Reviews
Adam Sweeting
When he's not investigating terrorism and the security services, Peter Taylor can usually be found probing into the tar-dripping innards of the tobacco industry. He's made a string of documentaries about it since the 1970s, as well as writing the book Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco.He has even become part of its historical archive, and we saw him here in a 1975 clip when, as a keen young reporter, he stood up at Imperial Tobacco's AGM to ask the chairman how he much he knew about the impact of smoking on health. This new two-part documentary brings the story of the industry's dogged Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It's always a bit of a thrill descending to the Linbury Studio Theatre in the Royal Opera House. A black box deep buried in the ground, it feels far away from all the glamour and glitter, but also the prices and pressure, of the main stage, plus the Linbury's steeply raked stalls bring the audience amazingly - excitingly - close to the dancers. Last night, Dutch National Ballet’s Junior Company arrived as part of the Linbury’s Springboard series of shows featuring young or development companies, a way so simple and brilliant of bringing together dancers in need of experience and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For an artist who famously can't travel to America, Roman Polanski would appear to have an unstoppable passion for filming small-cast Broadway hits. On the back of Death and the Maiden and Carnage, both of which diminished their stage sources, along comes Venus in Fur, adapted from the David Ives play that had no fewer than three separate New York runs, making a star of its husky-voiced young leading lady, Nina Arianda, who won a 2012 Tony for her work.And in that same role as an actress who gives her director considerably more than he bargained for, Emmanuelle Seigner (aka Mrs Polanski) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark’s Broken Twin take the lead in the latest of theartsdesk’s regular round-ups of the new music coming in from Scandinavia. Debut album May is melancholy. Minimally arranged, with lyrics addressing the pain brought by the passing of time, bleakness in the form of metaphorical references to weather and what happens after death, this is an affecting album. The sense of a lonely despair is reinforced by the defeated, distant voice of Majke Voss Romme – who is Broken Twin. May might fit clichés about Nordic chill, but the album draws from and sits proudly alongside landmark works of the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Nodding to John Ford, Shane and almost every other western ever made, baby-faced writer/director/producer/lead Seth MacFarlane (Ted) replaces the shocking genius of Blazing Saddles with swearing and jokes about bodily functions in a fast, funny, get-it-or-get-out comedy that will divide friends, ruin families and make a lot of people laugh. Whether you’re one of them, you’ll have to watch and see.MacFarlane is Albert Stark, a frontier nerd whose refusal in a gunfight loses his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried). Distraught, he takes comfort in the friendship of unmarried Christian couple Edward and Read more ...
james.woodall
Caetano Veloso gets more extraordinary. After his 2010 show in London, one critic (me) said that at 67 his “wings seemed a little clipped”. Maybe that show, which was quite short, wasn’t the best he’d ever given. But maybe I was wrong. At 71, this slight man has not a clipped or cramped or confined thing about him. He seems to have got younger. He sounds exactly like he did over four and a half decades ago, when he exploded with Gilberto Gil into Brazilian music with, for the time, a shocking thing called Tropicalismo.Tropicalismo went right across the arts. Its musical bent shocked because a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ken Loach’s regular collaborators have said that Jimmy’s Hall will likely be the director’s last film, at least on the level of major projects. And his latest work is a big piece, both in scale and in heart; it’s not a defining work in Loach’s oeuvre, but more than a reminder of some of the familiar motifs that have recurred in a remarkable career that now spans half a century.The film it’s closest to is clearly The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Loach’s 2006 Cannes Palme d’Or winner (Jimmy’s Hall came away without awards from the Croisette last week). Its main action, starting in 1932, takes Read more ...
Mark Valencia
The rapid rise of Dutch baritone Henk Neven is easy to explain. He is blessed with instant charm and the voice, still attractively youthful in his late 30s, emerges full-toned from his slight frame with a faint, fast vibrato that lends it a distinctive tang. The Neven sound is sturdy rather than flexible, which may help explain why the first half of his Wigmore Hall recital was more satisfying than the second.We began in Spain, or at least in some foreign notions of that country. Two groups of Cervantes-inspired songs by French composers framed an absorbing septet of Canzone Scordate (“ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For the latest in a seemingly endless line of misunderstood cultural icons, meet Maleficent, the preternaturally smooth-cheeked anti-hero (or maybe not ) of the new celluloid blockbuster of the same name. As played by Angelina Jolie like some sort of Lara Croft-style visitor to the Disney live action landscape, this creature with the clipped wings isn't so much evil as she is ripe for revision in the public imagination - much as the wicked witch, Elphaba, in the book and stage musical of Wicked was before her.Maleficent may sport black headgear and let rip with curses but beneath the feisty Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When a big star meets a small play, they go one of two ways - they step up to it like a believer, or they clue in the audience that this is all a bit low, throwing everything they have in the toolkit at it, playing the actor who does what one can with what's available these days. Bakersfield Mist is the arena for a battle between the honest integrity of Kathleen Turner, the Hollywood film star, and what at the moment is the mighty over-acting of Ian McDiarmid, the renowned British stage and TV actor.To older generations Turner will always be the scorching, duplicitous redhead in Body Heat and Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Whatever “it” is, Alex Turner has it in his bones. From those first excitable live performances passed around online in the early 2000s, before Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys rocketed to No. 1 success apparently overnight, to 2014’s triumphant Finsbury Park headlining residency, the frontman exudes charisma live. Where that once came from his disarming lyrical dexterity and comparable physical awkwardness, though, he’s now a different character entirely: one with smooth hair and smoother hips, who floats through an hour and a half set in front of a crowd of around 40,000 like a living, breathing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
John Deakin was lukewarm about his career as a photographer because his heart wasn’t in it. Really, he wanted to be a painter, and so it was in spite of himself that he became a staff photographer at Vogue in 1947, acquiring a reputation for innovative portraiture and fashion work. Vogue’s studio was dangerously close to Soho and Deakin was prey to its temptations, his alcoholism and dubious friendships with many of its most celebrated and notorious characters providing a constant distraction.The tension between Deakin’s life as a talented, salaried photographer, and his role at the heart of Read more ...