Reviews
edward.seckerson
Nothing has resonated through the unfolding First World War commemorations more than the poetry of Wilfred Owen; and in terms of its grim immediacy and enduring heartbreak nothing ever could. Benjamin Britten knew that when he set down his War Requiem for posterity, counterpointing religious posturing with Owen’s indisputable truths. One fought, the other chose not to, but both proffered conscientious objections, and both came at the reality - "the pity of war, the pity war distilled" - from essentially the same place. The truly astonishing thing about War Requiem - and this has been true Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Luc Besson has always venerated the ladies, preferably trousered types with lashings of spunk. You can tick them all off: Isabelle Adjani in Subway, the felon-assassin Nikita, precocious little Natalie Portman in Léon, bande-dessinée adventuress Adèle Blanc-Sec. Why, in The Lady he even offered a po-faced serenade to Aung San Suu Kyi. Not a lot of submissive mannikins in floaty floral-print cotton skirts in that lot. Just when you think he’s run out of ballsy goddesses to plant on a pedestal, up pops Lucy, his most completely idealised heroine yet, glacially incarnated by – who else? - Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Edinburgh Festival debut was the most telling example yet of the 2014 festival’s disregard for conventional concert programming. A programme that began with Strauss’ Don Juan and Four Last Songs could easily have settled into a comfortable evening of large scale late romantics, but instead turned on its heel to dip into Schumann’s Cello Concerto before concluding with Percy Grainger’s riotous The Warriors. More enterprising than their Proms outing, this was a high octane collision of styles and soloists across continents and centuries that could well have Read more ...
Simon Munk
Don't believe the cute visual style – Road Not Taken is a cold, dark and punishingly cruel puzzle game. It will challenge mentally and emotionally too.You, an unnamed ranger, walk out into the snowy forest each winter to rescue children lost while picking berries. For 15 years/levels you must return these shivering bundles to their parents or suffer their grief.In the forest you dodge creatures and pick up and throw objects – trees, boulders, children etc – in a grid. Initially, Road Not Taken feels like a fairly simple puzzle. In order to reach a parent, you might need to lob a log one way, Read more ...
David Nice
By the time we got to the end of this Prom, with four of the five encores – the whole of Bizet’s Carmen Suite – cannily crafted to bolster the short official programme, most of the rightly euphoric audience had forgotten the most unsatisfying first half so far this season. Perhaps I start from an ungenerous standpoint. Of course Barenboim’s orchestra of players from Israel and the Arab world is a beacon of light, communication and collaboration in the worst of times, and when I first heard it in 2004 the intensity was unrivalled; last night he seemed to be deliberately dampening it down at Read more ...
fisun.guner
Eight seconds in and my toes were already curling. Perhaps it was the authority with which the voiceover delivered some juicy clunkers. “If you wanted to be an artist in 1908, Vienna is where you’d come to make your name,” it intoned. Wow, who’d bother with Paris, eh? Picasso, you idiot, messing about with Cubism in a Montmartre hovel when you could have been sticking gold leaf on your decorative canvases, à la Klimt. Or perhaps it was James Fox’s predilection for banal generalities – cut-and-paste pronouncements that could be applied anywhere, any time. The “insights” never really got Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shared yearning for a place to belong is not a revelatory concept, nor is it given new dimension in this gently saccharine piece, yet although the whistle-stop tour only covers familiar landmarks, the journey is a convivial one. Adam Mathias and Brad Alexander’s pop/rock-cum-contemporary Broadway show meanders through six vignettes – with a loose thematic thread – that take place at American tourist attractions; some are all too brief, others outstay their welcome. Graham Hubbard’s economical staging is mostly effective, bar some cumbersome box moving and the strange decision to keep one Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
MurleyDance is something of an oddity in the world of small independent dance companies, in that it proudly wears pointe shoes. Yes, this is – according to its own publicity - the only professional classical ballet company attending the Fringe, and Artistic Director David Murley is playing that uniqueness for all he’s worth, issuing a press release calling for more ballet companies to attend Edinburgh’s annual arts circus.Now, I like ballet. I more than like it. I watch videos of the Rose Adagio the way some people listen to Eye of the Tiger. But it’s got to be the right art form for the job Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One isn't long into the latest weather-related doomsday movie before a nagging question occurs: did the script for this late-summer image of elemental Armageddon at some point blow away? We all know that you don't go to these kissing cousins of Twister and the like expecting Chekhov or Mike Leigh. But Into the Storm is so peremptorily written that it's borderline hilarious. I would imagine it's not easy to effect ceaseless variations on "we gotta get outta here" and "is everybody okay?" - to cite just two of screenwriter John Swetnam's defining lines - but rarely does one get the sense that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In keeping with the trends of recent years, the Edinburgh International Festival is showcasing a small but eclectic dance programme, light on classical ballet and heavy on contemporary, international and fusion. After choreographer Mark Baldwin’s collaboration with Ladysmith Black Mambazo last week, the festival is now playing host to what may be the final performances of Akram Khan’s bill Gnosis, which was a huge hit when it premiered at Sadler’s Wells in 2009.The first half starts with two long solos in the classical Kathak style, Polaroid Feet and Tarana. Khan dances with ghunghru bells on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For an actor whose post-Potter CV has been so wide-ranging - an Irish cripple on stage one minute, a young widowed lawyer in a period horror film or the poet Allen Ginsberg the next - Daniel Radcliffe has developed a highly distinct acting style: self-effacing, somewhat shy, his head often downturned as if to deflect attention away from someone who, after all, was catapulted into stardom before he had even reached puberty. And then there's the stubble, itself an apt visual reminder that the onetime boy wizard is now a man.Such modesty has its charms, to be sure, but also its limitations, as Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Britain, as Tamsin Greig’s soothing voiceover told us at the top of this hour, is a nation in love with its animals. Still, it’s unlikely that BBC Two is betting the house on this docu-soap, which will follow the lives of 10 students through their final year at the Royal Veterinary College and which is screening every night for the rest of this week. The cynic in me expects that the channel had a few too many episodes and not enough weeks before the next series of The Apprentice was due to begin.Which is a bit of a shame because, although Young Vets is hardly reinventing the genre - unless Read more ...