Reviews
Katherine McLaughlin
I Origins is a high-concept sci-fi thriller and romantic drama from American indie director Mike Cahill, who investigates big philosophical and scientific issues by looking for meaning in coincidence. Part produced by Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Pitt, who also stars, this well-intentioned thesis intrigues but falls short due to a laboured script and an inelegant handling of a burgeoning relationship.Molecular biologist, Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), is intent on disproving the existence of God through science. When he teams up with bright spark Karen (Brit Marling) the two make an exciting Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Hector Berlioz knew from early on in life which aspects of death he would want to avoid. He had seen quite enough of the medical textbooks that his father had tried to foist upon him. He had even got as far as smelling the dissecting table as a medical student in Paris, desperately counting the days before he could make his escape into music. The composition commission he received just a few years later in 1837 from the Minister of the Interior was exactly what he wanted and needed him to free himself from those memories, to write a requiem full of grandeur, glory and the sound and the sheen Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The news cycle waits for no man. When Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s thinly veiled Boris Johnson satire premiered in Edinburgh at the beginning of August, it seemed remarkably timely, coinciding as it did with BoJo announcing his intention to return to Parliament. Now, it’s at best reactive, and competing with a sea of far more penetrating editorials about the likelihood and reality of everyone’s favourite accident-prone chap actually running the country. Kingmaker is still atop its soapbox, but frantically and fatally jockeying for position.Khan and Salinsky’s central argument, conveyed in a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Angkor Wat in Cambodia is the biggest religious complex ever built. It is also one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring structures ever created, even now still a working temple with both Buddhist and Hindu connections. It was at the heart not only of a vast medieval city but an empire that dominated southeast Asia for centuries.The first instalment of this two-part documentary revealed how Angkor’s mysterious history, its rise and fall, are being slowly unravelled by academics from Hong Kong, Australia, France, America and Cambodia itself. We were shown a new technology, LiDAR, a kind of Read more ...
David Nice
Comparisons, even on paper, between two season openers from London orchestras could hardly have been more instructive. I didn’t attend Valery Gergiev’s London Symphony Orchestra concert last week, for reasons several times outlined on theartsdesk. But quite apart from the fact that Gergiev and his court pianist Denis Matsuev are active supporters of Putin's “Might is Right” campaign in the Ukraine – a situation which tens of thousands of Muscovites are beginning to challenge – Matsuev is also the worst of barnstormers. Last night, on the other hand, we had mercurial pianist Jean-Efflam Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Hollywood's veneer has been cracked so many times it's possible to see right through to its cynical core; in an age of irreverence and intrusion the stars simply don't glitter as brightly. David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars is a film that forgets all this and sets out its satirical stall anyway. A measure of malice to floor an elephant and a pair of striking performances - from Mia Wasikowska as a deliciously strange fruit and from Julianne Moore, giving us every shade of a star - nearly salvage it.Moore plays fading actress Havana Segrand. Part Baby Jane, part Norma Desmond, part porn star Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The problem with programming Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony - and only the very bold and resourceful and/or the BBC are ever likely to do so - is that it eclipses everything, and I mean everything, in its proximity. And if it was my 90th birthday - as indeed it was on this day for the BBC Singers - I’m not sure I’d want to bask in its aura, especially since the world premiere commissioned for this big birthday - Kevan Volans's The Mountain That Left - had to be postponed due to the indisposition of its soprano soloist, Pumeza Matshikiza. This being the BBC Singers, however - a group for whom Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Awards are strange things; they can recognise real achievement while at the same time overlook the really talented. Annoyingly, Luisa Omielan fell into the second category with her first two full shows - What Would Beyoncé Do? and its equally joyous follow-up, Am I Right Ladies?! - both of which should have been recognised in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards (in 2012 and this year respectively) but weren't.Am I Right Ladies?! is a sort of companion piece to WWBD? but you don't have to have seen Omielan's debut show in order to enjoy or understand what's going on here. It follows in the same vein Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When Rachel Bailey (Suranne Jones) told the promotion board at the beginning of this series: “I’m not a liability, I’m a safe pair of hands”, we knew it would be a matter of sitting back and waiting to see in what manner she would heap disgrace upon herself. It looked like being the quickest denouement ever, when seconds after leaving the interview, Bailey narrowly avoided being overheard telling Janet Scott (Lesley Sharp) that one member of the panel was “about as funny as sewage”.While best friends Scott and Bailey have always enjoyed a chuckle at the expense of their colleagues, this new Read more ...
fisun.guner
So, Exhibit B, the controversial “human zoo” using black actors to re-enact the role of ethnographic exhibits – semi-naked, chained, silenced by metal masks and degraded in metal collars – has been cancelled, due to the presence of protesters. The piece, a series of tableaux vivants recreating the human zoos popular in Europe and America in the 19th and even the first decades of the 20th century, is a work by white South African artist and theatre-maker Brett Bailey, and was being staged by the Barbican. Most recently it had been seen at the Edinburgh Festival, where the reaction Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Currently, the Royal Court is exploring the theme of revolution and resistance. In its studio space it is staging The Wolf from the Door, Rory Mullarkey’s excellent absurdist fantasy of a very English uprising. And now on its main stage is Tim Price’s fictional account of how Anonymous and LulzSec, a collective swarm of hacktivists, took on some of the most powerful capitalists in the world without even leaving their bedrooms. If this was revolution, or even just resistance, it was a very nerdy kind of activism.Teh Internet Is Serious Business starts by introducing Jake and Mustafa, two Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Pierces were on stage for little more than an hour, singing an enjoyable but quite predictable medley of their last three albums. Their sugar-glazed, glistening sound is filtered through all manner of electronic stabilisation and filtration devices which guarantee harmony and stability through their adrenaline-driven swoops and musical handbrake turns. So in some ways, you’re not getting much new content or musical insight by hearing them live. Yet a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire, quiet to begin with, thrilled to the intensity of their charisma. There’s a wide variety, stylistically and Read more ...