Reviews
Ismene Brown
Empty vessels make the most noise. That pithy old aphorism floated into my head a scant few minutes into the much-heralded new work by the undoubtedly talented, but here way off-beam, Hofesh Shechter. And again, a few minutes later. And again, and again, as something like 200 drummers filled the stage and bashed away in earnest polyrhythmy. At the end of the 80 minutes my watch was worn with checking.Survivor is its name, and I absolutely don’t mind being asked to survive din if it’s worth it, if it changes you. We had been kindly offered the option beforehand of earplugs but it’s surprising Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon, a successful thirtysomething New Yorker. His screen presence is so appealing that one could ogle him for hours and if, indeed, that is his body sauntering naked past the camera, he is well hung as well as handsome. Like Hunger, Shame explores bondage, but of a different kind: Bobby Sands was in prison, while Brandon is free but imprisoned by his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The recent suicide of Wales's football manager Gary Speed prompted angstful outpourings about the hidden menace of depression in top-level sport, even though there was no evidence that Speed was a sufferer. But depression clearly is an occupational hazard among sportsmen, with cricket incurring a disturbingly high rate of player suicides, and in this film former England superstar Freddie Flintoff (real name Andrew) probed into some high-profile case histories.Boxer Ricky Hatton recalled how he'd been traumatised by being knocked out by Manny Pacquiao in 2009, and fell into a deepening spiral Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Richly nuanced in its sideshot view of Uruguay’s film world and Montevideo street atmosphere, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is a small film that picks up on suppressed emotions which are only released in its second half. Its black-and-white images (actually transferred from colour, in a manner consciously evoking previous eras) recalls something of European cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. The three non-professional leads live rather than play their parts, but it’s atmosphere, conveyed especially through its score, that gives the film its charm.Central character Jorge (played by real-life Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play. Those nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done will find their prejudices confirmed, preferring the imaginative reach infinitely more easily arrived at by the use of puppets on stage. On the other hand, no one does epic screen moments quite like Spielberg, which on occasion means wincing through various passages while you await this director's long- Read more ...
josh.spero
You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much as possible.We had the overly mannered Miss Havisham and Burberry scowls of a new Great Expectations on BBC One and an ever-so-mysterious and oddly adapted Tale of Two Cities on Radio 4 (I like to believe they wear costumes in the studio). Last night came The Mystery of Edwin Drood, about which the biggest mystery was what sort of ending would be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near. Scripted and shot by first-time writer-director JC Chandor, it was made on the very stringiest shoestring – a snappy little irony given the numbers its characters bandy around in the course of its Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all-seeing eye of civil authority blinks shut for good, leaving us gazing, alone in perpetuity, at one another? It’s the unsettling question posed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. Written some five years prior to Orwell’s novel, the play’s existential vision of Hell (famously defined here as “other people”) might not have claimed the same place in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since Prime Suspect introduced television viewers to the writing of Lynda La Plante, the concept of event television has lost a little of its lustre. Such was the remarkable heft of La Plante’s storyline about a serial killer and Helen Mirren’s performance as DI Jane Tennison that schedulers have ever since been sending out their pedigree crime dramas in great big lumpy chunks. Twenty years on, La Plante doesn’t quite kick down the door the way she used to. Above Suspicion is back for a fourth formulaic turn around the block and it’s going out not on three consecutive drop-everything evenings Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Western image of manga comes from the thick volumes of knicker-flashing schoolgirls and lurid s.f. teenage boys pore over, and the anime (cartoon films) which adapt them. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of five stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, framed by details from his graphic autobiography A Drifting Life, reveals a radically different medium. As a young man proud of an art form which was being attacked for corrupting postwar Japanese youth, the now 76-year-old Tatsumi coined a new term for adult comics, gekiga (dramatic pictures), in 1957. It took until the 1970s for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a moment some way into The Iron Lady when its titular heroine presides over a celebratory domestic soiree. Around the table are arrayed ageing Tory nabobs and their peachy consorts, one of whom at the evening’s end tremulously approaches her hostess, sitting apart in an upright chair. The guest (played by Amanda Root) sinks to one knee and, offering up a gaze that mingles concern and adoration, says, “I hope you appreciate what an inspiration you’ve been.” It’s as if she’s in supplication to Saint Teresa of Avila, not the woman who torpedoed the Belgrano and the NUM.This is more or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she ought to be doing as Lund and just as adept as spotting what no else can see.On live TV, days before the parliamentary election, party leader Nyborg horrifies her spin doctor by reacting to a clip of a coalition partner’s new position on asylum seekers by instantly saying she can’t work with him. Following her convictions and being honest is what she’s Read more ...