Reviews
Jasper Rees
In a house in Nuneaton, a man calling himself Stinson Hunter lures paedophiles towards exposure, shame and possible prosecution. “We set the profile that is like the rope,” he explained. “And then if they choose to put that rope round their neck and hang theirselves [sic], that is their choice. We have not pushed them.”The bait is simple. Hunter loads a fake female profile on a casual dating site then awaits contact from men. His replies, in the voice of a fictional girl, make it repeatedly clear that she is underage. Undeterred, men turn up for what they assume is a rendezvous for illegal Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mesmerising in her sustained emotional rawness, Emmanuelle Devos is at her empathetic best in Violette, a psychological study of a woman damned by her loveless childhood and what she perceived as her ugliness.Devos gave an impression of homeliness and dowdiness as the near-deaf secretary ridiculed by her colleagues in Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips, but in that 2001 film, as in Martin Provost's Violette Leduc biopic, she obliterated conventional value judgments about women's appearances. She has a habit, too, of rendering almost appealing negative qualities like neediness, self-consciousness Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some feared that turning Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel into a movie couldn't be done, but with Flynn herself in the screenwriter's chair and the clinically precise David Fincher wearing the director's hat, it's turned out a treat. It's long at 145 minutes, but it needed space to accommodate its titillating mix of police procedural, whodunnit, social satire and psychological drama.Gone Girl is the story of the marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, a pair of high-profile journalists whose blissfully gilded Manhattan existence has been brought to a shuddering halt by an economic recession which Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Writing is a tedious activity, usually requiring a great deal of time spent alone at a desk with a pen, typewriter or laptop. It gives you bad breath and piles. Since a literal representation of this would be death on any stage, plays about writers need a dash of spice. In Pulitzer-Prize nominee Theresa Rebeck’s 2011 comedy, Seminar, this comes from seeing a quartet of budding writers being humiliated by their teacher. Luckily, there’s no writing on show, but there is rather a lot of silent reading - which is second to writing as a soporific.The seminar involves four young hopefuls paying $ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Alan Bennett’s 80th birthday last May deserves celebrating not just as a point of respect for a formidable playwright but with awe at his continuing liveliness. More than 40 years after 40 Years On, he is still producing hits, and at Kingston’s Rose an opportune revival of two of his spy plays from the 1980s reminds us that the cuddly Yorkshire macaroon-lover with the swot’s glasses is quite the George Smiley: there are mercilessly observant eyes behind those lenses.It was under the last Soviet president Gorbachev, when the Cold War was a permanent feature of contemporary history still, that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is what Goat look like: There are seven of them, five band members and two front-women, the latter constantly whirling about the stage like dervishes. One of the guitarists and the bassist are clad in dark attire with black cowls over their heads akin to those worn by nomadic Arabic riders in the Sahara – but also a little like hangmen. The second guitarist has on a beanie hat underneath which resides a gold mask, as if he were a sinister ancient deity returned to haunt an Eighties B-movie. The drummer, in an Afro-flavoured smock, wears a mask that’s part bird, part skull, and the bongo- Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
Transgressive is a bold statement for a record label's tin and, on their 10th anniversary celebration last night, there appeared instead a Caucasian calm to the events. From optimistic William Blake lyric loops in the foyer, to the persistent professions of love from the audience for anyone under the limelight.The first live act to grace the Barbican stage last night was newcomer Marika Hackman, unassuming in a simple black cape, aquamarine guitar and unbrushed Scandinavian blonde hair. The focus fell on her lilting pick pattern and twisting melody, and her presence and playing exuded a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Daniil Trifonov, 23, has shot to prominence as one of the hottest pianistic properties of the moment. With multiple competition wins behind him, including the Tchaikovsky in his native Russia, plus a recording contract with DG and a frenetic globe-trotting schedule, he is now a very busy young man. Last night’s London appearance was his recital debut at the Royal Festival Hall, a venue only accorded to the biggest names in the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, the new season of which he was opening.A sizable though not quite capacity crowd of pianophiles largely took this young Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Amy Winehouse, Esperanza Spalding, and Roberto Fonseca were the names tossed and bandied after a London debut of extraordinary charm and maturity from the 19-year-old Spanish singer and multi-instrumentalist Andrea Motis. While a modest Soho crowd was dwarfed by the audience at the Barcelona Jazz Festival where she became, in 2012, the youngest performer to headline, there was a communal tingle of recognition, that we’d witnessed the start of something big.Motis sings an already broad repertoire of standards, both American and Latin, with a sprinkling of modern repertoire such as Amy Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Britain has entered a “post-Christian” era, declared former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams earlier this year: we acknowledge its cultural presence, but Christianity is no longer an habitual practice for the majority of the population. If that’s accurate, viewers of the 2009 American work Next Fall will most likely sympathise with Charlie Condou’s sceptic Adam, who simply cannot comprehend his partner Luke’s (Martin Delaney) certain belief in Heaven, Hell and an inevitable Rapture, nor how such convictions are reconcilable with their life as a committed homosexual couple.This Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zombies have feelings too. That's the message at the heart of writer-director Jeff Baena's debut Life After Beth, which begins its life as a sensitive indie comedy with a winning deadpan shtick and ends up salivating and snarling after developing an appetite for riotous, blood-splattered slapstick. Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza bags the bizarro role of a lifetime and this quite brilliant comedienne attacks it like a man-eater tearing flesh from bones with only its teeth. She also quite literally does that.Dane DeHaan gives us a modern day Harold Chasen (from the excellent Harold and Read more ...
fisun.guner
When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “conceptual” in “conceptual art” obviously need not apply. Walking through the mind-maze of this year’s exhibition of four shortlisted artists, particularly the work of Dublin-born Duncan Campbell, one feels at the mercy of a lot of portentous theorising. But that’s probably because Campbell seems to dominate the exhibition with a film, It for Others, Read more ...