Reviews
Veronica Lee
John Lee Hancock's film is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Michael Lewis's biographical book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Michael Oher is virtually homeless when Leigh Anne spots him wandering the streets of suburban Memphis one freezing night, dressed only in shorts and T-shirt. When her daughter Collins (Lily Collins) tells her he attends her Christian private school (because of his bulk, the gridiron coach had persuaded the school’s governors to offer him a free education), Leigh Anne invites him home for the night. But what was a simple offer of a bed becomes a lifetime Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé, Telephone (Polydor)Lady Gaga is gradually wending her way to the position Madonna held for 20 years, punching through pop into the wider cultural consciousness, a superpopstar for whom the sky's the limit. Gaga arrived from the same cultural milieu as Madonna, the performance arty New York club scene. However, whereas Madonna very much played up the disco end of things, Gaga, at least visually, screams art attack.Her latest single arrives with a Jonas Akerlund-directed video, a bizarre amalgam of prison exploitation flick and Thelma & Louise co-starring the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I have no compunction laying into vastly overrated composers, crazily overpaid conductors or lazily over-employed directors. I feel slightly more guilty doing the same to struggling singers or musicians. But a cast of tiny children dressed up as bunnies? Now, come on, even I draw the line somewhere. Sort of.
Actually, they weren't all dressed up as bunnies. Some were caterpillars, some bugs, some cubs. There were adults too, kitted up as dragonflies, badgers, dachshunds and vixens, and some even playing others adults: a schoolteacher, priest, poacher and forester. Janacek's world is simple Read more ...
joe.muggs
The protests around the Iranian presidential elections of 2009 brought home to many in the West not only how dominated by youth the pro-democracy movement in Iran is, but also how westernised the youth of that country are. Symbolised by Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death at the hands of security forces was caught on camera and beamed around the world, this was an Iran a world away from the glowering Ayatollahs and pepperpot women in black chadors we tended to see on news reports.No One Knows About Persian Cats is a timely reminder of the existence of this young, modern Iran Read more ...
william.ward
Why is it that Method-ist actors are pretty much expected to spend months manically researching the inner minutiae of their character, but a much-lauded playwright can get away without providing any serious insights into his main subject matter?To anyone with even the slightest inkling of how modern businesses work – that is, just about anyone older than Kevin the token teenager – it is insulting, not to mention boring, to have to sit through three-and-a-half hours of such poorly developed material as Dennis Kelly’s new play about a global business mogul going bonkers in the boardroom, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work repeating the same image in paint, in collage, in photography and in mixed media. For Hamilton, now 87, in so much of what he has done over the decades the key idea cannot be conveyed by a single unique work of art, because the key idea is often to do with the multiplicity of images: in other words, the medium is the message.Modern Moral Matters, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Cuban boxers have always punched above their weight in the world arena: the little island has clocked up no fewer than 63 Olympic medals - 32 of them gold - in the last 40 years. Enjoying extraordinary access to the mysteries of the Havana Boxing Academy, this emotional documentary follows the fortunes of three ten-year-old lads over eight months as they submit to a punishing regimen of training for the National Boxing Championship. But, as with the best sports films, Sons of Cuba is about more than winning or losing. It's about more, even, than boxing itself.The day starts at 4am for Read more ...
josh.spero
What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity. Rather than a simple programme on Moore’s career – one fawning talking head after another – to coincide with the retrospective of his work at Tate Britain, Alan Yentob has instead chosen the meta-route, talking about TV talking about art. It is a topic which resonates today, where the one thing we love as much as looking at art is hearing people discuss art, and is well chosen Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In life Tom McRae is a cockeyed optimist. When his label, V2, dumped him, his response was to start up his own recording studio and to enthusiastically play every honky-tonk between LA and New York. It was the fans that kept McRae positive. An almost fanatically loyal crowd, they stuck with him through thick and thin and asked for little. Their demand was singular and a little perverse. All they wanted was to leave each concert feeling a little bit more depressed than when they went in.For, in music, McRae is a miserablist, out and proud. The Sixties had Leonard Cohen. The Eighties had the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Imagine if Rory Bremner had been banned from British television for the past 20 years, and Gordon Brown had put pressure on the BBC to get rid of Question Time because it had been critical of him. In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi these things happen. The country’s top satirist, Beppe Grillo, has effectively been denied access to the airwaves since Berlusconi became prime minister in 1994, while just this week allegations emerged that Berlusconi had tried to block transmission of a state television talk show, Annozero, that had discussed the alleged mafia ties of members of his government. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With a title like that, and a slug across the posters that so boastingly prejudges last night's premiere, some of us might keep our sceptical specs on when we turn up at the spirits-lowering Peacock Theatre to see this latest leap by mainstream stage forces onto the bandwagon of the most exciting trend in dance of the past 15 years. Sheathe those sceptical specs. This is a show blazing with talent and young exuberance, and it will rejuvenate you faster than a Red Bull.An 80-year-old was sitting in front of me last night, his face split with an ear-to-ear grin, clapping hopelessly out of time Read more ...