Reviews
Adam Sweeting
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the rich," as Oakland's general manager Billy Beane puts it.A true story based on the bestselling book by bond-trader- Read more ...
fisun.guner
There were those who laughed and those who spat outrage when Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, said in a press interview that he was simply “doing God’s work”. Although Blankfein did have the insight to add that if he slit his wrists everyone would cheer, post-crash we would much rather our rich bankers expressed their religiosity by donning hairshirts and crawling on knees through broken glass - or at the very least stopped rewarding themselves so generously for the mess they got us in.Ian Hislop is no fan of the modern banker and last night he turned his chipper nostalgic gaze to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dream House’s crude selling point is the chance to see newly married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz co-star as Will and wife Libby, in the film they made just before their first date. In bed and around the home their characters have moved to with their two young daughters, they’re appropriately, easily affectionate. “We’re safe now Daddy’s home,” Libby brightly reassures, but this is far from the truth in a film which darkens intriguingly, till a jolting half-time twist unravels it.The rich man’s house where Will plans to write a novel seems a fragile fortress, with too many faces Read more ...
ellin.stein
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild. The other difference, of course, was that everyone knew what a hurricane entailed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There comes a point in a writer’s life when he – it’s usually a he – stops writing about life and starts writing about writing. With Ibsen this stage arrived in the self-reflexive rage and unquiet of When We Dead Awaken – the play the author seemed to realise would be his last. Brooding on genius, art and the clamour of the everyday, it’s an inhospitable work and not one we see often; London’s last professional revival was almost 20 years ago. In a new version by Mike Poulton (he of the Donmar’s recent Luise Miller), the play gains clarity, exposing the warped theatrical bones of Ibsen’s Read more ...
judith.flanders
When the subject of funding for the arts arises, the phrase “allowed to fail” is frequently heard: artists must be enabled to try new things, press against the outer edges of what they know. Enter Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Jérôme Bel, two of contemporary dance’s thinkers. They have tried, and failed, to choreograph the final section of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, and in that attempt, they have produced an extraordinary evening: the anatomy of a failure.As much discussion as dance, it begins with De Keersmaeker playing the famous 1950s Kathleen Ferrier/Bruno Walter recording. Halfway Read more ...
ash.smyth
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.In little over 50 years since Kwame Nkrumah's groundbreaking election as Africa's first black prime minister, Ghana has been through five military dictatorships and four republics. The most notable figure in all this chequered history is Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, who seized power in Read more ...
John L Walters
The 10-day London Jazz Festival, now in its 19th year, is a diverse and international festival that embraces the unapologetically commercial Jazz Voice, the outer reaches of (free) free improv and even Abram Wilson’s Jazz for Toddlers. Despite a line-up that’s both starry and distinguished there was no single name that might encapsulate the festival’s rainbow palette. You can get a taste of its breadth from the three giants competing for our attention on the final night: Brazilian pioneer Hermeto Pascoal, guitarist Bill Frisell and free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. I rationed myself to Read more ...
josh.spero
I had misgivings before watching Britain's Greatest Codebreaker last night on Channel 4: the advertised mix of drama and documentary tends to send a signal that neither half is sufficiently well done. And within a minute, it was clear that this was such a chimera: over-dramatic voiceovers for the documentary part, Ed Stoppard acting to the back row in the drama part.From a documentary, I want an understanding of the man's context, his career, his thought, his achievements. None of these were present in any meaningful way. There was no clear explanation of what his genius was - his idea of the Read more ...
Dylan Moore
What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough. The brooding landscapes of the remote Olchon Valley in Wales’s Black Mountains are put to much the same use as they were in the book: claustrophobic and accompanied by threatening storm clouds, they serve as a pretty obvious Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
People speak to her. It could be her mother. It could be a colleague. But she doesn’t react, continues what she’s doing. Which, usually, is leaving. It’s welcome back to Sarah Lund, whose watchability is in inverse proportion to her demonstrativeness. As recalcitrant detective Lund, in the second series of Denmark’s The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl is as magnetic as the first time around, whatever she’s wearing. Sweaters be damned, these two opening episodes were up there with the BAFTA-winning first series.After the lash-ups of the first series – the killing of her detective partner, serial Read more ...
marcus.odair
It’s nine days into the 10-day London Jazz Festival, and highlights so far include the double bill of saxophonists Steve Williamson and Steve Coleman, and the UK’s own Empirical supporting veterans Archie Shepp and Joachim Kuhn (the former a mellowed African-American firebrand, the latter a German pianist with all the wild intensity of Klaus Kinski in a Beethoven biopic). Contemporary crooner Gregory Porter, who played the "Jazz on 3" launch at Ronnie Scott’s, didn't do much for me, but it seems already to have been written that he is THE FUTURE OF JAZZ and it might just come to pass.The room Read more ...