Reviews
fisun.guner
Does James Fox fancy himself as the Niall Ferguson of art history? I ask because clearly this latest addition to the growing pantheon of television art historians wants to do for British art what Ferguson sought to do for the British Empire. He wants us to stop apologising, and to admit that we’re simply the best, better than all the rest. And though I grant you he is similarly photogenic (with a touch of that swarthy, swaggering arrogance, too) the ratio of plausible statement to incredulity (my own, whilst spluttering and tweeting my incredulity) was considerably weighted towards the latter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kew the Music - the umbrella name for a series of outdoor concerts - did not look promising upon first arrival and, indeed, for quite some time afterwards. It was clear as soon as I walked through the gates that this was a day out for monied London, not the usual gig environment. Before the stage, in front of Kew Gardens' Victorian Temperate House, a large section of grass had been sealed off for those with pre-booked picnicking space and everywhere about people sat with hampers swigging half bottles of Veuve Clicquot and using cocktail sticks to pluck exotic varities of marinated Read more ...
judith.flanders
What is a "good" death? How do most of us want to die? These are not questions that we often stop to ask, particularly in the theatre, where deaths tend to be either heroic or sordid. Two years ago, however, the playwright Nell Dunn’s partner of three decades died slowly, painfully, of lung cancer. On his last day he felt as if he were drowning, but of the five NHS professionals who visited him at home, all were trained to prolong life, none to ease the suffering of the dying. Home Death, therefore, is her story, and those of others, about dying at home: good deaths, bad deaths.The 11 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling. Instead they’ve been boarding at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the divine made flesh, from the Annunciation to the crucifixion. Some 40 Italian altarpieces, from the 13th through to the 15th centuries – some whole but most just fragments – are theatrically displayed to suggest the atmosphere of late medieval and early Renaissance Italian churches, monasteries and convents.Along the way we are told of patrons and Read more ...
james.woodall
It is resonantly famous, picking up plaudits from the off, with one Sight & Sound commentator claiming in 1962 that it was the "greatest film ever made", for which he'd been waiting "during the last 30 years". That now seems slightly hysterical, as it evidently isn't the greatest film ever made, and wasn't then. In it, nothing happens, many times, as opposed to Beckett's Godot - first seen eight years before - often vilified for tedium and in which at least, as critic Vivian Mercier pointed out, "nothing happens, twice". Beckett was a funny Irish poet-playwright. Robbe-Grillet (the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Gleaming, shimmering, full of pizzazz, glitz and unashamed bling, although of the 18th-century sort, as befits its role as the most cheerfully mixed up and glittering show of baubles in Bath, the Holburne Museum reopened in May after three years' closure. At a cost of £11.2 million the museum has been expanded, rebuilt, refurbished and renovated. Much more of the collection, newly installed after extensive conservation, is also on view than hitherto. The whole works a treat. As many visitors have turned up in the first month as normally come in a year.The architect Eric Parry has Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week’s reviews include a generous Liszt anthology played by one of the 20th century’s most fondly remembered pianists. There’s a reissued box of Beethoven symphonies performed on modern instruments by one of the classiest European orchestras. Heading further north, we've a repackaged set of Sibelius symphonies with some essential extras.
Beethoven: The Symphonies Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus/Kletzki (Supraphon)
This lovely box set feels naughtily indulgent after the bracing, clean textures of Emanuel Krivine’s recent period-instrument Beethoven cycle. Paul Kletzki, born in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s not so much cultural differences that have hindered Death Cab for Cutie’s UK profile, it’s more the difficulty of making a name when “there just couldn’t be less scandal surrounding the band”. Or so guitarist Chris Walla feels. In the States their beautiful, emotionally muted music goes platinum and is featured in huge shows like the OC. But just as US audiences were hard to persuade of the charms of Pulp or Suede, so Death Cab’s strangely moving introspection has been here, by and large, niche. You’d never have known it, though, from the legions of fashionably dressed devotees at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The leap from BBC Four to Channel 4 is more than the flick of a switch. Migrating from the BBC’s digital channel to its terrestrial broadcast has transformed the Danish noir drama Forbrydelsen. It's now in English. It’s become American. Copenhagen has been banished. The alchemist responsible is US TV network AMC. Channel 4’s screening of the US remake of The Killing will attract more viewers than BBC Four ever could, but it’s impossible to watch the Seattle-set makeover without thinking back to the originalMore than the elephant in the room, Forbrydelsen (called that here to distinguish Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jean-Luc Godard has lived in self-exile for most of his film-making life, a now 80-year-old enfant terrible. After the seismic ruptures to film grammar in his self-aware, playful Sixties work, he largely abandoned narrative and popularity at the start of the Seventies. But his enduring idealism came through in a rare recent interview when, dismissing his more conventional and beloved nouvelle vague peers Truffaut and Chabrol, he sighed: “This was not the cinema we had dreamt of.” I haven’t seen much by him since 1967’s Weekend, for which I now suspect I should hang my head. Film Socialisme Read more ...