Reviews
Nick Hasted
Naomi Watts’s rare misstep with Diana is forgotten as this playfully provocative tale of female friendship and forbidden love unfolds. It’s an equally rare return to Australia for Watts, who plays Lil, whose deep childhood bond with Roz (Robin Wright) lasts into middle-age, as their respective teenage sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) join them in an idyllic life spent roaming freely between neighbouring beach-side homes. The ad hoc family’s laissez-faire attitudes are taken to extremes when Ian and Tom, both strapping 18-year-old Adonises, end up having sex with each other Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating and touched with despair, as Moodysson confronted how truly terrible lives can be.We Are the Best! is, in startling contrast, about a pair of 13-year-old punk schoolgirls in Eighties Stockholm, and fizzes with wide-eyed idealism. Based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel, Moodysson lets his young actresses Mira Barkhammer (as introspective Bobo) and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50, with stage directions that would be monumental if interpreted literally.Matthew Dunster does the only thing possible, paring it all down to the roughest edges, and does so brilliantly. Visually we've got exposed graffitied walls, wooden pallets and planks and a heap of tyres that define the prison parade ground and construction sites, where metal Read more ...
judith.flanders
Is David Bintley the one that got away, the wrong turning the Royal Ballet took in the early 1990s? I have long thought so, and watching their current triple bill, the feeling only grows. Bintley trained at the Royal Ballet School, graduated into Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham Royal Ballet), and became house choreographer for the Royal in 1985.Then, in 1993, he fled. Two years later he took over at BRB, and the man who should, probably, have steered Britain’s premiere classical company for the next quarter-century has instead quietly, and productively, guided their second, sister company in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Russell Brand, as I've written before, divides the room. Well, not the beautifully refurbished 3,000-seat Hammersmith Odeon in London, where his faithful gathered for the past two nights on his mammoth international tour, but more generally. There are those who find his – and I use the word deliberately – cocksureness irritating, or his loquacity a ridiculous affectation.Myself? No on both counts. Here is a man whose enjoyment of his sexuality is brazenly, comically played up, but like a little boy who has discovered his penis for the first time rather than some leering fool who wants to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
You couldn’t help marvelling at how good Alison Moyet looked. It wasn’t just her dramatically slimmed-down physique, but also the sense of her being truly comfortable in her own skin. Partly, that may have just been a result of an increasingly optimistic outlook. But also it seemed to emanate from Moyet's confidence in her new material. Since its release in May, her new album, The Minutes, has been well received. Could the songbird from Billericay also work that synth-heavy magic, live?Certainly there were no complaints from the audience. Indeed, at times, it appeared as if Alf could have Read more ...
David Nice
Milton Court’s new concert hall is a mighty small space, but the BBC Singers under their chief conductor David Hill were determined to launch their residency there with a musical epic of world events from Genesis to the post-nuclear era. And they carried it off triumphantly, if with some ear-singeing resonances, in American works from the last 66 years ringing with bright tonalities. The real surprise was to find Nevadan choral guru Eric Whitacre reaching for the stars as confidently, if not as consistently, as Steve Reich in his 1984 masterpiece The Desert Music.Copland did well by this Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's been nine years since Jonathan Glazer's last film, the courageous and underrated Birth. If that film had its moments of audacity then Under the Skin - an adaptation of Michel Faber's gloriously revolting novel - is a real feast of filmmaking flair, which elevates its director to the rank of auteur. Glazer resists the book's explanations, and ultimately its message, in favour of something more intriguing and unsettlingly ambiguous. At the centre of this cinematic cyclone is Scarlett Johansson, who's not only got the requisite visual va-va-voom but who turns in a performance up there with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jesse Eisenberg’s second film of the LFF is Kelly Reichardt’s low-budget, simmering thriller, confirming his work-led choices since The Social Network. “This was the only blockbuster I was offered,” he deadpanned, asked at the first screening’s Q&A about the giant roles that must be coming his way. “I sure was surprised when I got on set...”Reichardt’s follow-up to her Western Meek’s Cutoff is another genre rethink, following darkly introverted Josh (Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning), a rich girl determined to prove her worth, and morally careless ex-Marine Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) as Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Read anything about rock music in the Seventies - about British hard rock music in particular - and three bands are pushed forward as titans: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. However, while both Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin have gone on to receive widespread critical acclaim and massive sales since their glory days, Deep Purple have assumed the position of a guilty pleasure – at best. How is it that the band who produced songs such as “Black Night”, “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” have not been subject to a whole Friday night’s coverage on BBC Four?The line-up fronted by Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Playing against his wholesome appeal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's debut outing as a writer/director spins a comedy of internet porn addiction, love, family, church – and a man who loves to do his own cleaning. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Gordon-Levitt is Jon, a muscle-bound young greaser who loves the ladies but prefers his own hand.Between bedding attractive girls rated on a scale of 10 by his “boys” (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke), enduring stereotypical family meals (featuring a blowsy Glenne Headly, a chiseled Tony Danza and silent sister Brie Larson) and racing home to spend quality time with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The components of The Broken Circle Breakdown don’t seem as though they would make for a coherent whole. The film is Belgian with Flemish dialogue. Infatuated with bluegrass music and a mythical America, a leading character lives his life as a low-countries cowboy. It’s a poignant family drama. Yet little feels forced and nothing is played for novelty. You’d have to have a heart of coal to not tear up.Didier (Johan Heldenbergh, pictured on left, below right) is a bearded, Kris Kristofferson lookalike who beds down in a caravan on his run-down farm. A former punk, he tends chickens and a horse Read more ...