Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Very few of the staged goings-on in Covent Garden’s revival production of La Bohème this weekend rose above the level of mediocrity. The singing was blighted by illness and Eastern European bad habits. The 1970s set was as fresh as a fridge full of condemned meats. The 1970s vision of 19th century costume was extraordinary, as if the set of Abigail's Party had been emptied over the singers' heads. And yet, what an enjoyable evening. In the pit, the never resting hands of the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons was whipping this warhorse into some sort of damn appealing shape. Read more ...
sheila.johnston
At last something good on the telly at Christmas, you think. Eleven new short films premiere nightly on Sky over the holiday period starting this evening. All are dialogue-free (though with music and sound effects), all have a seasonal flavour and, cumulatively, assemble a terrific line-up, including the actors Timothy Spall, Natasha McElhone, Bill Nighy, Peter Capaldi, Mackenzie Crook and Ross Kemp and the writers and directors Neil Gaiman, Richard Eyre, William Boyd, Tony Grisoni and Jeremy Brock. You can't really go wrong with all that. Can you?It would be curmudgeonly to carp that the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If James Bond could survive Roger Moore and George Lazenby, there must be grounds for optimism that Sherlock Holmes will eventually recover from this brutal mauling by Robert Downey Jr, under the gaudy directorial eye of Guy Ritchie. Holmesophiles are a doughty bunch, and will probably just carry on watching Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett as if Mr Madonna never happened.It isn’t so much a bad film as just too much of one, and Ritchie could have done all of us a big favour by lopping 20 minutes off the 128 he has over-generously left us with. It’s the familiar saga of Hollywood bloat. Arthur Read more ...
glyn.brown
Ray Davies, that old curmudgeon, has said he’s not keen on touring alone since the demise of The Kinks. But he’s sorted that out for the moment by choosing to play alongside 45 new people – the members of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, with whom Davies has decided to reinterpret his hits. You’d think this could be undiluted lift-music hell: the Mike Sammes Singers trample everything you love. But though the album, named The Kinks Choral Collection as if the rest of the band are on it, is occasionally silly, the live result was wildly uplifting.The Chorus didn’t actually appear until the set’ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a sequence in which a monstrous tree of otherworldly dimensions, its boughs as sturdy as oaks, its twigs as vigorous as saplings, crashes spectacularly to earth in roaring, creaking, shattering, time-expanding slo-mo. In a film that’s full of them, this is very much the premier-cru money shot. Remember the last time the director, deploying the computer-generated forces of a sound-stage deity, downed another very large object? Back then it was a boat. This time it’s a piece of wood. Tiiim-ber-r-rr!!There is no argument, of course. Avatar is an astonishing creation. For sheer Read more ...
graham.rickson
Joanna MacGregor walks on stage purposefully, clutching a manuscript of paving-slab dimensions, promptly sits down and starts to play, smiling. The opening measures of Messiaen’s Regard du Père steal in gently, and for the next 120 minutes we are transfixed. Until this evening, listening to Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus on disc has always been an unappealing prospect - something I’ve done more in duty than pleasure. Hearing it live for the first time is a revelation.Composed during the liberation of Paris in 1944 for Yvonne Loriod (soon to be the composer’s wife), the Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time, not long ago in fact, when contemporary art could seem all too wrapped up in its own juvenile cleverness. It was all about being ironic and irreverent. Certainly a lot of it was achingly self-referential. But we eventually got fed up with all that. What’s more, we now live in less frivolous, more fearful times: recession has hit and the sea waters are rising, ready to flood us out and turn our congested cities into swampy, primitive marshland, like an apocalyptic J G Ballard novel.So now the mood music is sombre, more earnest. Artists have once again turned their attentions Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For a choreographer the moment your work becomes a classic is when the audience tells you that you’re casting it wrong. I’ve seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake more than a dozen times for professional reasons since it first took off from Sadler’s Wells nearly 15 years ago, and it’s not Adam Cooper’s blinding image all those years ago that’s telling me the press night cast last night wasn’t delivering what the work is worth. It's because I have come to own this piece in my own imagination.I don't say this is Ibsen with wings, but the potency of Bourne’s rewrite of Swan Lake lies in the true Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six.” Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, broadcast on the radio in 1955, offered young listeners a flavour of his aromatic observations of small-town Welsh life better known to adults in Under Milk Wood.The old roué might very well have wondered how a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This film was never going to be nominated for any awards, but then it probably doesn’t need critical acclaim - the first reworking of the glorious 1950s Ealing Studios comedies (which were based on Ronald Searle’s cartoons), released in 2007, was the third-highest grossing independent UK film ever. St Trinian’s 2 is more of the same: loud, silly and rollicking good fun.No joke is considered too old or too obvious in the immensely daft yarn scripted by Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft, directed by Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson. The plot (using the term loosely) concerns a 420-year-old Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A banner year for the Almeida Theatre continues with Rope, director Roger Michell's taut, tense production of the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play better known from the subsequent Hitchcock film, starring a peculiarly cast James Stewart. Performed in the round - a first in my experience at this address - and without a break, the staging gradually tightens its own invisible noose around an audience sufficiently rapt that even a silly visual flourish at the very end can't sour one's enjoyment.Michell's good sense - more radical than it might sound - is to take absolutely seriously a scenario Read more ...
aleks.sierz
She’s the most famous young pout in Hollywood. And her first West End appearance has already sparked a media frenzy, making this contemporary version of Molière’s The Misanthrope the hottest ticket in town, with massive advance bookings already guaranteeing anyone associated with the show a credit-crunch-proof Christmas. Of course, I’m talking about Keira Knightley – I mean, who isn’t? But what about the play, which opened last night with a barrage of paparazzi flashbulbs? And how does La Knightley shape up?Written by Martin Crimp, this take on Molière’s 1666 tale about the sourpuss Read more ...