Reviews
Veronica Lee
A move from E4, where sketch duo Cardinal Burns's debut series was shown, to Channel 4 is a significant jump. A bigger budget (one presumes), a broader target demographic and the confidence of your employers should act as a fillip to performers; on the evidence of last night's opener to their second series, that confidence was well placed.Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns have developed their craft since 2012 and a Bafta nomination; they've kept a few favourites – the Office Flirts, Banksy the suburban dullard who tries to daub walls by night, Yumi (pictured below) the giggly Japanese girl Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Best known for the Mortal Kombat twosome, the Resident Evil franchise (one of the DVD extras noted how the zombie dogs constantly ate off their zombie makeup) and big, bulging swipes at other genres with Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs Predator and The Three Musketeers, director Paul W S Anderson’s Pompeii has been neither a critical nor box office hit in America. It is not, however, without charm. Call him old fashioned but Anderson knows how to stage a fight and pace a story. We may well be seeing his work decades on, shown in museum retrospectives.Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) is "The Celt Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Who knew the human spirit needed such bureaucratic care? The celebration of International Jazz Day, founded by UNESCO in 2011, at King’s Place last night was nothing if not well cared-for. Sponsored SGI-UK, an arm of the global Buddhist movement, who were raising funds for UNICEF, proceedings are guided globally by legendary pianist Herbie Hancock, a UNESCO Ambassador for Intercultural Dialogue and Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. It bore the warning signs of art designed to appease a committee, and that’s a very different thing from making the spirit leap and the heart Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Juliette Binoche gives a powerful performance at the heart of a thought-provoking, very topical drama, whose flaws reflect its difficult subject matter.The Frenchwoman plays Rebecca, a highly-rated war photographer, whose single-minded pursuit of the perfect shot and the game-changing scoop has compromised both her attitude to family life and her professional ethics. When she nearly dies on an assignment, she is forced to take stock.The film opens on that assignment, in Afghanistan, where the photographer has been given access by terrorists to accompany and photograph a young female suicide Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no one writing more brilliantly for television at the moment. Sally Wainwright’s star has risen on the back of two hugely popular series that, more or less cheerfully, celebrate women of a certain age. After the female buddy cop show Scott & Bailey came Last Tango in Halifax, a romantic comedy for pensioners with troubled daughters. Put them together and what have you got? Happy Valley stars Sarah Lancashire as a copper in rural West Yorkshire, but turns out to be rather more than a plucky merger of Wainwright’s twin interests in policing and life in the windswept northern moors. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ah, revenge. Why does something so bad sometimes feel so necessary? Particularly in its most bloodthirsty form, it's a concept well explored onscreen, from almost every western and martial arts film to the final act of so many horrors – and the entirety of the spectacularly absurd TV series currently showing on E4, which is so obsessed with the idea it couldn't be called anything other than Revenge. But what do those determined to get their own back truly hope to achieve, and where does an eye for an eye actually end?Jeremy Saulnier's follow-up to the little-seen Murder Party deals with the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The teenage heroines of In Bloom may be only 14, but in the world in which they live – the film is set in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in 1992 – they are forced to act much older, to take on responsibilities beyond their ages. The action of the film takes place a year after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and their newly independent nation is afflicted by conflict, both on the wider level – the separatist war in Abkhazia is in the background, while queuing for bread involves exhausting daily squabbles – and on the smaller, domestic front, in which families are fractured. The “bloom” which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Policeman wrongly accused of murder" is possibly not history's most original story idea, but in Prey, writer (and TV debutant) Chris Lunt has turned it into a platform for a skilfully-controlled thriller that keeps your brow sweaty and your breath coming in short panicky gasps. It's greatly assisted by having John Simm playing the lead role of Manchester-based DS Marcus Farrow, since there's nobody better when you want a bit of earthy-but-sincere, with added soulfulness.Though we first met Farrow in the aftermath of a road accident, when he was trapped in the back of an upside-down police Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We have all learned to genuflect at the altar of Nordic noir in recent years – see The Tunnel, the Anglo-French remake of The Bridge, and the American Killing, not to mention the news that Borgen creator Adam Price and Michael House of Cards Dobbs are to collaborate. But the traffic is not entirely one-way. One series purchased by the Danish broadcaster DR is Hinterland, an intriguing and impeccably sullen crime series from Welsh-language broadcaster S4C. Its drama department is better known for the long-running soap Pobol y Cwm, but this is an altogether harder-hitting snapshot of rural Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Baroque operas are like buses. You wait years for some Cavalli to come along, and then three of his operas arrive almost at once. It all started with English Touring Opera’s Jason last October – a witty and endlessly shape-shifting work – followed by the Royal Opera’s glossy L’Ormindo at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last month. Now, undeterred by larger rivals, Hampstead Garden Opera continue the trend with La Calisto.HGO are a fixture of London’s fringe opera scene, staging considered, well-funded productions with strong young singers in the theatre above Highgate’s Gatehouse pub. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It might be putting it bluntly, but hell - American rom-coms didn't always suck. The screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s made bickering artful and aspirational and Woody Allen added his own neurotic spin in the 70s. Now the commercial end of the genre makes fools of us all with its desperate women, bland men and rigid, asinine formula. These films are an insult to the intelligent, ambitious or independent, and are at best a guilty pleasure.Modern rom-coms might be a joke but unfortunately they're not a joke with legs, as David Wain's Scary Movie-esque spoof They Came Together shows us over Read more ...
Andy Plaice
She drinks beer, drives a Land Rover and can never remember the names of her sidekick’s wife and daughter: welcome to the offbeat world of Vera Stanhope, deliciously imagined by writer Ann Cleeves and actor Brenda Blethyn. ITV’s Sunday night cop show-by-the sea, Vera, is back with a fourth series which will be welcome news for a loyal few million viewers and for the people who like to sell Northumberland as a tourist attraction.ITV may have forgotten to have given it an interesting title (she could so easily be either a Gwen or a Madge) but in tonight's episode Our Vera was anything but dull Read more ...