Reviews
Justine Elias
There's little reason to arrive early at the cinema these days, now that filmgoers are forced to endure as many advertisements as movie trailers. Once upon a time, though, the animated Looney Tunes were essential viewing before the main movie event. Now, 90 years after the first Looney Tunes short appeared, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig star in the franchise's first full-length feature.Surprisingly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is neither an exercise in nostalgia nor a cynical reboot, but an anarchic blast of 2D cartoon mayhem that will please adults and their kids. Even without Looney Tunes' biggest Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
William Nicholson’s drama about the short-lived love between the academic and writer CS Lewis and the American poet who initiated a lengthy correspondence with him in the 1950s, Joy Davidman, can be a devastating tearjerker, especially at close quarters such as a cinema or an intimately scaled auditorium. In the boxy vastness of the Aldwych Theatre, once home to the RSC and Tina: The Musical, its strongest points can struggle to be appreciated, however.Key to the piece is its portrait of the slow dissolution of the writer’s strong Christian certainties. It opens with Lewis (Hugh Bonneville) Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you stand close to a picture by Georges Seurat, the experience is totally different from being a few feet away. To a certain extent this is true of any painting since, close to, any brush marks and fine details are more apparent; but with Seurat the discrepancy is not only more emphatic, it was factored into his way of working.He devised what came to be known as pointillism (he called it chromoluminarism). Instead of mixing colours on the palette, he applied each hue separately in tiny dots and dashes, thereby allowing them to mix optically between the canvas and your eye.The technique Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut plunges two young country brothers into Nineties Lagos’s joyous energy and febrile politics, as they seize a unique chance to bond with their loving but largely absent dad. Often shot at the low angles of a child’s worldview and in intimate close-ups only dimly apprehending the full picture, it is a requiem for both Nigerian hope as the 1993 election is stolen and fleeting paternal ties, and a fervent celebration of Lagos and fatherhood.We first meet 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) playing with 8-year-old Aki (real brother Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In November 1975, UK music weekly New Musical Express included an article by Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Alive To The Jive Of The Sound Of '75.” Recently in New York, he was revealing what he had discovered.The bands looked at – and he saw most saw live – in his prescient round-up were Blondie, The Heartbreakers – “the first N.Y. punk supergroup” – a “new-look” New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Shirts, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Tuff Darts.
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Central to what he covered in this remarkable role call was a venue: the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I still retain a vivid memory of a concert in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2013 at which Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta sat at an upright piano with their backs to the audience and played excerpts from his Játékok collection of progressive teaching pieces, interspersed with arrangements of Bach chorale preludes for piano duet (Pictured below). The audience might have been eavesdropping on an afternoon of private music-making. But what in fact took place was the distillation of the essence of music – its directness and detached spirituality – into a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.We meet Jim Hacker, now over 80 but once the PM, in the handsome but untidy Georgian master’s lodge of the Oxford college named after him, built on the funding he secured from a Russian oligarch. Griff Rhys Jones plays him with a little too much gurning and an over-emphatic Read more ...
Robert Beale
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen 20 years ago, is still one of the jewels in Opera North’s treasury. It was revived in 2013 for their “Festival of Britten”, and now is back with a fresh top music team and a cast of (mainly) young British singers, several in company debuts, which bodes extremely well for them and for us. Chief of this new generation is John Findon in the title role. I admired Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’ quality as Grimes in the original and the first revival, but Findon’s performance equals and in some respects excels it.The revival is co-directed by Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Visual artists gave up on titles long ago, resorting to neutral labels such as Untitled. Choreographers still feel bound to tag their works descriptively, which can be a challenge if the dance is about everything or nothing. The Irish director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan found a neat solution in MÁM , the 80-minute piece he made when he first arrived in West Kerry in 2019, choosing an Irish word that means so many things, and so many different things, that as a title it can only suggest everything and nothing all at once. A mountain pass, a burden or obligation, a handful of Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Cynthia Erivo delivering her stunning, technically complex one-woman performance of Dracula is not unlike watching a top athlete gunning for gold at the Winter Olympics – with the exception that this is infinitely more exciting. Over the last week, dissatisfied audience whispers led to headlines that the Oscar-nominated actress was struggling with the lines needed to play the 23 characters. Yet in a virtuoso press night performance she slayed doubters like a vampire hunter administering a stake to the heart.Kip Williams’ adaptation is the third in his gothic cine-theatre trilogy that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Somewhere in the bowels of the BBC, far away from the overheated stories of serial killers and female mutilation that clamour for the audience’s attention elsewhere on British telly, there is an oasis of calm. This little patch is the fiefdom of Mackenzie Crook.Yet Crook for me represents life as most people live it, full of mundane domestic duties and quiet pleasures. His characters are the ones you see down the pub, operating the supermarket tills, loitering in workspaces with not quite enough to do. Crook’s career was launched in one such workplace, The Office, then boosted by a run in Read more ...