Reviews
Nick Hasted
Babylon is sensational, a manic, pounding assault on the senses meant to convey Hollywood’s chaotic birth. Damien Chazelle’s return to La La Land’s showbiz dreams forsakes ineffable intimacy for hysterical thunder, and for much of the time that’s enough.It’s 1926, with Hollywood growing in LA’s backwater at America’s wild western edge. We start with an elephant shitting in a truck, en route to a party where that will count as decorous subtlety. Inside the party’s mansion doors, frenetic camerawork explores packed, deep-focus frames, embodying a seething, orgiastic crowd. Chinese-American Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The distinctive silvery tones of the viola da gamba were eclipsed in the 18th century as music moved from intimate settings to the brasher acoustic demands of the concert hall. Yet for Liam Byrne, discovering the viola da gamba at Indiana University was a way both of channelling his own musical voice and of connecting to the influential early music movement dating back to figures like Arnold Dolmetsch in the early 20th century.A collaboration with the Icelandic composer and audio engineer Valgeir Sigurõsson in 2013 introduced him to a form of electronic music making that he realised, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
At one point in this brilliantly constructed and performed set, Alex Edelman ponders on the catchment area for his comedy and figures it might be the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nah: this is comedy that can talk to anybody with a brain. Edelman is not from New York, though he studied English at NYU and lives a bicoastal life there and in LA. He grew up in Brookline, Boston, the son of a leading heart specialist; his brother AJ represented Israel at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. (There’s a hilarious section on that unlikely event — how could there not be?) They are a successful Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Ryan Wigglesworth is a man of many talents. He has recently been appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, but he is also a versatile opera conductor, and an operatic sensibility is clear in the musical personality he projects.Last night, that came in two forms, as the first work was by Wigglesworth himself. The song cycle, Till Dawning, was written for the conductor’s wife, Sophie Bevan, who gave the premiere in Austria in 2018. Serious illness has since interrupted her performing activities (not permanently, we hope), and so this UK premiere was given by soprano Elizabeth Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
We all have that friend. The person you met on holiday and couldn’t shake off. You added each other on Facebook, but they posted so much you’ve quietly unfollowed them. You can’t quite bring yourself to unfriend them, though. In The Unfriend, a new play at the Criterion Theatre after a Chichester premiere, Sherlock writer Steven Moffat asks: what if that friend was a murderer? And what if you had invited them to stay in your house?This is a true story – so true, in fact, that Moffat didn’t even change the name of the actual friend, Peter, to whom it happened. The play's Peter (Reece Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If, as a teacher newly hired to instil an appreciation for literature in underprivileged high-school kids who think it’s useless, you don’t march into their classroom and try to ram Jorge Luis Borges down their throats. That’s one lesson learned by Lucio Garmendia (Juan Minujín) in Diego Lerman’s The Substitute. Another is that for many of Lucio’s charges, who live in a jerry-built neighbourhood on Buenos Aires’s periphery, education is secondary to survival. Lucio’s father, a former teacher turned community organiser known as The Chilean (played with typical assurance by the veteran Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel has captured a particular moment in time. A few long-term residents of the legendary building at 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan are still hanging in there after several years of constant and oppressive building noise. They're gamely holding on to its artistic and counter-cultural spirit, keeping their values and beliefs intact, living through what they hope are the last stages of the Chelsea's redevelopment, hoping they'll not be forced out once it becomes a luxury boutique hotel.It is not just an idea thar we see dying. The Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like families, nations have secrets: dirty linen that they prefer not to expose to the light of day. Patriotic myths need to be protected, heroic narratives shaped, good guy reputations upheld. In 1942, the USA rounded up Japanese-Americans and locked them away in the badlands of the Midwest and promptly forgot about them – and then worked hard to keep it that way in the decades that followed. It’s likely you didn’t know that and it’s no accident if so.One such intern was George Takei – Star Trek’s Mr Sulu and, in his extraordinary second life, liberal activist supreme on social Read more ...
Saskia Baron
We’re told from childhood that it’s rude to stare at people, but sometimes it’s hard to extinguish that desire and sitting in a dark cinema can provide the perfect opportunity. If seing Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight and Corsage left you craving more screen time with her, More than Ever might just satiate that yen. It’s another chance to allow this fine-featured, body-confident actor to show her emotional range to us watchers in the shadows.Freed from constricting corsetry this time round, Krieps plays Hélène, whose happy life in Bordeaux with her husband Mattheiu (Gaspard Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Timing is everything. The release of Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider at a time when the world’s attention is turned to the treatment of women in Iran should win it more ticket sales than his previous (and far better) film Border managed in 2019.That superb Swedish allegory on racism and misogyny sprang from the imagination of writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. Holy Spider is drawn from Iranian media coverage of the serial killer Saeed Hanaie. In 2000-2001, Hanaei went on a murder spree in the holy city of Masshad, strangling 16 prostitutes. A married man and jobbing Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
So there’s this prince, see, and he’s not at all happy. For a start, he never got over losing a parent when he was a child. He’s at odds with the world, sick to death with royal protocol and convinced that no one understands him. Worse, having too much time on his hands, he suffers from delusions. Meet Prince Siegfried, who found his soulmate, and met his nemesis, on a moonlit night by a lake.It can’t be long before some ballet company mounts a Swan Lake with a bearded prince in a ginger wig, but it won’t be English National Ballet that does it. That company is too respectful of the memory of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It was a rare treat to hear Yevgeny Sudbin’s piano artistry quite so close up. World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens is a new venue, in fact just in the process of being born (more about the venue lower down). In the room, with its seated capacity of just 120 on two levels, the sound is so clear and immediate, you could sometimes almost be inside the piano.And that proximity suits Sudbin’s way, which is to reveal every intricacy of the works he plays, to allow absolutely everything to be heard. His technical command is unbelievable, particularly as witnessed from within a few feet. I noted that Read more ...