Reviews
Marina Vaizey
The Whitworth Art Gallery was showered with meteors in a spectacle devised by the artist Cornelia Parker on its reopening weekend – appropriately Valentine’s Day. The £15m project (architects MUMA) has doubled the exhibition spaces, reclaimed the Victorian Grand Hall from offices, added state-of-the-art on-site storage and more space for conservators. Here is public art with sculpture and installations on the building itself, and in the surrounding park – landscape art not only in its park setting but within new gardens, and with the building providing wrap-around scenic views. There Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Romanians Are Coming was the immigration story from the other side. Bustling along with the wry, sometimes desperate comedy (and themed music) of a Balkan film, its characters said things about themselves that others would hardly get away with. “I’m going to tell you the stories of some of the arseholes like me who came to take your jobs,” said narrator Alex Fechete Petru at the beginning of James Bluemel’s revealing three-parter. It showed both the lives of three hapless characters as they sought work, or just survival, in the UK, and their homes in the desolate location of Baia More Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As worst-case scenarios go, the prospect of a UKIP government in a little under three months’ time is a frightening but unlikely one – isn’t it? That they have only two MPs, and leader Nigel Farage is yet to find a seat, has done nothing to stop UKIP setting the political agenda, bulldozing its way to centre stage to demand a place in the forthcoming televised election debates. And while the pantomime buffoonery of Farage and Godfrey Bloom has provided endless scope for ridicule, the very existence of Channel 4’s fictional documentary, set in an imagined but uncomfortably near future, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I went into watching Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Maidan with the highest hopes, and came out, more than two hours later, cold. For a film about a successful national liberation movement, that’s something of a paradox.It’s titled, of course, after Kiev’s Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the centre point of the Ukrainian revolution that saw huge public gatherings from December 2013 through February of last year which culminated with then president Viktor Yanukovych fleeing first his capital city on 22 February 2014 and a few days later his country (he remains in Russia today). A Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s all over: the final note of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s London Residency, for which many music-lovers bought tickets about a year ago, has risen into the ether, leaving most questions concerning Sir Simon Rattle’s future plans as yet unanswered. Following a red-hot Sibelius cycle at the Barbican, the Berliners came over to the Royal Festival Hall to complete the weeklong residency with Mahler’s Symphony No 2, which sold out twice on two consecutive evenings.On the final day the 12-strong cello section, which has an independent life, gave a lunchtime concert; and in the afternoon Sir Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The broomsticks are back in the cupboard, wands are no longer at the ready, and no one is casting spells in cod Latin. JK Rowling’s first novel for adults has made its inevitable journey from page to screen. The first view of a picturesque Cotswolds village – a mannikin in erotic underwear provocatively on all fours in a shop window – says it succinctly: we’re not in Hogwarts any more.The setting of The Casual Vacancy is Pagford, a village in rural southern England where the haves and have-nots, the plummy toffs and the loamy yokels, co-exist cheek by jowl. That’s the way it always has been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Michael Mann, the director of the monumental crime epic Heat and the original and best Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter, this lumbering saga of cyberhacking is really rather disappointing. Not that it doesn't include several torrid action sequences in exotic locations, while the basic theme is at least urgently topical. It's just that there's little evidence that the project fired Mann's imagination, or inspired him to breathe plausible life into his characters.The set-up is as widescreen as you could wish. A nuclear plant in China is sabotaged by an unknown hacker (Mann makes sure we get Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In the tradition of A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown and Staying On, Indian Summers is ambitious, a serious soap attempting to show the dying days of the Raj through a host of interwoven personal and political attachments. Passions run high in the foothills of the Himalayas, cool in the Indian summer, but X-rated for human relationships. This jumbo-sized opener (the first of 10 episodes) had a tangled web of plotlines woven round a variety of class and caste, racial, religious and sexual tensions, amid a potentially explosive political situation. It's all set in the gorgeous Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fifty Shades of Grey is upon us, more or less literally. It's a bit like the clamber-cam POV shot of Jamie Dornan materialising through Dakota Johnson’s spread legs. The teaser campaign has completed its titillating foreplay, and this weekend the fairytale fantasy franchise about fucking and slapping (but please, sir, no fisting) thrusts its entire length into the world’s cinemas. How will it be for you? The morning after, will audiences still be applying Arnica to their assaulted senses?Let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not the worst film in the world. To an extent, it has been rescued Read more ...
Simon Munk
Techland's previous first-person zombie game was Dead Island. This swaps its beach resort location for a nondescript south American city, and its supercharged, cobbled-together weaponry for parkour-style run-jump-climb agility. One of these swaps is good news, the other not so much.Crash-landing in the zombie-infested city of Harran, your undercover government operative has to ingratiate himself with the locals, trying to survive holed up in a tower block. How he does that is largely by going and fetching things for them from all over.On the way, you also get to open up "safe houses" and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s a danger in an artist having their work reinterpreted that the end result will be little more than a rough outline of the original. Look at Metallica’s axe job on the Velvet Underground for instance. Still, on the bright side, at least they increased the band’s "reach" to include jocks and morons.Following a series of live shows over the last few years, Throbbing Gristle alumni and art-dance legends Chris & Cosey were inundated with requests for recordings of the live versions of old songs and ended up complying, dressing up their back catalogue for a night out on the tiles.So, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Junk CultureOMD’s fifth album, Junk Culture, followed 1983’s Dazzle Ships into the shops. Where that was experimental, fragmented, wilful, used found sounds and, in places, eschewed melody and traditional song form, 1984’s glossy release was recorded at Montserrat’s swish Air Studios, the facility founded by George Martin which was favoured by Dire Straits, Elton John and Paul McCartney. Dazzle Ships was influenced by Stockhausen. Junk Culture featured the mambo-esque calypso “All Wrapped Up”, a weedy echo of early Eighties chart funsters Modern Romance.Of Read more ...