Reviews
howard.male
I’ve long held the belief that much of what is wrong with the human race stems directly or indirectly from religion. But while this subject has had something of a renaissance in recent years, thanks to the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the absolutely central story of the global banishment of the Goddess - in all her many forms - has largely remained untold. So it was with some excitement that I sat down to watch the first instalment of this three-part documentary series.Historian Bettany Hughes' ebullience about her subject was immediately palpable. In the opening minutes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’ve seen a few American film and TV actresses grace the West End stage with surprising potency, but no one surely will surpass Laurie Metcalf for profound emotional truth-telling in Eugene O’Neill’s shattering family drama, given an unbeatably cast new production in London’s West End. Metcalf's by no means famous over here now, so long after her brilliant stint in Roseanne Barr's Nineties sitcom, but this is one of those performances you won't forget, up there in the Vanessa Redgrave class.The play, set exactly a century ago, famously portrays O’Neill’s own family, so much so that he would Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The Gospel of Us is a film about remembering. It is based on and was filmed at The Passion of Port Talbot, Michael Sheen’s triumphant theatre-event that took over his home town in south Wales to retell the Easter story this time last year. Writer Owen Sheers has novelised The Passion as The Gospel of Us. Continuing the chain of collaboration and adaptation, director Dave McKean has taken this title and managed the incredible dual task of producing a lasting memorial to the incredible events of that weekend while also making a film that stands in its own right as part of the pantheon that Read more ...
Marcus O'Dair and Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Sufjan Stevens is a singer-songwriter of startling scope, one minute releasing a record dedicated to the state of Illinois, the next a five-disc Christmas box set or an album for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Bryce Dessner is the guitarist in indie rock act The National, but also plays semi-improvised avant-folk with Clogs and works with leading classical ensembles like Kronos Quartet and Bang On A Can.Composer Nico Muhly counts among his collaborators both symphony orchestras and the likes of Bjork, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Antony and the Johnsons. He’s written soundtracks and operas Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspected that Julian Fellowes' Titanic (ITV1) would improve as it went along, but it hasn't. Sunday night's third episode churned along monotonously, listlessly keeping tabs on a list of characters who became less interesting the more you saw of them. We got a bit more of Italian waiter Paolo Sandrini and his instant undying love (just add water) for lady's maid Annie Desmond, plus the entirely spurious appearance of Latvian terrorist Peter Piatkow. Supposedly he'd been at the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911, but dropping him onto the Titanic from a great height made it seem as if Fellowes Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Cher Lloyd first appeared aged 16 on The X Factor with a storming cover of an unofficial bootleg version of “Turn My Swag On” - a song that peaked at just number 48 on the UK singles charts. Knowing so much about music at such a young age set her apart from the entire competition, and it’s no surprise that her debut album Sticks + Stones is the most feverish and bold set that anyone from the show has yet produced. Some 18 months after that first appearance, the singer headlined her first London show at a 2,500-capacity venue. Keeping it relatively intimate served a little too much as Read more ...
ash.smyth
As a prelude to last night’s John Sergeant Perspectives doco, I made a note of the four things I thought I knew about Spike Milligan. He was the writer and star of the Goon Show, on which my brothers and I were weaned (the grammar of the humour being obvious even to 10-year-olds, but the subject matter almost totally wasted); he was the author of a decreasingly-witty shelf of literary parodies; he once appeared on Paul Merton’s Room 101 and put his own home in the sin-bin (an early twinge of startled sympathy, there); and then his famously brilliant epitaph – “I told you I was ill” – Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The opening credits of US television’s latest watercooler export Homeland have proved to be one of the critically lauded show’s few divisive elements, yet also encapsulate what could be most interesting about it. The sequence – a fragmented, arguably messy blend of real newsreel clips, stylised monochrome footage, anti-terrorism soundbites and the odd persecutory whisper – isn’t really about national security or post-9/11 America, but about psychological illness. Love it or loathe it, it evokes the troubled mind of our de facto heroine Carrie (Claire Danes) more effectively than any moment in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like an adrenalin injection straight to the heart of a flagging horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods is fresh, funny and teeming with deliciously nasty surprises which - have no fear - will not be revealed to you here. Although it’s helmed by first-time director Drew Goddard (the Cloverfield scribe and co-producer of Lost and Alias), for many the key name attached to The Cabin in the Woods will be Joss Whedon, the film’s co-writer and producer. Whedon is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on which Goddard also worked as a writer), Firefly and the lesser but still impressively ambitious Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The first and most unusual aspect of Caro at Chatsworth is that it is there: 15 outstanding sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, placed in an irregular pattern around the formal 950ft early-18th-century Canal Pond, situated facing the southern vista of the great Baroque house. For these sculptures are tough, the antithesis of any sentimental attachment to a rural Arcadia, almost relentlessly urban and even architectural. Caro once used the term "archisculpture" for his ambitious work.Caro objects to being called a living national treasure or any such sobriquet, although at the age of 88 it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If Twenty Twelve's creators were looking for inspiration for their mockumentary about those making London 2012 happen, they need have gone no further than reading the headlines (now daily) in London newspapers about Tube drivers demanding more wedge to work during the Games, the Civil Service asking their staff to work from home and the London Mayor's transport officials suggesting that August may be a good time to find an alternative route to work - this after Londoners have put up with years of delays and cancellations while the system was being upgraded not for their benefit, but for Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Musicians can go one of two ways after a period of prolonged professional absence. The hiatus can either set them free (Horowitz) or screw them up (Pogorelich). In the case of Maxim Vengerov, we already knew that the latter hadn't happened. A successful early reappearance with the St Petersburg Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall a few weeks back - where he stepped in for an AWOL Martha Argerich - proved that. But the real test was always going to be his recital comeback at the Wigmore Hall last night. How has the Russian violinist evolved since we last heard him in London in 2007?A lot Read more ...