absurdity of the situation, alongside the exasperating injustice.Inspired by the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gravelly, Winstone-esque banter about the trauma of putting down the sawn-off and having to stop for red lights. Poor taste in swimwear and the chunkier kind of jewellery. We know what to expect from a sitcom about life on the Costa, on the run. Which makes SunTrap, BBC One’s new take on the genre, highly adventurous. Unfortunately, having torn up the rulebook, what we’re left with is not a brilliant new approach, but a fistful of fragments, albeit highly coloured and diverting in patches. As fugitive tabloid reporters (the series’ title tips the wink about who’s in the Beeb’s sights here) Read more ...