Reviews
Nick Hasted
Lars von Trier wants us to see the big picture. When Terrence Malick similarly returned cinema to the cosmic with The Tree of Life, he tried to make us feel the terrifying wonder of creation as much as death. The prelude to Von Trier’s new film instead sees Earth smashing into an indifferent planet 10 times its size. What’s more, when that planet, Melancholia, hoves into view from its hiding place behind the sun, the famously depressive director has suggested the catastrophe is a symptom, even affirmation, of his heroine Justine’s malaise. You can imagine her saying with grim relish as she Read more ...
David Nice
It was bound, in vocal terms, to be a case of Beauty and the Beast. Stefan Vinke, though useful for killer heroic-tenor parts like this one in Mahler’s Song of the Earth, has made some of the ugliest sounds I’ve heard over the past few seasons, ineffable mezzo Alice Coote many of the loveliest, and with great communication, too. The wild card was fitfully engaged old-master conductor Lorin Maazel: would he stop dragging the Philharmonia behemoth-like behind him and let it be the bird of paradise Coote needed to share her deepest meditations?At first, that seemed unlikely. Maazel (pictured Read more ...
josh.spero
Art about art is one of my favourite kinds of art. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, films - works of art which talk about what art is, what the image is, what art can represent and what it can't - all appeal. It is not just a picture of some prostitutes and some African masks - it is Les demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso and it blows apart the boundaries of painting by cramming three dimensions into two. And then there is Frank Stella, in a new survey of his career at Haunch of Venison, the ultimate modern artist-about-art - and I'm left cold.I know that Stella is someone contemporary art Read more ...
josh.spero
I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.A compact history of the British Board of Film Censorship (it became the less finger-wagging Classification in 1984), made with extensive access to its letters Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting and the result – Terrible Advice – receives its world premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.Rubinek subtitles his work “A Dark, Dirty and Dangerous Play” and there are certainly nods to the first two elements, but its dangerousness rather escapes me. It concerns the story of two middle-aged men, now living in what is presumably Los Angeles, who met at college; child-man Jake (Scott Bakula, Read more ...
ash.smyth
John Madden's mainstream remake of Israeli thriller Ha-Hov – The Debt – features three Mossad operatives despatched to Sixties Berlin on an Eichmann-style mission to kidnap a former Nazi and escort him to Israel for trial.In pursuit of Dieter Vogel, "the Surgeon of Birkenau", Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain), Stephan Gold (Marton Csokas) and David Peretz (Sam Worthington) each carry the requisite array of general post-Holocaust baggage and individual character flaws, which, in the fullness of time, incline them predictably to a messy love triangle and an even messier Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The first half-hour of Edouard Lock’s nameless new piece is some of the most thrilling dance imaginable; dynamic, mercurial, as men and women convulsed with frenzy fight each other in stark spotlights in the dark. They’re dressed in black, so that each flail, each clash, each twitch of a pink pointe shoe trails an outline of blinding light and throws a flashing black shadow. Mile-a-minute in the dark, it’s terrifying.Even more so given that the music being churned through some particularly emulsifying sound system from the small live band behind is neatly based on samples of Purcell’s Dido Read more ...
howard.male
Dinosaurs. Even just seeing that word takes me back to a letter my seven-year-old self wrote to Blue Peter humbly begging them for “More dinosaws pleez”. Back then, a sighting of these lumbering beasts on TV or at the movies was a rare and thrilling thing. But ever since Jurassic Park (and the fact they can be conjured up with relative CGI ease) we’ve been overrun by the things. The BBC alone have recently given us a Horizon special, a guide to their mythology, and even a programme on how to assemble one yourself should you stumble upon its bones in your back garden.Out of all this new dino Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The final night of the Barbican’s adventurous if slightly awkwardly named Transcender season was a Sufi safari, with a tapas selection of four very different artists from assorted Islamic countries giving a taste of their music.First up, making their UK debut, although they had impressed at this year’s Fes Festival, were the Ensemble Syubbanul Akhyar. The band, whose name translates as “youthful praise”, are from Java, Indonesia, where they added sweet violin, painted a hallucinogenic turquoise, and wonderfully melodic flute to the traditional voice, oud, drums and tambourines. Their music Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It takes an ultra-liberal Catholic like Kevin Smith to tear into Christian fundamentalism with Red State’s ferocious accuracy. The writer-director’s 10th is being sold as a horror film, but the only demons to be seen are those of church and state.When his debut Clerks became a micro-budget paragon of independent cinema in 1994, Smith gently dismissed himself as “a 24-year-old with a talent for dick jokes”. In some subsequent films – Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), for instance - he’s seemed happy to live down to that, and massage his own cult. Red State is a radical change. An early Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"The sheer adventure and life of the touch is the only relevancy," wrote Barry Flanagan in his graduation thesis for St Martin’s School of Art in 1966. "I must allow my hand to touch and feel, my eyes to look and see, my tongue to lick and taste, my nose to sniff and smell, my ears to listen and hear."Clearly a sensualist, his approach to art-making was exploratory; a fascination with materials and processes led to objects whose forms were arrived at through simple actions that are clearly visible in the end product. The first sculptures in this exhibition at Tate Britain are made from sand. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard.There’s no doubt that Rock of Ages is absurd, but that hasn’t stopped it being reconfigured for a film that’s in production now. The high-octane cast includes Alec Baldwin, Mary J Blige, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Its Broadway run Read more ...