Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“A place of human bondage, a place of human suffering,” was how Hank Skinner described the Texas prison where he’s spent the 17 years. On death row, he's convicted of triple murder. The subject of the disquieting first entry in Werner Herzog’s series on condemned prisoners, Skinner was sanguine in the face of death but pursuing every means to prolong its arrival.Although unseen, Herzog was heard. The programme began with his voiceover stating that “the death penalty exists in 34 states of the United States of America. Currently, only 16 states actually perform executions. Executions are Read more ...
ash.smyth
In 1888, the extremely weird Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, the radical lefty son of a shipping merchant and a housemaid, wrote a play called Miss Julie about the conflict between the classes, between love and lust, between obedience and servitude, and between all the possible variations on these knotty and tortu(r)ous themes. The seemingly perennial “relevance” of his story has since guaranteed endless theatrical re-runs (including productions set and/or performed in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Mississippi), a host of Miss Julie television dramas, films, a ballet, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may think that, eight series in, applicants for The Apprentice would rein it in a bit. Overblown egos, fantastical verbal imagery to describe their always unique talents, hyperbolic self-assessment - we had all of those, and so much more, in last night's hugely enjoyable series opener. Welcome to another bunch of hopelessly, and hilariously, deluded men and women in search of Lord Sugar's £250,000 investment.No longer about a serious search for a young business person or entrepreneur - it stopped being that in, oh, series three, perhaps? - The Apprentice is now pure entertainment but, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There are many directors who profess (or have claimed for them) one sort of naturalistic cinema or another, from Ken Loach in the UK, to Bruno Dumont in France and Lisandro Alonso in Argentina. It’s an odd characteristic of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, that one feels almost discourteous to give them any such label. To do so would suggest at least some degree of artificiality, of self-conscious and discernible design; but when you watch a Dardenne film, there isn’t a single moment that doesn’t ring true.The Kid With a Bike is no exception. As with The Promise, Rosetta, Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.In late 2010, the website WikiLeaks posted around 250,000 secret communications between Washington and the scores of US diplomats stationed across the world, which were subsequently published in newspapers. Suddenly America’s private anxieties and political Read more ...
judith.flanders
Melodrama is not something we accept easily these days, tittering gently as the gore runs, moving restlessly in our seats as heroes or villains declaim to the gallery. So all the more odd, on the surface, that Sweeney Todd is the most popular of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. On the surface. Because, under the melodramatic posturing, Sondheim creates a cold, hard, bleak world.So not a barrel of laughs, right? Well, no, not right either, for Sweeney Todd is Sondheim at his fastest, his most ferocious, and his funniest. The melodrama of the returned convict Sweeney Todd (Michael Ball) cutting a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Civil Wars are one of those bands rendered suddenly white hot in the UK by a classy performance on Later with Jools Holland. They’re a photogenic country-ish acoustic singer-songwriter pairing whose style is just un-country enough to fit neatly alongside James Morrison on Home Counties i-players, but whose very, very faint tint of Deep South gothic also has the hipsters intrigued. They have sold out the Shepherds Bush Empire tonight and arrive on stage to enthused applause and yells of appreciation. The crowd are in their early thirties and upwards, straight-looking, and they love this Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Given the numerous and now pretty tiresome comparisons that pundits and punters alike have drawn between the Hunger Games trilogy and the inexorable Twilight saga, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine how the franchises’ respective heroines might get on if they actually met. One can’t imagine they’d see eye to eye on much.The Hunger Games’ fiercely self-reliant Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old with the weight of a broken world on her stoical shoulders, fighting tooth and nail to protect her family from starvation and violent oppression. Twilight’s meek, passively dependent Bella Swan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The eminence grise behind Touch is Tim Kring, who also devised Heroes, and it shows. Heroes was about a network of people with paranormal or superhuman powers, and so is Touch. In this case, we find ourselves in a universe which is underpinned by numerical patterns and mathematical probabilities. Only a select handful of humans can discern this astounding cosmic architecture and join the astral dots, one of them being Jacob "Jake" Bohm.Jake is the 11-year-old son of single father Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland), a former ace newspaperman now struggling to bring up a boy who has never spoken a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This is a great spring for dance-lovers. Tucked in for two nights at Sadler's Wells (catch it again tonight) is the return of Wayne McGregor's FAR, well timed to appear just before his latest ballet at Covent Garden next week. Uniquely among choreographers today, McGregor has two lives; two selves; two creative identities. The better known is that cool cult-leader at the Royal Ballet, with his slink-and-fidget on pointe that looks so trendy on classically trained ballerinas. The lesser known is the man whose imagination runs free and intuitively with his own company. Freed from the pointe Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I had a terrible fright last week. While listening to BBC London DJ Robert Elms introduce a track from the new Paul Weller album, Sonik Kicks. What I heard sounded remarkably like Oasis. It seemed that the man who once influenced Noel Gallagher was now so bereft of ideas he was reduced to ripping off Noel Gallagher. To my relief Robert Elms followed the track with an apology. He had pressed the wrong button and had played a Noel Gallagher track by mistake.If you've got enough hair to make it stand up at 53, why not flaunt it?By contrast Sonik Kicks actually sounds fresher than anything by Read more ...
ash.smyth
If you’re one of those readers who likes to believe that a novelist’s work and the life he leads have little or nothing to do with one another, then I trust you were watching last night’s Arena: The Dreams of William Golding.After an upbringing of lower-middle state schooling, immersion in the Classics and archaeology, uncompromising atheism (father) and superstitious eclecticism (mother), eventual Nobel Laureate William Golding was spat out into the world – with a reference from Oxford marked “Not Top Drawer” – chippy, resentful, and deeply susceptible to the wishy-washy of the unconscious. Read more ...