love
aleks.sierz
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of his early play, Port, at the National Theatre. Now they are in the West End again, this time with a two-hander starring Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham. Despite the title, this is not a play about science, but about love, but it does concern chance. And uncertainty.Inspired by a vague notion of the Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that Read more ...
theartsdesk
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).AUGUSTThe Odyssey. Director: Jérôme Salle, starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. Jacques Cousteau: le movie. Released 18 AugFinal Portrait. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Longborough Festival was started, essentially, to perform Wagner, and Wagner is still what it does best. This revival of Carmen Jakobi’s production of Tristan und Isolde is the strongest argument imaginable for small-theatre Wagner. For once the voices can make themselves heard without bellowing; the orchestra is clear and detailed, not just a distant fog; and – a rare treat in opera of any kind – acting with the face as well as the arms and torso becomes a factor in establishing character and relationships.Isolde is a passionate young girl with a manipulative streak. But what Wagnerian Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back, John Boyega. Less than a decade ago, he was an unknown budding British stage actor, then he took off as a global film star thanks to his role as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens after his debut in Attack the Block, the comedy sci-fi flick. After these extraterrestrial excursions, Boyega is now back to earth, playing the lead at the Old Vic in Georg Büchner’s 1837 classic, Woyzeck, translated this time by Jack Thorne, the playwright who wrote London’s two-part super-hit, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.It’s a radical rewrite. Gone is a lot of the mystery and the poetry of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Amy Leach’s energetic Romeo and Juliet is fast, furious and a little breathless, the setting transposed from Verona to a fairly grim contemporary Leeds. Think West Yorkshire Side Story. Leach’s starting point was hearing about conflict resolution in a local high school created by merging a pair of formerly rival institutions, and her programme note also explicitly links the production to a divided post-Brexit Britain, a place where long-buried differences have fractured previously stable relationships. And the energy is specific to modern Leeds, which each summer hosts a hedonistic music Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Love, we know, will tear us apart again. And again. And yet again. It will shred our nerves and rip through our guts; it will fill us with anguish, and then douse us in regrets. It will expose our weaknesses, and then make us say what we can never unsay. It will embattle our egos, and then stamp on our ids. It will. It really will. And before you ask why the bedroom is so cold, I can tell you that all this is the effect of some passages of debbie tucker green’s new play, which will henceforth be known as the one with the long-dictionary-definition title, and which has national treasure Meera Read more ...
theartsdesk
Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our writers to identify something - anything - in the arts that embodies the L word. There are some obvious choices, some obscure ones, and a whole lot of omissions. So, in the comment Read more ...
Graham Fuller
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco. A mecca for refugees from Europe seeking transit papers that will enable them to fly to neutral Lisbon and thence sail for America, the café is a hotbed of shady deals to which Rick, cynical and aloof, turns a blind eye.He Read more ...
David Kettle
What’s love all about anyway? That’s the almost certainly unanswerable question that Israeli-American director Alma Har’el sets out to tackle in her strange, feverish, at times downright hallucinatory documentary LoveTrue. The problem is, by the end of its alternately entertaining and disconcerting 80 minutes, you’ll almost certainly be none the wiser. And you may even have forgotten what the original question was anyway.Har’el’s previous documentary Bombay Beach, on a ruined ghost town in southern California, earned high praise for its fantastical visuals and its blurring of reality and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The end of empire has rarely looked more cinematically beguiling than in Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, the visually lavish 1992 drama written for Catherine Deneuve, who gets the film’s epigraphic line about “believing that the world is made of things that are inseparable: men and women, the mountains and the plains, human beings and gods, Indochina and France…” Substitute Communism for “gods” in this somewhat faux-glamourised depiction of an independence movement, and it becomes clear why that final pairing didn’t last.Indochine has moments of visual glory that raise it to the ranks of truly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love in real life while making The Light Between Oceans, which lends an extra dimension to a morose period weepie that needs every bit of excitement it can get. Reminiscent of the laboured celluloid romances of a bygone era that could once have starred Robert Taylor, the film is as vacuous as it is pretty, and if director Derek Cianfrance cut some of his stars' lingering glances, it would have the added virtue of being short.As it is, 132 minutes is a long time for a movie whose narrative more or less demands that the audience is several steps Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ralph Fiennes has long felt at home in the Russian repertoire, whether onstage in Fathers and Sons near the start of his career or, in 1997, taking the Almeida's Ivanov to Moscow as the first UK company to bring Chekhov home, as it were.Add in screen credits that include starring in the Alexander Pushkin novel-turned-film Onegin, directed by his sister Martha, and it begins to makes sense that here Fiennes is speaking what sounds to this untutored ear as very decent Russian in a film adaptation from the director Vera Glagoleva of Turgenev's A Month in the Country that appears to minimise Read more ...