Reviews
Lydia Perrysmith
It was a strange atmosphere inside Camden’s KOKO last night, like a very particular nu metal subgroup of 2003 having a reunion. There was no one under the age of 20 but there were still dreadlocks and beards aplenty. First up on this nostalgia-fest were Alien Ant Farm, the American rock band who formed in 1995 in Riverside, California. By the time the band come out on stage, the crowd has had time to buy a few warm, over-priced beers and are ready to let loose.As they launch into “Wish” there’s a surge of excitement, with grown men and women suddenly reverting to awkward angst-ridden Read more ...
ellin.stein
Jon Stewart’s Rosewater falls into the micro-genre of films about foreign correspondents struggling with the moral imperative to move from observer to participant, not a question that keeps most viewers up at night. But where Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously engaged us through a stirring romance and Oliver Stone’s Salvador through a stirring bromance, Stewart takes a more austere approach. He wants to instill passion about an idea – the importance of bearing witness – rather than taking the audience on that X-Factor staple, an emotional journey.In his native US, Stewart Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After the most TV-based election build-up ever seen with big debates, small debates and, for the two main party leaders at least, a traditional Paxo stuffing, the battle buses were parked up as the electorate settled down to watch the big night on the small screen.Channel 4 was up first in a bizarre decision to bolt out of the traps a clear hour before polls closed. This left Jeremy Paxman and David Mitchell with very little to do other than complain about the Ofcom rules that wouldn’t let them discuss politics until 10pm and the Channel 4 schedulers who were, presumably, busy keeping their Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Thank fuck, it’s over. I mean the General Election. No more campaigning, no more leader debates, no more anti-Miliband hysteria. But there’s still no end to theatre gimmicks that exploit public interest in what is clearly one of the tightest elections in living memory. First prize for the biggest stunt must go to this venue: artistic director Josie Rourke and playwright James Graham have created a fictional polling station, located in a Lambeth school gym, where people er, vote, and the experience is broadcast live on More4.The Vote looks at what typically happens on election night through Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and iterates, as no other film has done in recent years, the politically incorrect but no less obvious and appalling notion that a woman’s face is her most valuable real estate, the thin, fragile wall that separates her from emotional destitution.A woman effaced, this fable-like drama insists, is a woman invalidated – a theme previously explored, in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is perhaps a clever piece of ironic perversity to have scheduled the first part of a three-part documentary on sharks on polling day, but the subject here is the comings and goings inside the complex world of the predators of the sea. The series is an amazing feat on the part of the BBC Natural History Unit, in tandem with the Discovery Channel.The images from under the ice in the Arctic to the South African ocean and the Great Barrier Reef are in themselves awesomely beautiful and mysterious, as we investigate the natural world in ways that were never possible before the revolutionary Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The over-full O2 Academy is already like a sauna, with sweat dripping down the walls and clouds of condensation drifting above the audience, before the Prodigy even take to the stage in Birmingham. However, when a fur-coated MC Maxim leads the band out the atmosphere goes up several notches further and then positively explodes as Liam Howlett lays down the intro to 1997’s hit single “Breath”. Bodies are thrown around from the first beat, hands are raised and the temperature climbs even further.“Nasty” and “Omen” follow in quick succession with heavy metal guitar riffs, football terrace Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are many forms of comedy – stand-up, sketch and improv among them – and now Alex Horne has introduced a new genre as he constructs his set during the hour he spends on stage. It's a kind of Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg device (that is, a machine that performs a simple task in an unnecessarily complicated way), and the anticipation builds as we see it coming together, and finally learn its purpose.This show was a huge critical and audience hit at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, and the audience are Horne's willing helpers by peeling potatoes, helping him display his archery skills, Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play... and corrupt oil prospectors shoot you as soon as look at you, and ankle-biting rattlesnakes lurk under the sand dunes, and abandoned gold mines are teeming with bandits.In this world, described by the talented five Banditos over at developers Ostrich as being “built out of the grittiest pixels this side of Montezuma”, our unnamed hero awakens to discover his family slaughtered and his idyllic homestead burned to cinders. Alas! If only they’d been wearing their cowboy hats for protection! With a fist full of pixels Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical thinking and reflectivity.HIs best-known works, quotations in illuminated text, blazon themselves on the mind. They occupy a tidy niche and reproduce well in books, magazines and social media updates. So when you first see his work here on the south coast, in an 11th-century church no less, you might for a moment get a sense that, were this not a cosy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of a movie spin-off from BBC One's spy show Spooks has been lurking with intent ever since the tenth and final series ended in 2011. Finally it's here, helmed by director Bharat Nalluri (who shot the first and last episodes for TV) and with Peter Firth's Sir Harry Pearce at its centre. Where, as the Spookfather-in-chief, he had to be.Since Spooks stuck unswervingly to its grand tradition of bumping off leading characters – diehards will still be wiping away a tear at memories of Rupert Penry-Jones's Adam Carter, Richard Armitage's Lucas North and Nicola Walker's Ruth Evershed – Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The venues Laura Moody has played on this, her first national tour, have included a launderette, a lighthouse, and the philosophy section of a well-known Oxford bookshop – all, apparently, selected for their “intimate and unusual” quality. It's certainly been an odd couple of months. On the other hand Acrobats, the album she featured last night, seemed a little more mainstream than her previous material. Normal for Moody is still a relative term. Her early stuff included "avant-pop" numbers like "There Could Be No Doubt of His Sex", where quivering high vocals were accompanied Read more ...