Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.In this series three opener, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) became a new father, after his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) had very nearly given birth in the back of Read more ...
James Williams
There was something of a Canadian invasion at the O2 last night, but this is about as far from lumberjacks and mounties as it comes. Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd, is getting straight to the point. “I want to get on top, London!” This may of course simply be a metaphor for his and mentor Drake’s meteoric rise to fame, but Tesfaye does seem to like saying naughty things.All sleaze aside, though, his sleek, futuristic brand of R&B tonight is bolstered by a backing band of considerable talent, making songs from his recent Kiss Land project sizzle and pop in the cavernous O2 arena Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Initiating the tercentenary of the arrival of the Hanoverians and thus the foundation of our German royal family, this startling and beguiling exhibition of the work of the polymath William Kent (1685-1748) crams 200 objects – drawings, paintings, plans, photographs, furniture, illustrations, models – into an illusionistic array of gauzy rooms, evocative of real interiors. The profusion is deliberate. Long before art nouveau, Kent’s interiors left no surface without rich ornament. His own admirations are clear; the exhibition shows us at its very beginning marble busts modelled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jon Robin Baitz learnt his craft writing on big American television shows including The West Wing and he created Brothers & Sisters, and Other Desert Cities - his first Broadway play - is another family drama with a political edge. The title comes from the signs saying “Palm Springs/Other Desert Cities” on motorways leading into the Coachella Valley, a vast sprawl of nine cities that have a profusion of resort hotels, spas and golf courses. A two-hour drive from Los Angeles, the area is both a playground for Angelenos, and the place where many choose to live when they retire.So Read more ...
Andy Plaice
It was something of a relief when the police were finally alerted to the sinister motives of Malcolm Webster in last night’s second episode of The Widower. ITV’s three-part dramatisation of the killer’s exploits (he was convicted in 2011 of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second) raises interesting questions not only concerning how we tell stories about crimes from real-life, but whether we actually tell them at all.Part One had ended with Webster's first wife dead following the staging of a car crash. Malcolm had miraculously survived as the vehicle started to burn, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.However, Theroux's film suggested that this wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the city's dog-lovers, who appeared in many colourful guises. Louis spent some time riding around the sullen, menacing Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s sleazy being green. In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit The Frog stars as both himself and evil Constantine, a frog that would annex the Ukraine if he could, in a star-studded follow-up to the enjoyable hit The Muppets. Like the feature of 2011, Muppets Most Wanted has some terrific songs, even if it lacks the momentum and funny logic of its predecessor. Nevertheless, given a little time, the frog and his buddies warm up, brush off the dust and get down to the kind of Muppetry we crave. It’s one of those films you’re not sure about, but as you leave the cinema you'll be singing the songs as Read more ...
Naima Khan
Performed by all-female theatre company, Fluff, Sarah Sigal's take on feminism through the ages drops us in and out of three time scenarios: the Royalist household of Lady Anne in 1646, the adventures of fashion journalist Pamela in 1936, and the discourse between corporate manager Celia and her recovering addict friend Lucy in 2014. Sound familiar in both structure and content? Well, if you follow the work of Caryl Churchill, it largely is. The play's elliptical scenes and female-centric focus suggest Churchill's contemporary classic Top Girls, to which Sigal further adds an aspect not Read more ...
fisun.guner
Has any artist ever painted an apple that gets as close to the essence of appleness as Cézanne? I don’t think so. Cézanne’s apples are the equivalent of William Carlos Williams’s cold, sweet plums. Not only can you almost taste Cézanne’s apples but you can sense their weight, their density. And in your mind, you touch their smooth, waxy skins.Cézanne’s still-life oil paintings are a thing apart. Those simple table-top arrangements are, for me, the most seductive of anything he ever painted. But of watercolour, that other medium he painted them in, he thought very little. His sketchy Read more ...
ellin.stein
If Errol Morris lived in Middle Earth he’d make a documentary about Sauron. If he taught at Hogwarts, he’d be turning his cameras on Voldemort. You get the idea. Morris is drawn to Dark Overlords, powerful men of steely ambition and ego, convinced of their own rightness even after events have proven that their wrong-headed ideas have demonstrably contributed to the sum of human misery.He can also claim to be the only person to have made documentaries about not one but two former U.S. Defense Secretaries (Ministers), the pinnacle of the Pentagon. The first was 2003’s Oscar-winning The Fog of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Lou Adler – A Musical HistoryLou Adler is more than a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry. Akin to a whole spool of yarn, he helped Carole King realise the monumental Tapestry, was integral to making 1967’s epochal Monterey Festival happen, brought The Mamas & The Papas to the world and co-wrote Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”. Adler is a towering figure in music. Lou Adler – A Musical History is an overview, collecting records he masterminded. A reminder that the achievements did not spring from nowhere, the disc frames this man within the world he operated in.Many names Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The core pulse of Tudor polyphony is often deliciously slow. It gets down to a mesmeric pace of about 30 beats per minute. The listener just has to succumb to it, and the experience, even in the virtually unheated Cambridge College chapel where The Sixteen began its 2014 Choral Pilgrimage last night, was pure pleasure.The names of the three composers whose work form the Sixteen's programme for the concerts of this year's Pilgrimage will be unfamiliar, but Davy, Sheppard and Mundy are all important precursors of Byrd and Tallis, and the sequence of works has been meticulously prepared to Read more ...