Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
I have no idea why the original title of this fine first feature from Frenchwoman Alix Delaporte has been changed, from Angèle and Tony to the current one. Apart from the pointlessness, it also suggests the wrong tone entirely, since Angèle is certainly no angel.The film’s first scene sees Angèle (Clotilde Hesme) having sex against a wall, in a public space in broad daylight, with a young man we will never see again. The brashness is accompanied by a business-like ennui; her payment, rather fantastically, is an action man: yes, the toy.This twisted transaction sums the woman up. The toy is a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Two more contrasting pianists than Yuja Wang and Martin Helmchen would be hard to find. To move within 24 hours from the glittering assault of Wang’s technique to the restrained, almost introverted, Helmchen is an exercise in extremes, and one that left me yearning, Goldilocks-style, for a soloist neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. Dvořák’s Piano Concerto may have been a sober affair, but the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski bid farewell to their Southbank season in a blaze of Central European passion and music by Suk and Janáček.Anyone heading to Glyndebourne Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of the most colourfully explosive playing I've heard for ages. A good deal of excitement comes from the fact that Wang is a pianist that plays with her whole body. One gets as much of a thrill from watching the extraordinary lever activity of her feet, which must navigate pedals and five-inch heels simultaneously, as one can from her spidery hand Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton is a very funny man, as anybody who watches Have I Got New For You will know. But fans of that programme will find his latest live show, billed as his return to stand-up, which he started doing 30 years ago, a very different experience. First thing to report is that it's not really stand-up, more an autobiographical run-through of his life, using jokes, songs and sketches, aided by some chums from his improv group Paul Merton's Strolling Players.The players – Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson and Suki Webster, his wife – are, like Merton, dressed in pale grey suits, and introduce him Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The sun shines - a LOT - in the new Zac Efron film, which seems appropriate to a celluloid landscape shaded with loss and grief that puts such aspects of the human condition to one side in favour of the sequence of pretty-as-a-postcard images on which Scott Hicks's direction alights before too very long. Rife with portentous voiceovers on such topics as guardian angels, fate, and moving from darkness through to light, the film may appeal to rain-drenched spectators who can go on holiday simply by feasting on the visuals here; others may yearn for those halcyon days before Efron got all Read more ...
Daniel Ross
There’s a glamorous grubbiness to John Copley’s returning La Bohème that makes Puccini’s bawdy and romantic romp through the under-lit alleys of Paris’s Latin Quarter especially enjoyable. Beyond the beautifully mournful portrayal of the tortured artist and his suffocating love, there’s something devilishly attractive about it all. If anything, Copley’s direction (he is tonight celebrating 50 years since first directing at the ROH) could do with more grime under its fingernails, or a harsher and less pretty winter to really make his characters suffer in the opening acts. The attic space is a Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to think of any other records as exuberantly hedonistic as the handful of singles this London band rattled off at the beginning of the 1980s. Yes, they were accompanied by the then necessary punk sneer which said, This is all strictly ironic. But the music couldn’t lie. The music really did want you to go wild in the country, even if naughty Annabella Lwin just wanted to sneak off for a fag. Or was naughty Annabella just an illusion too? The 40something Lwin who skipped and twirled onto the Islington Academy stage last night certainly had as much energy as the 14- to 18-year-old Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Considerable quantities of bile have been hosed over Silent House by American critics, who have found its premise flimsy and its execution dismally predictable. It was made by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who were also responsible for 2003's low-budget hit Open Water. That was the one where a couple of objectionable yuppies were left behind by their dive-boat and we bobbed about in the ocean with them as they succumbed to terror, hypothermia and hungry sharks. Its seasick, hand-held feel lent it an unsettling edge, but ultimately it felt like a single clever idea stretched way too thin.Similar Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A comedy of alienation, estrangement, and magical metamorphosis – if ever there was a Shakespeare play made for the linguistic transfigurations of the Globe to Globe season it’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unmoored from the familiar English text and cast adrift in a forest of mischievous Korean spirits, you couldn’t wish for livelier or more bewitchingly colourful guides than the actors of the Yohangza Theatre Company.Shakespeare’s best-loved play gets a boldly South Korean re-write in the hands of Yohangza. Oberon and Titania become Gabi and Dot, king and queen of the Dokkebi (Korea’s own Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So, Rizzle Kicks, teenybop pop-hop, right? So what we’re going to get is a bunch of over-excited tweens fobbed off with pre-recorded backing tracks, a bit of choreographed dancing and maybe some balloons? Certainly the support acts, Josh Osho and Mikill Pane, while passably entertaining, adhered to a minimal set-up and plenty of basic hype man call’n’response, but Rizzle Kicks didn’t. In fact, they firmly booted pre-conceptions into touch.The duo of Jordan Stevens and Harley Alexander-Sule are Brighton’s own, via the Brit School, and it’s clear there are many of their peers here as well as Read more ...
Angie Errigo
When Zhang Dongyu’s charismatic Richard III rose from the dead to take his bows for Sunday’s spellbinding afternoon performance by the National Theatre of China, the actor paused, remaining on his knees to kiss the stage of the Globe. It was a gesture both charming and wildly popular with the sodden but appreciative audience, affirming that, for the guest artists from afar, bringing their interpretations of the Bard to the Thames-side temple is a very big thrill and emotional experience.(One has to guess by the way at who had which part, since the programme didn't marry the actors to their Read more ...
geoff brown
“I don’t want to be a Cyclops,” Pierre Boulez said in 2010, faced with the prospect of conducting a Chicago concert with only one working eye. Eye troubles, alas, have continued to bedevil the octogenarian giant of contemporary music, which is why his current engagements with the London Symphony Orchestra – there’s also a tour to Paris and Brussels this week, and a second Barbican engagement next Tuesday - have fallen into the hands of a younger composer-conductor of advanced habits, the admirable Hungarian Peter Eötvös.And what good hands they are: not perhaps as fastidiously incisive, but Read more ...