Reviews
graeme.thomson
Blondie are one of a handful of bands capable of producing a set list which renders rational critical argument all but obsolete. If they play the hits and they play them straight and true, there’s not really much to complain about. Last night in Edinburgh the six-piece line-up (half original members, half relative newbies) played (most of) the hits, and well, but let’s break it down to specifics.Five things you want to see at a Blondie concert1. Debbie Harry. A vision in peach with voice and sass intact, she remains a tough-but-tender front woman par excellence with charisma to burn. 2. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The ancients teach us that after hubris comes nemesis, and Luther's writer/creator Neil Cross has taken the lesson to heart. The big question hanging over this third series is, can the bullish DCI John Luther continue to hunt villains in his own headstrong, politically-incorrect fashion, or will he be brought down by snarling Detective Super George Stark, a bitter and vengeful man hauled out of retirement to bring Luther his come-uppance? He's played with spittle-flecked animosity by David O'Hara, and you can't help hoping that at some point Luther will drop him off the top of a tall building Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This movie has a couple of key advantages - it doesn't have any serial killers or zombies in it. It also pays the audience the compliment of assuming that it has a certain amount of intelligence, enough at least to appreciate being bamboozled by its relentless cleverness and convoluted trickery.It's a strange beast, though. I thoroughly enjoyed about 70 per cent of it as it took off on a whirling thrill-ride which seemed to defy the laws of physics and probability. But perhaps inevitably, all those spinning plates came crashing back to earth as director Louis Leterrier struggled to tie Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17th century.Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortalityMusic was part of the entertainment in brothels, bawdy houses, taverns, inns, part of the energetic goings-on of the working classes, and also profoundly integrated into the life and mores of the burgeoning Read more ...
Toby Saul
Paul Delvaux, the subject of a modest exhibition at the Blain Di Donna gallery in Mayfair, was JG Ballard’s favourite painter. The writer prized him for the creation of a complete world. Ballard found that world curious and inviting. He said he could spend hours gazing at the pictures wishing he could escape into their alternate reality. Ballard was made of sterner stuff than me. The places Delvaux paints seem quiet but harsh, not much happens but they feel menacing. They are sparsely populated and lonely. On the other hand, Ballard had a point about how compelling and intriguing he made his Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Sofia Coppola has become known for lovingly sketching out the tribulations of the rich and famous, and reviews of her 2010 Chateau Marmont-set angst fest Somewhere made it clear that critics’ patience with that particular seam had waned. But it has become easy to forget Coppola’s debut film in all this, because it doesn’t fit the pattern.While The Bling Ring deals overtly with fame and the desperate pursuit of it, emotionally it has more in common with 1999’s The Virgin Suicides, a wistful study of disaffected girls whose suicidal behaviour seemed almost involuntary, almost predetermined. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park" is a wonderfully grand name for the venue for this summer's Hard Rock Calling festival, but the reality doesn't quite match up. Rather than basking in the glory (and shiny new stadium architecture) of Mo and Jessica's triumphs from last summer, music fans found themselves a few hundred yards away on a drab swathe of stony wasteland, temporarily covered with artificial grass. Still, at least the sun blazed down and they'd got the beer tent sorted, with thirsty punters bundled in and out, several banknotes lighter, at unprecedented speed.Bruce Springsteen has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“It was a bit leary,” Georgie Fame recalls of a 1960 visit to Glasgow. “They had these cast-iron ash-trays at the Empire...” Teddy boys offended by Fame’s starry effect on the local girls led to these being skimmed at the band, bisecting a cymbal, he explains almost fondly, of the night police with dogs were needed to ensure that he at least left the city intact.That stereotypical picture of a Glasgow crowd was of course unlikely to recur now Fame is a respected 70-year-old, headlining the Glasgow International Jazz Festival’s penultimate night. In steep contrast, this festival's fans are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
An English Civil War horror film which looks as if it was shot on authentic location in both space and time should convince his widest audience yet that Ben Wheatley is a major director. Released in cinemas, on TV, Video on Demand, DVD and Blu-ray on Friday, it’s yours if you want it.It starts with Whitehead (The League of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith) and two companions fleeing a brutal battle. Wandering into a field which seems endless, all but Whitehead eat the mushrooms growing there. It’s when they happen upon O’Neil (Kill List’s Michael Smiley) that the screaming starts. He has papers Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at the age of 50. It was his first opera and his greatest. In its five acts, its visits to the woods of Diana, the groves of Venus, the fires of Pluto and the domestic meltdown in the house of Phaedra, is some of the most assured, inventive and stylish music ever written for the stage. As operatic debuts go, it is a miracle. That William Christie, the pre-eminent French Baroque specialist of our age, would be capable of summoning up some of the premiere’s dazzle was not surprising. But that Jonathan Kent would be able Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s part of the Lowry myth – the myth of many famous artists, in fact, whether or not it actually happens to be true – that he’s never been taken seriously as an artist by critics or by cognoscenti. Even the co-curator of this exhibition, T.J Clark says more or less the same. Lowry isn’t taken seriously, Clark has said, because anyone dealing with working-class life in class-ridden Britain can’t be taken seriously. Perhaps we might qualify this by adding that anyone dealing with working-class life from within it can’t be taken that seriously. Perhaps.Throughout the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
fisun.guner
David Mamet has composed a love letter to Phil Spector. It may not be the most mellifluous ever written, and its tone may occasionally jar, but that’s what this fictional film, which he also directs and which stars Al Pacino as the bewigged legendary music producer, effectively is. It focuses on the months leading up to and during his first trial for the murder of struggling actress and nightclub waitress Lana Clarkson, and ends before we hear the verdict (it’s a hung jury; a retrial convicted him of second-degree murder in 2009).But just in case there’s any danger of mixing fact and fiction Read more ...