Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified picture captions. They were also allowed to carry the photographers' equipment.Obviously the idea of being an object of reverence appeals to photographers. Portrait and fashion snapper Rankin has long admired the work of the great Life lenspersons, and in this film he reviewed their accomplishments and tracked down some of the magazine's fabled Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As gentle and emotionally affecting as they come, Argentinian director Pablo Giorgelli’s feature debut is the tenderly told story of the burgeoning bond between a migrant mother and a slightly grizzled, taciturn trucker, which gingerly moots the possibility of romance. It’s a wise and disarming tale of hope and unspoken sadness which, though you’ll barely notice it doing so, will work its way right under your skin.In Las Acacias Germán de Silva (main image and below right with Hebe Duarte) plays Rubén, a gruff and withdrawn long-distance lorry driver. As a favour to his employer he has agreed Read more ...
marcus.odair
A Hawk and a Hacksaw began a decade or so ago as a solo project, when Jeremy Barnes stopped drumming with indie-folk cult heroes Neutral Milk Hotel. It was with the 2004 addition of violinist Heather Trost, however, that the sound was found: a peculiar, and occasionally mariachi-tinged, take on East European folk.The pair have subsequently toured with Portishead and Calexico, and worked with Beirut’s Zach Condon on his bestselling 2006 album Gulag Orkestar. This, however, must be their most imaginative project yet: a live soundtrack to a 1964 film by the Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It catches everyone out that Duran Duran’s version of the hip-hop classic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” comes off so well. Not just affable entertainment but actually fiercely funky, raising a large section of the Brighton Centre to its feet. Duran’s 1995 covers album Thank You – from which the song comes - was once voted by Q magazine as the worst album ever, but looking around at the enthused reaction, including my own, that all seems rather irrelevant. Midway through their set, Duran Duran are a persuasive force.The four Durans – Nick Rhodes (keys), Simon Le Bon (vocals), John Taylor ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time towards the very origins of the art form he so reveres. Kids may love the sweep and scope of the visuals, many of them involving timepieces that whir and tick and hum, but Hugo at heart is an extended act of homage toward the miracle Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If anyone tells you that Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969) wasn’t a masterpiece then they’re an idiot. In fact, it was, more or less, the only successful use of an orchestra with a rock band ever. Now, 40 years on, a pensionable Purple have hit the road again with a full symphony orchestra. But they’re not playing the Concerto. They’re playing their hits. Critically, they’re performing them without founding keyboardist, Jon Lord, and guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore. So, at 8.30pm when support band Cheap Trick had failed to ignite the room, even with a five-necked guitar, a 12 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
John Carpenter's original The Thing from 1982 had punch, pace, shocks, horror, dramatic tension and Kurt Russell in the lead. It also had a great intro, with its scenes of an apparently blameless and photogenic husky being pursued across Antarctica by gunmen in a helicopter. How we cheered when the animal was saved. How we shouldn't have.It's indicative of the low calibre of this so-called "prequel" that Carpenter's opening now becomes a belated, tacked on ending, stopping (with slavish literal-mindedness) a few frames short of where Carpenter's film began. We learned in the previous movie Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are times when one marvels that some films ever get the green light; whether it's difficult subject matter, unknown leads or first-time directors, they each have their own, different hurdles to cross with studios more interested in the bottom line than creating art. But with a film such as The Big Year, one wonders that it ever got made for different reasons - for despite its A-list stars, a director with a successful track record and an unusual (maybe even unique) storyline, it really is one that should never have got beyond the conference-call stage.It tells the story of three Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A music broadcaster commented after last night’s concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra that all the hype, all the talk about the surf-obsessed, free-spirited leader Richard Tognetti, had left her half expecting them to surf onto the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. As they walked on however (decorously, and rather more smartly dressed than most English groups) we were reminded that there’s nothing gimmicky about this ensemble. They might stage surf-music retreats, play concerts in the Australian desert, but when it comes down to performance they are as ferociously serious as any of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Sex, spending, violence and debt: life in the city is lived raw in this caustic interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedy by Dominic Cooke. The setting is grimy, graffiti-daubed; shiny apartment blocks vie with sleazy strip joints and brothels, and the streets are stalked by gangsters, chancers, trophy wives and gypsy buskers. Shakespeare’s action takes place in Ephesus, a town “full of cozenage”; Cooke’s takes a tour of the urban Eurozone, with a flavour of Italy here, Greece there, winding up, for the maddest scene of all, in a location that looks uncannily like London’s own Harley Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Can the Hanson brothers ever rid themselves of the shackles of “MMMBop” (the 1997 hit that brought them global renown)? More to the point, should they bother to try? These were the burning questions I armed myself with as I prepared to watch a band whose progress, it’s fair to say, I’ve hardly followed in the last 15 years since their falsetto singing and rambunctious head-banging brought the world such joy. So, having done some serious mugging up, and listened to their back catalogue, I was interested to see where fortune would have taken the clean-cut trio with the flowing blond hair.As Read more ...