Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
Given the world’s most famous crime organisation hails from Italy, it’s odd that we associate the best crime movies with elsewhere, notably Hollywood (not least its quintessential Mafia films, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II). But Italian directors have been contributing some memorable additions to the genre of late. And following The Consequences of Love and Gomorrah comes the scintillating Salvo.It opens with a terrific extended sequence. As Salvo (Saleh Bakri) drives his boss (Mario Pupella) through the Palermo streets, he’s edgy, expecting trouble – as though trouble comes Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The newly restored Royal Festival Hall organ was inaugurated in a celebratory atmosphere with this gala launch concert, which also marks the beginning of the Pull Out All the Stops organ festival.The varied programme included works for solo organ, as well as combined with brass and choir, and included two world premieres composed specially for the concert, one by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and one by the late John Tavener. Four organists took turns (John Scott, Jane Parker-Smith, Isabelle Demers and David Goode), two conductors (Jessica Cottis and Sam Laughton), plus Alison Balsom, the combined Read more ...
kate.bassett
Maybe, just maybe, Noël Coward is scarier than you think. As a rule of thumb, when ghosts feature in plays, they're meant to be creepy as hell, calling for some horrid crime to be revenged, and/or a manifestation of the living characters' profoundly troubled thoughts. In Blithe Spirit – which opened last night, with Michael Blakemore restaging his 2009 Broadway production – Coward’s protagonist, Charles Condomine, finds that he's prone to apparitions. But he hardly seems mentally agonized by way of explanation.Ensconced in the drawing room of his timber-framed country house, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Director David MacKenzie has made a prison drama for those who don’t like the genre and an ace in the hole for those who do. Starred Up is an example of how quality filmmaking captures an audience no matter what the topic – and here, that quality includes skilful cinematography, a tight script and tremendous performances from both leading and supporting cast. The result is that we get to see how the horror of prison life reflects the violent pockets of society outside. This is a film that edifies and also gives hope – even if that glimmer is currently beyond the realms of reality.Like his Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Georg Baselitz might seem an unlikely connoisseur of 16th-century prints, but since the Sixties the controversial German artist has amassed a collection of chiaroscuro woodcuts to rival that of any museum. His interest in Renaissance prints emerged while on a scholarship to Florence, where he studied the work of Mannerist painters like Parmigianino, one of the earliest artists to realise the full potential of chiaroscuro woodcut, both as a highly expressive medium and as a means of transmitting his ideas. Supplemented by loans from the Albertina, Vienna, Baselitz’s extraordinary Read more ...
Veronica Lee
My, what an entrance Jack Whitehall makes on the last night of his first arena tour. The 25-year-old - not that long ago making his Edinburgh Fringe debut - rides into the arena on a Segway with music blaring and fireworks. But he may have overreached himself, however, as a whole tier was curtained off and the remaining two were by no means full.Whitehall has made his name as a posho comic who is always wrongfooted by his accent and his upbringing in a thoroughly middle-class household, and he continues to send himself up in Jack Whitehall Gets Around to great comedic effect. With his writers Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invincible is therefore something rare, for it turns social distinctions into compelling comic drama.Alan Ayckbourn is generally considered to be the master of this kind of writing. Given that, it is perhaps unsurprising that Invincible's writer, Torben Betts, has worked as a resident dramatist at Ayckbourn's famous stomping ground, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.If Invincible has a flaw it is that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking. With his fifth feature - staring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin - Reitman Junior tries something different, something initially more dramatic, but ends up back in comic territory anyway, albeit unintentionally.Set in 1987 during the titular US holiday weekend and narrated by Tobey Maguire (who seems to do this a lot - see also The Ice Storm, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In a Q&A at the London Screenwriters' Festival last year, Welsh writer/director Caradog James and producer John Giwa-Amu already had fans. If that Q&A is any indication, the team at Red & Black Films have a brilliant career ahead of them, all thanks to The Machine, a dark science fiction tale of artificial intelligence and human scheming that is finally released this week. Described by some as a 90 minute sci-fi Pygmalion, or a hybrid of Blade Runner and Frankenstein, The Machine is stylish and fantastic in the original sense of the word – slick enough to be impressive but not too Read more ...
David Nice
A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship? I ended up feeling that way despite what should have been the ultimate cataclysm of the Frenchman’s concluding infernal orgy.The sound of the orchestra is still sleek and bright. That paid dividends in a Bruckner concert I Read more ...
fisun.guner
Addressing a crowd of journalists gathered at the press launch of her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Yoko Ono begins by telling us how cynical she is. It’s quite a claim considering it’s just about the last thing you’d ever think to call her. Perhaps she’s finally tired of being dismissed as a naive idealist. But no, it’s just a roundabout way for her to express her astonishment at the extraordinary architecture of Frank Gehry’s glinting, titanium-clad masterpiece, which opened 16 years ago in this Basque city of northern Spain. Being “naturally cynical” she hadn’t, she said, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jane Birkin: Mes Images Privées de Serge / Françoise Hardy: Message PersonnelThe bond between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin still resonates. They met while on the set of the film Slogan in 1969 and were soon a headline-grabbing couple. Although they separated in 1980 and he died in 1991, Birkin still recorded his songs and continues to do so. Françoise Hardy’s public profile was more measured, but she was and is central to the fabric of French culture. The coincidence of these two releases being issued in the UK at the same time is about more than each being French. Gainsbourg also wrote Read more ...