Reviews
David Nice
It seemed as if the usually sober Wigmore Hall was trying to shower us with as many pianistic notes as possible before the midnight bell rings in the New Year. More could hardly have been accommodated In two recitals on Monday and Wednesday evenings, when modest British virtuoso Daniel Grimwood was followed by 2007 Tchaikovsky Competition winner Miroslav Kultyshev in tackling a gaggle of densely-packed baggy monsters. It wasn't just the name of Felix Blumenfeld which was unfamiliar; I suspect musical trainspotters had a field day collecting two major but long-retired opuses by Tchaikovsky and Read more ...
fisun.guner
2009 hasn’t been a vintage year for art, exactly - no queue-round-the-block showstoppers, if that’s your type of thing. Nonetheless the year was nicely topped and tailed by some memorable, and quietly seductive shows. My top five are Picasso, Mark Wallinger, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Calle and The Sacred Made Real.Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London (February-June)
Originally shown in Paris, where Picasso’s paintings featured alongside works that had directly inspired them, this became a much tighter, more focused exhibition by the time it arrived in London. It was all the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The first movie in my experience to feature a Sarah Palin joke lends a glimmer of distinction to Did You Hear About the Morgans?, an otherwise excruciating romcom that finds Hugh Grant in tic-laden overdrive, his genuine charm jettisoned somewhere in the onscreen journey from New York to points west. Sarah Jessica Parker is on hand to trundle out her mightily-aggrieved-lover routine that she long ago patented on Sex and the City, but Marc Lawrence's film is probably best saved for those airplane trips that are now upon us where one isn't allowed to do anything but look at the screen. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Saving the planet from ecological disaster is all very laudable, but be careful what you wish for. In this two-part Anglo-Canadian production of John Wyndham's 1951 sci-fi novel, the voracious man-eating plants called triffids had been artificially cultivated as a fuel source, so successfully that triffid oil had enabled the world to wean itself off fossil fuels and thus curtail global warming. The story didn’t bother itself with those pesky climate change deniers.However, nobody had foreseen the freakish intervention of dazzling solar flares which struck most of the global population blind. Read more ...
sheila.johnston
In 2009 Hollywood sank deeper into the trough that it has busily been colonising over the last decade. The year's twin peaks, the most keenly analysed awards, each seen as a bellwether of international cinema, were firstly Danny Boyle's Britpic-meets-Bollywood fable, Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar laureate; and secondly a paradigm of European art cinema at its most austere, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which took the Palme D'Or in Cannes. In America, by contrast, horror - notably torture porn - lame action franchises and lamer comedies held sway, as the marketing of movies eclipsed the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was something very postmodern about the resumption of Quentin Crisp’s story. To recap, in case you missed episode one back in 1975, The Naked Civil Servant has been turned into a successful television drama, and its subject into a celebrity. The script doesn’t go quite so far as to name the actor who impersonates Crisp, but here is John Hurt playing Quentin Crisp being interviewed on television the night after a drama is broadcast in which Quentin Crisp is played by John Hurt.Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Hurt returned to a role which, more than any other, crystallised his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of the South Bank Show? Surely some mistake. But there was Melvyn, looking into the camera with a resigned air, telling us that this film about the Royal Shakespeare Company (“possibly the greatest theatre company in the world”) was indeed the end of the line, give or take the occasional retrospective special. There must have been a temptation to attempt something extravagant and all-encompassing, but instead director Naomi Wright’s film was distinguished by its discipline and focus, as if to exemplify what the South Bank Show was always supposed to be about.The piece homed in on the Read more ...
David Nice
Even for a narratorless animation of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf like Suzie Templeton's obsessively detailed gem of a film, you probably only need 14 words before you can get on with the business of screening and playing. Peter: strings; bird: flute; duck: oboe; cat: clarinet; grandfather: bassoon; wolf: horns; hunters: timps. The savvy middle-class children gathered with their parents in the Royal Festival Hall yesterday afternoon had only two for actor/presenter Burn Gorman's manic clot on a bike, wheeling in to set up the background. The longer he shillyshallyed affecting to remember a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was all done in the worst possible taste, as the late, great Kenny Everett didn’t say: 2009 started with the fallout of the mother of a ruckus over a radio broadcast that probably three people actually heard when it went out, but more than 30,000 individuals felt they should complain about in the ensuing row. I refer, of course, to the Russell Brand-Jonathan Ross telephone-message jape concerning elderly actor Andrew Sachs. Ross returned to his BBC One chatshow and Radio 2 programme at the end of January 2009, and the ripples still run as we enter 2010. Much has been said or written on the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Time was when British families planned Christmas Day around The Queen in the afternoon and (depending which generation you fall into) Morecambe and Wise, Victoria Wood, French and Saunders or The Vicar of Dibley in the evening. But now it seems television bosses have all but given up on offering family entertainment, as BBC One's comedy fare was transmitted entirely after the watershed and ITV1’s sole offering, Ant & Dec’s Christmas Show, was broadcast on Boxing Day.My appetite for Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas had been whetted by a wonderful night devoted to the Lancashire comic on Read more ...
theartsdesk
No great new movements or radically transformational figures emerged to dominate classical music in the Noughties (not even him up there). Just one small nagging question bedevilled us: will the art form survive? Well, it has. What appeared to be a late 20th-century decline in audience interest in the classical tradition was in fact a consumer weariness with the choices on offer. And who could blame them? At the start of this decade, the London orchestral scene, in the hands of aging, mediocre conductors, was as appealing as a boil-in-the-bag fish dinner; administratively and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's reinvention of Doctor Who under the auspices of Russell T Davies has proved to be an inspired upgrade of a legendary 1960s marque fit to rank alongside BMW's resuscitation of the Mini, though it would hardly be sensible to argue that the new-look Doctor is distinguished by Germanic precision engineering or a coolly mathematical design philosophy. Quite the opposite. Although the cardboard scenery and risible special effects that used to lend Doctor Who much of its jerry-built charm have been digitally upgraded, the series is still a hard-to-define mix of soft sci-fi and a kind of Read more ...