Reviews
Simon Munk
Today sees the first of the truly "next generation" consoles launch – the Microsoft Xbox One. It promises to revolutionise gaming. But in fact, it could well be the last gasp of a dying form of interactive idiocy.The Xbox One is perhaps the most intriguing of the new console launches – it does something totally different in controlling your entire TV. Aiming to be a one-box multimedia solution, the Xbox One will control your TV viewing, using the built-in Kinect motion-sensing and voice control (this service doesn't come to Europe until 2014!). So plug in the new console and you can play Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's great to see Robert De Niro front and centre in a full-sized role again, even if we might wish it hadn't been this one. Likewise Michelle Pfeiffer, stepping up to play the hard-boiled wife of De Niro's mobster-in-hiding Giovanno Manzoni. Twenty-five years later, she's remarried to the Mob and giving it serious bada-bing.With its twin (and legendary) leads in fine fettle, The Family might have been a shoo-in for the industry's various gong-circuses, but the fact is that it's only some hard peddling from Bobby and Michelle that keeps the thing airborne. It's directed and co-written by Luc Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there a danger that a show can be oversold? Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room sounds innocuous enough — until you read its subtitle: The Vibrator Play. Marketed as the most provocative drama of the year, its theme is female sexuality in the Victorian era, and yes, it’s all about the discovery of the joys of orgasm. Now premiering in London, after a Broadway production that garnered Tony nominations, does this production, which is directed by Laurence Boswell, live up to the hype?Set in a wealthy spa town just outside New York at the end of the 19th century, the story dwells in the home of one Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With the bell of his Dizzy Gillespie-style “bent” trumpet pointing skywards like a rocket launcher, Scott dominated the stage at Ronnie Scott’s last night, every bit the iconic jazz trumpeter. Instead of the clearly-articulated, pure-toned pulse of a Louis or a Dizzy, Scott’s trumpet voice is smudgy, occasionally even grimy, with chromatic bursts of notes, played so fast you can’t always hear the join.Yet at the right time, he has a tone as straightforwardly piercing as any of the twenties greats. Both as a player and composer, he straddles tradition and modernity, believing he can “stretch” Read more ...
Angie Errigo
The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.This second instalment — in what will be four films from the phenomenally popular Suzanne Collins book trilogy — finds Katniss, haunted by the ordeal of her inspirational victory in the 74th Hunger Games, back in dystopian, post-Apocalyptic Panem’s miserable mining community District 12 with her Read more ...
Mark Valencia
The alpha (Schubert) and omega (Mahler) of Austrian romanticism made for a musically satisfying pairing as the London Symphony Orchestra resumed normal service after its recent Gergiev-Berlioz marathon. Buoyed by the contrasting delights of a sprightly symphony and a weighty song-cycle, the spring was back in the musicians' collective step as they played as one for their principal guest conductor, Daniel Harding.Less satisfying were the evening’s vocal contributions, albeit for different reasons. The male soloist may be the junior partner in Das Lied von der Erde, but he has to sing over some Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty and ugliness, continually on the brink of change.Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose treatment of his cast and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
What does a stuffed penguin have in common with the religious concept of transcendence? Even less than you might think, it emerged last night, during one of the London Jazz Festival’s less well matched programmes, featuring one trio named after each item. Gogo Penguin, an amiable and talented group, were outgunned by the intellectually and spiritually sensational vision of New York drummer Jaimeo Brown’s improvised setting of sampled spirituals from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the Manchester band’s light-heartedness in danger of seeming simply lightweight. Gogo Penguin has risen quickly Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether you’re partial to Highsmith or Hitchcock, or both, there’s something deliciously exciting about the prospect of Strangers on a Train. Much of that anticipation lies in the intriguing question of which side of the material this adaptation will fall – with book or film, two very different animals – and curiosity as to the staging. "Hitch" has rather spoiled us for visuals. Or has he?The opening premise of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, in 1950, is a cracker. Two strangers meet on a train and fall into conversation. One of them, alcoholic playboy Charles Bruno, talks of the perfect Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The precise nature of the photographic portrait has always been contested, and this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize only fuels the debate. While historically photographers have questioned the portrait’s ability to go beyond physical fact to reveal a subject’s character, this exhibition of shortlisted entries challenges the notion that a portrait should tell us about its subject at all, while also raising questions about the ethics of picture-taking.Selected from over 5,000 entries by photographers from around the world, the winner of the Taylor Wessing Prize must convince the judges that it " Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one seemed quite sure whether it’s a journey of 60 miles or 40 from Harrogate to Halifax, but we’re going to be seeing a lot of the M62 in this second series of Last Tango in Halifax. It’s a journey in more senses than one, leading from the genteel prosperity of the former, where you’re expecting arrivals from an Ayckbourn or a Bennett play any moment, to a rural farm outside the latter, where the grim atmosphere rather resembles The Village (okay, pushing that a bit).Sally Wainwright’s story of septuagenarian love rekindled between childhood sweethearts whom life has separated continues Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The expected curveball came an hour in with a completely unfamiliar 14-minute song. Based around a pulsing bass riff, it was a deconstructed merger of The Rolling Stones’s “Paint it Black” and the Spanish side of Love’s Da Capo. A large contingent of the audience used it as handy toilet break.Television were never going to play what amounted to the equivalent of a straight greatest hits set, although they came pretty close last night at the Roundhouse. There was no “Foxhole”, but “Elevation”, “Guiding Light, “Little Johnny Jewel”, “Prove it”, “Torn Curtain” and “See no Evil” were aired. The Read more ...