Reviews
Emma Dibdin
The question of what makes a romance click on screen – what combination of elements goes into creating that indefinable spark between two projected faces – is one of the most eternal for filmmakers. David Lowery’s wistful, lyrical neo-Western has just over 10 minutes to make you invest in doomed lovers Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) before fate and justice do them part, and succeeds with breathtaking ease.Their snatched moments together, like most of Lowery’s film, settle over you like half-remembered dreams, images that burrow deep into your subconscious and re-emerge Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I can’t have been alone in my struggle to keep the two of them straight in my head: there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down Jack the Ripper; and then there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down a modern-day killer inspired by Jack the Ripper. When Rupert Penry-Jones, dressed in suave black tie like the James Bond he never was, arrived at the book launch that kicked off this fourth series of Whitechapel, it took a few minutes - and a bit of stylised violence in an alley involving a kid in Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
While Lady Gaga’s conceptual antics left the crowd cold in Camden last Sunday, Björk’s Ally Pally spectacular last night showcased the musical artistry that sets her so far above other female pop pretenders. While Gaga’s affected oddities have always jarred with the mainstream sensibilities of her music, Björk’s strangeness perfectly fits and feeds her sound.In a career spanning almost four decades, the Icelander has matured from a punkish techno popper into one of music’s great innovators. A status confirmed by the global success of Biophilia – a twisted musical show and tell which boasts a Read more ...
geoff brown
Purity and holiness filled the air. Boy choristers in red cassocks filed onto the platform. The BBC announcer, paraded soon after, promised “choral music to carry us into the after life”. Had I come to the right place? Was I attending my own funeral service? I needn’t have worried. This was only a Late Night Prom, not of the meatiest kind maybe, but of a kind certainly to tickle the heart of Proms director and British music enthusiast Roger Wright. Two composer centenaries were neatly combined, both of them home grown, born in 1913. One was Benjamin Britten, fantastically gifted, nearly Read more ...
David Nice
May I be permitted a rude, opinionated intermezzo between reflections on Vasily Petrenko’s two Oslo Philharmonic Proms, and before Marin Alsop steps up to great expectations for the Last Night? Here’s another Russian in trouble, not for keeping mum on what ought to be said about Putin’s steps too far (Gergiev and Netrebko), but for talking inflammatory nonsense about women conductors – as opposed to harmless nonsense about conductors in general (the violinist who likes to be known as Kennedy, who we can only hope was also speaking nonsense about a possibly fraudulent vote for MP Glenda Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The news that Richard Curtis will not direct any more films after About Time (which he also wrote) was met with sadness in some quarters and undisguised glee in others. Curtis co-wrote Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Mr Bean, created Comic Relief and is an all-round good egg, but none the less stirs up real venom in those who find his other creation, the modern British romcom, sickeningly sweet.Me, not so much, but then again I'm partial to a bit of schmaltz and any kind of four-wheel event on film – christening, wedding or funeral – will have me in tears before you can say Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bruce Goodison has been responsible for some of the more impressive television of the last decade, sometimes drama, sometimes straight documentary, and sometimes drama-documentary, like his Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. He was back in the latter genre in Channel 4’s powerful Siege in the Sahara, bringing the heightened tension of fictional reconstruction to the story of the assault on the Algerian gas plant at In Amenas by terrorists in January this year. The ensuing hostage drama lasted three days, during which the Algerian side refused to negotiate, and left 40 of the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra made quite a splash with their Tchaikovsky symphony series under Mariss Jansons back in the 1980s. The watchwords then were freshness and articulation, a re-establishment of Tchaikovsky’s innate classicism - and so it was again as Vasily Petrenko stepped out as the orchestra’s new Chief Conductor. The opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony sounded so light and articulate, so suggestive of clean, icy cold air, and the clarity that brings that the subtitle “Winter Daydreams” suddenly seemed a little vague.When Petrenko’s poetic first clarinetist eased us into Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Hannibal Lecter meets Jason Bourne”: that’s how director Ryuhei Kitamura unbeatably sells No One Lives’ indestructible serial killer hero. But his film is at its most interesting before it’s clear who Driver (Luke Evans, pictured below) is, or where we stand with anything that’s happening.We meet this coldly urbane charmer as he motors through the American South, checking into a motel with a woman with an ambiguous relationship to him – maybe an accomplice to the murders glimpsed on TV, and certainly jealous of another woman who, we eventually discover, is being transported in the boot of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When The Newsroom’s first season started in 2012 the unthinkable seemed to have happened: Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network, had lost his mojo. Not even his previous, erratic show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, cancelled after its first season, had moments as excruciating as this. Set within a fictional cable news channel and centred on a ratings-hungry anchor man, Will McAvoy, who has rediscovered his fire for campaigning journalism, The Newsroom sought to combine the idealism and calling-to-account of Sorkin’s best work. But whereas Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Newcomer Ronny Chieng doesn't waste any time trying to get the audience on his side. He outlines his interesting ethnic background – born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, several years spent in the United States and Singapore, and he did a law degree in Australia - but that mix is distilled into his Chinese ethnicity and its innate superiority to anything Western.He says he's tried reclaiming the word 'chink', in the style of black rappers and the n-wordIt's a refreshing approach, as generally comics crave our affection. In The Ron Way Chieng runs through various stereotypes about Chinese and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so it comes to an end. The final Proms Chamber Music concert of the season didn’t offer quite as grand a send-off as the Last Night of the Proms promises to, but arguably that’s no bad thing. These lunchtime events might be slight in size but they are by no means a poor relation to the Royal Albert Hall events, offering thoughtful, miniature programmes that send us all back to our desks in a better state than we left them. Bidding us a tearful farewell (you can always rely on Dowland), Ian Bostridge, Elizabeth Kenny and viol consort Fretwork left us with a celebration of one of England’s Read more ...