Reviews
caspar.gomez
It is only when Peaches turns into King Herod that she really becomes the Peaches the audience recognises. A cheer goes up as she jeers, “Prove to me that you’re no fool/Walk across my swimming pool.” She’s mocking, leering, puffed up in a gold coat, her hair shaved at the sides and swept into a giant bouffant on top. In fact she looks more like the Elvis-ish Pharoah from Rice & Lloyd-Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat than any character from the pair’s self-consciously hip interpretation of the Gospels. She tops it all off by ostentatiously doing the splits to whoops Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With this year's Cannes Film Festival in full swing, the winner of last year's Best Director prize gets a belated UK release. Heli is the third feature from the Spanish-born, Mexican-raised Amat Escalante, following Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008). Set in a ravaged town in rural Mexico, Escalante's film shows a country enslaved by the drugs trade, its authorities corrupted and its people living in poverty and fear. By combining compositional magnificence and hard-to-watch content Heli gives us beauty intermingled with beastliness.Heli finds children growing up far too fast, while the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sure as carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, the 2010s are following a standard 20-year nostalgia cycle by embracing the 1990s as their "retro twin" decade. The quiet rumblings of the last few years – student Nineties parties and the reappearance of the crop top – have this year flowered into a full-on revival that has hairdressers fingering their razors (remember the Rachel cut?), thirty-somethings wearing double denim again, and Rambert coming to Sadler’s Wells with revivals from 1990-1 alongside a Merce Cunningham classic from the Nineties’ own retro twin decade, the 1970s.Four Read more ...
Naima Khan
As glad as I am that you've chosen to read this review, I can't help thinking you'd get more kicks out of the Daily Mail's take on Microcosm at the Soho Theatre, if indeed there is one. Written by Matt Hartley, whose Sixty Five Miles won a Bruntwood prize for playwriting in 2005, Microcosm is, as its title suggests, an attempt to home in on the paranoia and anxiety expressed across the country by right-leaning suburbanites. The play doesn't pull this off with any special skill and has to resort to the stereotype of hoodie-clad yoof to make its point, but it does bring to attention the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've had endless waves of vampires, zombies and Frankenstein's monsters, so why not bundle them all together under the same doomily Gothic roof? Welcome to Penny Dreadful, created by writer John Logan and producer Sam Mendes (who previously worked together on the Bond movie Skyfall), in which we descend into a "demi-monde" of monsters and necromancy in Victorian London.Though the series is named after the lurid serial publications popular in the 19th century, which featured the likes of Sweeney Todd and Sexton Blake, the trickiest part here is picking your way through the reverberations from Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
On the morning I visited William Forsythe's installation there was a fire truck parked up on Circus Street. Its crew were all in the Old Municipal Market, taking in the art and, like everyone else, interacting with the kinetic sculptural elements. It is the stuff of arts outreach programme fantasies.Forsythe is an American choreographer and sculptor who lives and works in Germany. He made his name at the helm of Ballet Frankfurt and has since proved himself an able visual artist, along with a radical director. Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No 2 previewed in Essen, began life as a Read more ...
fisun.guner
The best, and funniest, interview I’ve ever read – and I confess it’s attained almost mythic status in my memory – was an interview with the Chapman brothers by Lynn Barber. The brothers notoriously run rings around respectful journalists, but Barber isn’t one of those. So as she tried to elicit some properly confessional stuff from the former YBA artists, the interview got more and more surreal. In fact, it was pretty much a car crash, but a car crash that, through some writerly alchemical process, turned into pure interview gold. That interview was genuinely cringe-making, in the best Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz pianist Chick Corea put a bomb under his reverential “rare solo concert” billing at the Barbican last night, with an outrageously showmanlike variety performance that seemed to take in everyone from Keith Jarrett to Gareth Malone. Corea’s two ECM albums, Piano Improvisations (1971 and 1972), blazed a trail for similar work, music that was cerebral, even austere, from Paul Bley and the arguably even more distinguished Jarrett. Anyone expecting a similar experience last night will have left reeling not just at moments of sublime musicianship, but also at Corea’s multifarious Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When I first heard that the new play from Out of Joint was about the NHS I thought this might be a delayed result of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics: all those prancing nurses surely deserve a play of their own. In fact, the emotional fuel behind Stella Feehily’s new play comes from nearer home. In 2006, Max Stafford-Clark, her husband and the play’s director, suffered a stroke, which means that much of this drama’s depth of feeling comes from first-hand experience.The play tells the story of one family. When Nicholas James, a widower, begins to suffer prostate problems, he seeks Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the same Tatyana whose life depended on every word of her letter to straw idol Onegin at the 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition? Then, Ekaterina Shcherbachenko – she’s since dropped the first “h” in transliteration – gave the most convincing, nuanced interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s famous Letter Scene, his reason for setting Pushkin’s verse-novel about youthful idealism and lost illusions. She enjoyed some success in Dmitri Tcherniakov's strangely compelling Bolshoi re-think. Now, though she looks ideally young and vulnerable, it’s all semaphoring gestures and telephone- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For some reason this year's telly-Baftas felt a bit flat and weary. Host Graham Norton seemed to labouring for laughs (when he wasn't moaning about his own show not winning anything), and anything resembling a surprise was thin on the ground. When Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman, stepped onstage to present the Comedy and Comedy Entertainment award (one of the ones Graham Norton didn't win, since it went to A League of Their Own), at least you knew B Bad was going to win something. This turned out to be the International award, which was by far the strongest category of the night Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability. Here, in his second film as a director, consolidating his credentials as a director-actor after his impressive directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which drew favourable comparisons with Sam Peckinpah, he portrays a bitter, seen-it-all outsider, cajoled into helping a lonely 35-year-old, "bossy and plain" virgin (the splendidly unplain Hilary Swank) transport three insane married women back Read more ...