Reviews
Tom Carr
Flick through my 2022 Spotify Wrapped playlist and those who know me best won’t be surprised by what they find. Architects, the UK’s preeminent metal group who grapple with progressing their sound further on the classic symptoms of a broken spirit – check. Foals, the indie delights who continue to sweep all before them, and adorned new, summery vibes with latest album Life Is Yours. Check.Also present are Alexisonfire, Rolo Tomassi, and Zeal & Ardor among many others, but all indicative of how my go to listens span the spectrum of hardcore and metal, to straight edged indie/rock. Though Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant, fictionalised portrait of a woman whose main duties are to have her hair braided and stay thin, eating only orange slices for dinner. If her looks fade in this circumscribed royal world, what will be left of her?The action takes place over several months in 1877-8, in Vienna, Bavaria and England, as Elisabeth's 40th birthday comes and goes. Again and again Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Come the end of the year, the ritual glance over the shoulder, what we crave is celebration – this year of all years. "Look, we have come through!" is what we all want to hear from arts practitioners who took such a battering in the previous one.And it would be possible, just about, for this article to take that tone. The big ballet companies – paddling furiously beneath the surface – have for the most part kept up an impression of business as usual. There was ambition, if not wholesale success, in two big three-act creations in the first half of the year: Tamara Rojo’s Florence Nightingale- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2022 we were finally able to welcome back the first “proper” Edinburgh Fringe since 2019. While I was disappointed that a few established comics – they know who they are – hadn't used the enforced layoff from live comedy to, you know, write new material, I was delighted to see others who had very obviously done so – and produced really memorable work.Chief among those were Leo Reich (with Literally Who Cares?!) and Colin Hoult (The Death of Anna Mann), who produced two ravishingly good five-star shows. If anything connected these two very different hours, it was rampant ego; Reich's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Some of what’s nourishing the debut album by Sweden’s Dina Ögon is evident. A Bossa Nova jazz-pop essence evokes Brazil’s Quarteto em Cy. There’s a trip-hop undertow. Vocal lines bring to mind Free Design. Less easy to pinpoint is a melodic sensibility which seems to be derived from local traditions; echoing the sort of fusion pioneered by Jan Johansson’s Jazz på svenska and Merit Hemmingson when she reframed folk music on the Svensk folkmusik på beat albums.It’s likely Dina Ögon – the name translates as “your eyes” – are mindful of all or some of this, but what they’ve come up with doesn’t Read more ...
theartsdesk
It may be the lack of old-fashioned blockbuster movies that explains the staggering success of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, and the explanation for the lack of blockbuster movies may be that all the money and effort are being poured into television.But the downside is that we now have far too many streaming services, and viewers are sick of having to fork out for yet more subscription plans. It’s baffling for TV critics too, since nobody can agree on what ought to be reviewed any more.Despite all that, 2022 had many memorable moments, and we pick out our favourites (and not-so-favourites) Read more ...
David Nice
While the call for livening up the concert format remains dubious – beyond unusual settings and a will to communicate, the rest is window-dressing – there’s always a special buzz about festival-like concatenations of events. For that reason, four one- or two-day chamber spectaculars have stood out for me this year.The most innovative was Chamber Domaine’s Bach Brandenburgs Plus day at West Malling Abbey in Kent, masterminded by music@malling’s Thomas Kemp, violinist and conductor. The idea of matching each of the concertos with a new work using the special forces involved isn’t new, but this Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Have you noticed how exhibitions now seem to go on for ever and ever? Three months seems to be the norm, but five months is not unknown. Ever wondered why? In terms of time and money, mounting a major exhibition is incredibly expensive, of course.And as Covid had such a disastrous impact on the finances of museums and public galleries, post-lockdown they’ve had to find ways of maximising revenue, and extending the duration of each show seems to be a popular solution. Inevitably, this reduces the number of exhibitions put on – so much so that I’d say a full-time critic would be hard Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Where were the great new plays during 2022? That question underscored weeks of playgoing that turned into months, with very little new British writing announcing itself with real force.Three of the best are enumerated further down, but the disappointments were many: David Hare's talky Straight Line Crazy, a fascinating topic (the American urban planner Robert Moses) that existed primarily to showcase Ralph Fiennes in barnstorming form. Or Mike Bartlett's often-ludicrous The 47th, another play redeemed by a startling central performance – in this case, Bertie Carvel as, of all people, Donald Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 10 series stretching over the last 18 years, ITV's Doc Martin unobtrusively became an enduringly popular household name, but it finally reached the end of the road with this Christmas one-off. Unless, of course, there’s a prequel, a sequel, an origin story or a transformed internationalised version from Netflix.But barring all that, this was the last we’ll see of Martin Clunes’s doggedly grumpy and stone-faced Doctor Martin Ellingham. He’s a bit like a medical Blackadder. Series creator Dominic Minghella based Ellingham on Dr Martin Bamford from the 2000 movie Saving Grace, also played by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is the prototype for the Rue Morgue murders’ deducer, Auguste Dupin. He’s a legendary, retired police detective, asked to solve a death at the West Point military academy in wintry upstate New York. The suicide verdict of Dr Marquis (Toby Jones) is swiftly altered to ritual murder then followed by a second, with hearts carved out of hanged bodies. Landor Read more ...
David Nice
Looking through everything we’ve covered this year – and some of our reviewers have made their choices from an even wider sphere – I find, as in 2021, that the abundance of classical-concert top choices is richer than the number of truly outstanding opera productions. Personally, I’ve seen only three performances in the UK that ticked all boxes (production, singing, conducting, top quality work) and three abroad, despite limited travel.Curiously, the one that brought me most joy was Charles Court Opera's pocket Patience at Wilton’s Music Hall, turning exigence to creative advantage in having Read more ...