Reviews
joe.muggs
A 15ft aardvark constructed from raw timber with a light-up robotic face and gigantic hands is climbing up one of the support pillars of the Westway, next to the body of a full-sized helicopter the front of which has been shaped into a grinning skull. Life-size rearing horse torsos made of white marble-like resin, with real horse skulls instead of heads, are mounted on the wheels of Victorian perambulators, while a man rides a clanking, hissing, fire-spitting motorised beast with stamping front legs and huge rear wheels around through the crowd as children caper about and their parents drink Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It‘s when you see how popstar fame can reach people with more luck than work that Carlos Acosta’s achievement in becoming a truly popular ballet star is underlined. Ballet is just the toughest discipline there is. Great elite artists and great popular artists are generally divided by an insuperable wall; often there’s a sell-out of some kind when the great elite artist achieves wider popularity, the dancer gets cocky or vulgar or goes on too long. But I have to exempt Acosta from that.At Sadler’s Wells this week he is showing just what a ballet-dancer’s ballet-dancer he is. In an evening that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It always used to be said that boarding school prepares you for every hardship. Whether that includes prison in one of the most impenitent dictatorships in Africa is not a question that was put to Simon Mann in last night’s edition of Storyville. Mann, still incarcerated when the BBC caught up with him, was awaiting a pardon from President Teodoro Obiang, the very potentate he had attempted to topple five years earlier. Never mind that they like to keep a battery and electrodes handy for interrogations, Mann wasn’t about to slag off the great man’s excellent hospitality. Goodness, Eton really Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a pirate television (pirate television!) broadcast from 1992, a large group of Russian youths in flat top haircuts and leather jackets discuss Depeche Mode's appeal. “It's romantic style,” suggests one with absolute assurance, “it's music for the lonely.” It is just one touching, funny moment in a film packed with them, but it also sums up what The Posters Came From The Walls is about. This “music for the lonely” by a band of awkward blokes from Basildon has brought this group of young people together, as it has all the legions of devoted lovers of the band that we see throughout the 58 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The best thing in Paradox so far has been the enormous explosion that provided the climax to episode one, as a train stranded on a railway bridge was incinerated by an erupting chemical tanker. A dramatic aerial shot captured an angry pillar of smoke and flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air, against a backdrop of lush Lancashire countryside.But some fine camerawork aside, this new “high-concept, high-octane investigative drama” is caught between being a conventional domestic police show and a boundary-stretching trip into the paranormal. Baffled by its own premise, it seems to have Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The voice has landed, and what an astonishing sound it makes. I'm referring, of course, to the mighty roar unleashed by James Earl Jones's majestic Big Daddy in the new West End revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof over which this legendary actor rules, much as the Southern landowner he is playing speaks vaingloriously of his "kingdom". When Jones isn't on stage, Debbie Allen's production serves Tennessee Williams's dissection of Mississippi-style "mendacity" sensibly if not definitively. But come the second of the play's three acts, and Jones's roof-raising redefinition of a great role Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The plight of asylum-seekers is no laughing matter, but that doesn’t mean that dramas about the subject have to be worthy, or dull. In fact, young playwright Bola Agbaje’s Detaining Justice, which opened last night, is an exemplary mix of laughter and tears. As the final part of the Tricycle Theatre’s trilogy examining the state of the nation at the end of the new millennium’s first decade, this play confirms the feeling that much of the energy in new writing is coming from black writers.Earlier episodes in the trilogy were Roy Williams’s Category B, a powerful and realistic drama about life Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rihanna, Russian Roulette (Mercury)
I strongly suggest anyone who believes the sound of US mainstream pop is somehow homogenised and safe take another look at the current charts. Standing over them like android colossi are Lady Gaga and Rihanna - who not only look exactly as pop stars were always going to look "in the future", but sound apocalyptically insane. This song is in the standard melodramatic modern power-ballad style of writer/producer Ne-Yo, but the combination of Rihanna's piercing voice and the lyrics that circle in the non-specific manner of nightmares around death, obsession, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Little, it seems, falls beyond the musical compass of Ryuichi Sakamoto. After cutting his teeth with synthpop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto branched out like a one-man synthesis of Messrs Byrne, Bowie and Eno, investigating world and renaissance music, chamber pieces, orchestral works and movie soundtracks.Well versed in traditional Japanese and Okinawan forms, Sakamoto is also adept in multimedia and digital manipulation, and was even commissioned to write ringtones for Nokia. Recent collaborations with Alva Noto and Christian Fennesz confirm that Sakamoto's inquisitive spirit Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.After that things got considerably more complicated, and far more enjoyable. Following the disaster that was Gracie! last week, I fully expected Read more ...
anne.billson
Looks can be deceiving. The first thing you should know is that Richard Kelly's third film isn't really about the box at all. It's more about what's inside, which is a big red button. The place is suburban Virginia and the time is 1976, for no reason I can fathom other than this was the heyday of the paranoid conspiracy thriller and Kelly fancied giving us the heebie-jeebies with some truly terrifying 1970s wallpaper.Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a married couple with a pubescent son called Walter and what sounded to me like iffy Virginian accents, though I'm no expert. Diaz has a club Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The porn star Sasha Grey - turned mainstream actress in Steven Soderbergh's new film - is a bit better looking than the schlubby, chubby hero of The Informant!, also directed by Soderbergh and released just two weeks ago (click here for our review). More attractive also than the unkempt and ultra-hirsute Che Guevara in SS's epic diptych about the Cuban revolutionary. Astonishingly, The Girlfriend Experience is the fourth work by this prolific and versatile film-maker to open in Britain since the beginning of the year and, whatever their differences, it has something curious in common with its Read more ...