Reviews
Matt Wolf
Forget the action movie trappings of the aggressively titled This Means War: the latest film from the enigmatically named McG has a plot that Noel Coward might well have loved. Whether Sir Noel would have approved of the witless dialogue and the decidedly coy sexual politics is another thing altogether, though he doubtless would have admired the three stars' physiques. Audiences may well respond in kind provided they check in their brains at the door, though as an illustration of the ongoing Hollywoodification of England's own Tom Hardy, the film provides instructive viewing for that reason Read more ...
judith.flanders
The one thing you can count on at an Alston evening is the quality of the music: everything Alston does, and everything he creates for his dancers, revolves around the music. In his wonderful Roughcut, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape begins before the house lights dim, his sharp, vibrant phrases giving a sense of urgency to the audience before they have even settled down.Once the curtain goes up, Alston and his dancers manage the extraordinary feat of making the complex layers of music (the clarinet, played by the splendid Roger Heaton, is soon joined by James Read more ...
judith.flanders
A show about lines: my tiny minimalist heart goes pitter-patter. And with good cause. Lines can be a bit blah – a quick scribble, and you’re on to the next thing. But they can also by their very simplicity, their irreduceability, lay bare some fundamentals, can draw a line under (yes, lots of “line” jokes available: line right up!) what really matters.Two of the artists at the core of minimalism set the tone. Sol LeWitt produced instructions for wall drawings of lines which were invariably minutely detailed, yet also magically permitted great freedom for the person actually “transcribing” his Read more ...
ash.smyth
Zach Braff’s debut theatre piece begins with Charlie (Mr Braff himself), in an empty house, swinging from a noosed extension lead, attempting to do the big FO while f(l)ailing to extinguish a cigarette and listening to the bagpipes on a record-player. At which crucial moment he is interrupted by Emma, a flibbertigibbety-type Brit realtor; then Myron, the local drama-teacher-turned-fire-chief/drug-kingpin; and then Kim, a callgirl. All of whom seem hell bent on spoiling Charlie’s big day.So far, then, so full of comic potential – and indeed, with All New People, both as script-writer and as Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In the UK we call them ambulance-chasers, those personal injury lawyers who prey on the victims of accidents, encouraging them to seek compensation, in return for a tidy fee. The Argentines, as the title of Pablo Trapero’s new film suggests, have their own word for this mucky breed – vultures.Deeply flawed Buenos Aires lawyer Héctor Sosa (Ricardo Darín, pictured below) even looks a little vulture-like, with his hooked nose and hungry, ravaged features. Darín, Argentina’s greatest actor, has the perfect face for seedy no-hoper:; when he played a grifter in the seminal Nine Queens, he resembled Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Love it or hate it Christopher Alden’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at English National Opera last year made quite the impact, banishing any fey woodland glades and general waftiness from Benjamin Britten’s opera and embracing a rather more astringent visual aesthetic. It’s unfortunate then that Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama should follow so closely behind, begging comparisons that don’t best serve his World War II interpretation. A lack of directorial coherence mars what visually and vocally is a fine evening, and while Shakespeare may restore order Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Red Army Faction was Germany's key revolutionary force for a decade from the late 1960s onwards, and its story, especially the characters of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, has proved highly attractive to the country's filmmakers. Uli Edel’s 2008 The Baader Meinhof Complex told the key political story in lengthy detail through to its end in 1977 when four of its key members (in the official version) committed suicide in prison. One of them was Gudrun Ensslin, who became radicalized after she became a lover of Andreas Baader.In his first feature documentarist Andres Veiel tells a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A remarkably tidy parade of thousands upon thousands of objects, neatly grouped into their categories – soap, plastic bottles, cooking pots and utensils, empty cardboard boxes, shoes, flower pots, gloves, string, to name but a few – Waste Not is a deeply disturbing yet affecting display of the obsessive accumulation of sheer stuff. These are the household goods of Zhao Xiang Yuan, the mother of the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong, collected over five decades of family life. Xiang Yuan and her family suffered the usual outrageous reversals of fortune common to most of the Chinese Read more ...
geoff brown
Why has the Royal Opera not staged Dvořák’s Rusalka before now? I know there have been plausible distractions: the lock grip of Italian repertoire, fear of singing Czech, fixation with Dvořák as an instrumental composer, two world wars, a shortage of good water nymphs. But Sadler’s Wells gave the British premiere of this musically sumptuous "lyric fairytale" (its official description) as long ago as 1959. Since then the Little Mermaid-ish drama of the water nymph longing for human love has visited English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Opera North, Grange Park, Wexford; I could Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It ended with Annie Clark on her back, being passed around the audience like a volleyball. Scrubbing at her guitar, the squall didn’t stop. As encores go it was pretty memorable, the confirmation that Clark – as St Vincent – has arrived. Earlier in the set she’d remarked that she was last at the Empire four years ago, playing in The National. Now she’s selling it out.Her success, including the appearance of last year's Strange Mercy on many best-of-2011 lists, has come via a circuitous route. Born in Oklahoma and now living in Brooklyn, Clark graduated from high school in Texas and entered Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The scene is ineffably English. The thock of mallet on ball, the clack of ball through hoop, the gentle sun adding a benediction. A senior gent in natty English threads looks on from the pavilion, a member of this club for 55 years. Everything is just so, apart the setting: Cairo. “Was there nothing good the British did here?” wondered Jeremy Paxman. Apart from croquet. “All kinds of imperialism is bad,” ventured his host with a wily smile.Technically Egypt wasn’t part of the empire. We just hung around there for 70 years to keep an eye on the canal connecting the tiny island called home with Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to imagine a bad documentary on David Hockney. Hockney always gives good Hockney: the quotable sentences come thick and fast; his enthusiasm for his craft is never less than exhilarating, and like that other great British artist of his generation – Francis Bacon – he’s always been better at getting to the crux of why and how he makes pictures than any of his commentators have. And yet… But we’ll get to the “and yet” in a moment.In last night’s Culture Show Special, the amicable Yorkshireman was gently quizzed by his friend, the journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr. But what added Read more ...