Reviews
aleks.sierz
Walkouts are always intriguing. When audience members leave before the final curtain, it’s usually a sign that the play is too powerful, or too scandalous, or maybe just not very good. After reports that during previews many people aren’t returning after the interval in this revival of Howard Barker’s 1985 play, Scenes from an Execution, you have to wonder — is it the play or the production? Or is the National’s audience too conservative to appreciate this remarkable play?Certainly, the drama is not just a soapy little entertainment. It’s a hugely ambitious and intricately written story set Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Like a Dirty Daddy Harry, Taken saw bad people get rough justice: if you kidnap a covert operator’s daughter, you'll be mercilessly tracked down and dispatched with giddy, impossible violence. In Taken 2, the whole family gets 'taken', making this sequel a study in scary togetherness. Conceived as a schlocky action vehicle for durable star Liam Neeson, Taken was a surprise hit. Doing what every good sequel should, Taken 2 puts the audience back into the exciting world of the first film where they can enjoy those lovable characters as well as a new twist on the story. It also prods them to Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Resident Evil ****There’s a war going on in the world of Resident Evil, and it’s not between soldiers and zombies. In one camp there are those who long for the good old days of horror-filled fixed-perspective wanderings through zombie-infested mansions, while in the other are those who are more open to the fact that franchises have to evolve to survive.Resident Evil 6 is set a few years after the action of Resi 5 and brings the characters of the previous games together into four separate but interweaving story campaigns. This narrative chop-up is a deliberate move by Capcom to offer Read more ...
stephen.walsh
For some reason, the Welsh have revived their Così fan tutte, from last year, with positively unseemly haste – if not quite so unseemly as the haste with which their La Bohème, from this spring, was wheeled back on last month barely three months after its first airing. It looks as if the outgoing intendant John Fisher, never notable for lively repertory planning, was either clearing his desk, or had simply scarpered. His successor, David Pountney, has bravely been much in evidence on company first nights this year, but cannot yet be blamed for what he, and we, are hearing and seeing.This Così Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Being dead – however recently – doesn’t necessarily mean reputations are immune from being rewritten or trampled on. Best Possible Taste was scheduled just before another channel’s documentary on Kenny Everett's fellow TV personality and BBC DJ Jimmy Savile, which raised allegations of his sexual assault of minors. Savile has been dead a year. Everett for seventeen.“We must construct our own universe,” Everett was told by his wife Lee in the latest BBC Four bio-drama based around the private lives (and pain) of Britain’s popular entertainers. Everett was lucky to get this treatment. That Best Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Our Boys shines a light on young war veterans in a military hospital in the early Eighties. A hit at the Donmar Warehouse in 1995, this new revival balances brash humour alongside some moving moments, but ultimately lacks punch.Jonathan Lewis has based Our Boys on his experience as an army scholar. Just before he was due at Sandhurst he was diagnosed with a pilonidal sinus, an infected tract under the skin beneath the buttocks: the same condition is suffered by the officer-in-training in the play. Lewis spent time in a military ward, before leaving to become an actor. He never made it to Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Instead dapper Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a more than satisfactory replacement for the great Neeme Järvi - ran through this nightmarish world like an open razor, every cutting gesture aimed with deadly accuracy, having allocated the spiritual healing to a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Midway through their set Gallows are expending a mass of energy, attacking their instruments and jerking about like possessed men in a jam-packed venue yet, unless you are one of their devotees, moshing like Bedlam or hanging from the rafters gesticulating, it’s not especially engaging. It should be, with such energy and dynamism on show but their music attempts nothing so much as to fulfill the expectations of those who already like them, possibly in an ever-diminishing manner.Gallows are a punk band from Watford and when they first made it big in 2007, they were a breath of fresh air, angry Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This year’s glut of haunted house films have been unusually, often painfully intimate. Elizabeth Olsen’s pure, panting terror in Silent House, like Gretchen Lodge’s depraved unravelling in Lovely Molly, added to the sub-genre’s essential horror: the thought that when you shut your front door you’re locking something awful inside, not out; that your home, every creaking floorboard and attic thud of it, isn’t a safe haven but an insidious foe. Even as a long-time horror film lover, I’ve found them at times almost unbearably tense, creeping under my skin in minutes.Sinister seems set to push the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’ve seen Akram Khan’s Desh twice. The first time I sat in my favourite spot – the front row – close enough to smell the sweat drenching his shirt as the demanding physicality of this ambitious solo work became evident. But I could also see him apparently lip syncing to recordings of his own voice and, despite the potency of his close physical presence, this created a profound sense of disjunction, as though he were emotionally disengaged from the recollections and stories being told. The work is autobiographical or, rather, an exploration of identity – of what it means to be born of Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Teenage angst is a tough thing to get right on screen. It's perenially popular territory for dramatic writers in part because of the heightened emotions it allows for – as Joss Whedon once phrased it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series which was in itself an extended metaphor for the horrors of high school, "everything feels like life or death when you're 16 years old."But push that inevitably narcissistic young worldview too far, and and your audience will be alienated, regardless of how appealing your performers are. Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of his own late Nineties novel Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his romantic tragedy. But if it’s admirably courageous, truth be told, it makes for rather punitive viewing.The new translation of Racine's 1670 text, which was originally composed in Alexandrine couplets, is by Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker-winning novelist. In unrhymed pentameter, it is cool, pellucid, direct; what it is not, and perhaps does not Read more ...