Reviews
Graham Fuller
Ron Mann’s laid-back documentary about the career vicissitudes and family life of Robert Altman (1925-2006) takes its cue from the tone of the director’s films. It was Altman’s habit to observe his character’s crises, collapses, and deaths with the same evenness and lack of melodrama with which he observed their humdrum moments.Although there’s a powerful current of liberal anger in Altman’s work, at the core of it there’s an acceptance of the reality of Social Darwinism, manifested particularly in the American Way. Optimism goes hand in hand with opportunism, as demonstrated by a scene that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Your mum told you (or at least, I hope someone did) that it wasn't about being pretty, it was about having personality. True wisdom though this is, you probably also noticed that there are some jobs where it appears to be necessary to conform to a certain model of style or appearance. Playing the princess roles in ballet is one of these, though it's not about prettiness: for practical reasons you have to be shorter and considerably lighter than the men who will partner you. Tall ballerinas do become principals, but, especially in smaller companies, they don't often get to dance the Auroras Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been just over a year since Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring famously gyrated, and chest-thumped his way through the band's latest single on American TV. The show was Letterman and the singer looked like a stevedore undergoing primal scream therapy. Within days the footage had gone viral. People have been talking about it ever since. Not least in the bar before last night’s show – how could he, they asked, possibly keep that up for an hour and a half?Heaven knows where he gets his energy from but Herring never missed a beat. This was his show. Dressed all in black, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All the politicians lined up to chorus "Je suis Charlie" after the nauseating massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January, but three months later, how is that emotional declaration of solidarity against murderous extremism holding up? For this documentary, British Muslim Shaista Aziz went to Paris to find out.Her inquiries suggested that France is split in two over the issue of Western values versus Islamic fundamentalism. So is much of the rest of Europe, but France's rigorous insistence on maintaining the state's secular status, and therefore banning such faith-based Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s no shame in being a jobbing actor, but you can’t help missing the Anthony Hopkins who dissected repression with definitive, painful finesse, back when he was great. The Human Stain (2003) is the last I’ve seen of that, amongst the last decade’s Norse gods, Greek generals and judges. His turn as kidnapped lager tycoon Freddy Heineken resembles one of Larry Olivier’s later, international pay-cheques – as a project if not role, Wild Geese 2 comes unwelcomely to mind.The story of Heineken’s 1983 kidnapping, 21 days of captivity, the paying of a then-record ransom and its strange aftermath Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a distinct lack of giraffe or spiny ant-eater or even ant in The Ark. The animals went in none by none in the BBC’s visit to the Old Testament. When the deluge finally came on, it was only the human race which was saved from the watery wrath of God. Our furry and feathered friends never got the call. They say don’t work with animals, but this was taking liberties with holy writ.Meanwhile theologians will be poring over the text for arcane signs which might reveal why this was on in Easter week, an area of the calendar when they generally tend to favour the last few chapters of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Louis Theroux just wants to make good television. This may seem an obvious thing to say of a programme-maker, but many programme-makers concerned with the kind of human interest story that Theroux has made his own, often want to do more than this. They want to understand subject and motive, to get under the skin of a thing, or perhaps somehow resolve an issue. They believe, and sometimes perhaps they may even be right, that this in itself will produce good television, or at least go most of the way there. Theroux’s ambitions are clearly much simpler. He wants to tease out stories – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, nothing can prevent love blossoming. Sebastian’s second encounter with Andreas is punctuated by the latter vomiting after too much booze. It doesn’t put the brakes on the former’s growing passion for the leather-jacketed object of his affections. Soon, the pair are lovers despite Andreas declaring that he is not gay. He cannot resist Sebastian.The path of love often takes strange turns. In the Swedish film Something Must Break, the roadmap is ripped up. Sebastian (Saga Becker, pictured below right) is androgynous and gay: he is transgender. Although accepting of who he is, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Switched from last Thursday to accommodate the live standup gigs by Cast Iron Dave and "Tough Enough" Clint Miliband, this 90-minute drama took us back five years to the birth of the Conservative-Lib Dem pact. It purported to be based on "extensive research" and interviews with "people who were there", though there wasn't much that the average politico-freak wouldn't have known or surmised already. Some of the performances were fun though.Particularly relishable was Mark Gatiss's portrayal of Peter Mandelson, silky and slithery like Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book. While all around him were Read more ...
Simon Munk
The old house seems empty at first. But in the darkness, a flickering match your only light source, it quickly becomes apparent that something terrible is here…White Night is a classic haunted house tale and a classic adventure game wrapped up in a beautiful, stylised visual feast. Like the Sin City comics and films, this uses stark black and white with just the occasional flicker of colour, mostly the guttering yellow of a match.In Sin City the stark design is a homage to the chiaroscuro of film noir and hardboiled detective fiction. And perhaps, in homage also, White Night unwisely adopts Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
After a Messiah last Christmas by one of London’s finest professional chamber choirs that was straight off the factory production line – mindlessly and maddeningly correct, just, I suspect, as it had been the five other times they performed it that week – I vowed to do things a little differently this Easter. Bach’s Passions certainly need skill and musicianship, but what they need above all is sincerity and heart. With that theory in mind, I went looking for a performance by a good amateur ensemble; when I found one by the Anton Bruckner Choir that also numbered Jacques Imbrailo and Ed Lyon Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Specials: Specials, More Specials; The Special AKA: In the StudioAfter hearing the three albums credited to The Specials during their formative period with 2 Tone Records it becomes hard to think of them as a single band. Their clanky sounding, Elvis Costello-produced eponymous debut album, issued in October 1979, just about holds together overall, but its successors now sound as though nothing united the different directions they were firing off in. More Specials (October 1980) sits up-tempo cheerlessness alongside a warping of easy listening. In The Studio (June 1984) comes across Read more ...