Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-managing everything and everyone. His philosophy is that there's no task involving a staff member – or a member of their families – that's too petty or too personal for him be involved in, too. And it's his genius, of course, that ends up solving every problem. He justifies his actions because the buck stops with him: “Your problems become my Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s an ill heatwave that brings nobody any good, and Buxton International Festival’s decision to move its highlight concert, by Manchester Camerata with Jess Gillam and the Brodsky Quartet as their guests, from the Buxton Octagon to St John’s Church meant not only that it was heard in probably the only coolish venue in town yesterday afternoon, but also that it benefitted from an acoustic that’s excellent for instrumental music.The Camerata is celebrating its 50th anniversary in different places this year, and while the personnel seen yesterday may not overlap entirely with the band we are Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
I had anticipated a sweltering evening at the Albert Hall. Sadly, though, the heatwave prevented me from even getting there – buckled rails or some similar problem led to the cancellation of my train. So this review is of the Radio 3 broadcast, heard on headphones in the comfort and relative cool of my back garden.The BBC is making an excellent job of transmitting from the Albert Hall. The sound is bright and lifelike, much closer and clearer than you’d ever hear in the audience. What’s missing is the atmosphere. Presenter Hannah French gave a good sense of what it was like, but it is not the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The BBC publicity department doesn’t want reviewers to reveal too much about this three-parter in advance, so the description of its content here may seem skimpy. If you watch this mini-series, you will sort of understand why – its plot relies on coincidences (or are they?) and unexpected twists (or just implausible ones?), flashbacks to past traumas (are these reliable?) and nightmarish scenes (real or imagined?)What can be said is that we are following what happens to Gabriel (Iain De Caestecker), an ambulance dispatcher in Glasgow, one of the junior operatives in the control room, who has Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This one sounded implausible. Frida Kahlo, the great (and fashionable – collected by the likes of Madonna) Mexican painter interpreted by Indian classical music at the Elgar Room in the Royal Albert Hall. It was, however, entrancing, made a curious sense, and was a different way of immersing yourself both in the music and paintings.Presented by the enterprising Saudha Society of Poetry and Indian Music, the director TM Ahmed Kaysher, a Leeds-based poet was perched stage left and briefly described his own relation with Kahlo at a time in his life when he was suffering from depression Read more ...
David Nice
Had Claudio Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a major Elgar orchestral work – and to my knowledge he never saw the light about the composer’s due place among the European greats – it might have sounded something like last night’s “Enigma” Variations. Yes, John Wilson and his superband Sinfonia of London really are in that league. Elgar’s cavalcade of character-studies, both inward and extrovert, is the ultimate test, the most varied of masterpieces in a various programme.Perhaps it was a slightly over-long one. I’d have jettisoned Bax’s Tintagel in favour of a pleasing symmetry in Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Sweetness never lasts too long at a Haim gig. No sooner had Alana Haim, the youngest of the Californian siblings, finished a speech about her delight about being back in Glasgow by announcing she was going to “smell the f****** roses” then bass-playing elder sister Este piped up with “I’m smelling my armpits. They are ripe.” It summed up a chat-heavy show that at times felt like part gig, part stand-up comedy try-out.For all the banter, which reached such an amount that Alana quipped at one stage she felt all they’d done was talk, the trio have an assurance about playing large venues. An Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sikisa is a new name on the comedy scene, but trust me you'll hearing and seeing a lot more of the south Londoner with Barbadian roots. Twerk in Progress, her in-progress version of her debut show Life of the Party, is a winning mixture of autobiography and social comment.She is an energetic performer and barely pauses for breath in the hour – even in the dance breaks she's exerting herself across the balloon-strewn stage – as she delivers her thoughts on house parties, feminism, dick picks and much more.Sikisa is, she tells us, the life and soul of parties, and the show is about the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the middle of a pavement-cracking, railway-melting heatwave, what could be more refreshing than a visit to the bleak but bracing landscapes of the Faroe Islands? This 18-island archipelago midway between Norway and Iceland is where BBC Four’s latest Nordic drama is situated, and its themes of murder, conspiracy and ecological awareness strike a topical note. A Danish-German-Faroese-Icelandic co-production, Trom doesn’t display the schizophrenic (or quadrophrenic) characteristics that might imply, but instead is a methodical thriller deftly played by a cast which is always unflashily Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As either a producer or songwriter Gary Usher worked with The Beach Boys and The Byrds, the two most consequential California bands of the Sixties.When he co-wrote “409” with Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys’s first Capitol Records single in mid 1962, he teamed the hot-rod fad with surfing in popular culture for the first time. By his own reckoning, Usher wrote and recorded more than 50 car songs in one month in 1963.Any of this would make Gary Usher a significant figure in pop music. But, of course, there’s a lot more. Much more. Getting to grips with his world means that bands or studio Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t simulate nostalgia, or the dusting of urgent magic which made The Railway Children so immediately poignant. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the 1970 film with the same special affinity for vintage childhoods he showed in his heart-piercing ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972).It was his emotional investment which made generations unquestioningly sympathise with the film’s privileged family fallen on hard times – a standby of middle-class children’s literature revived as recently as Mary Poppins Returns.That belated sequel proved you can better a beloved original, and poured Read more ...
David Nice
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at the East Neuk Festival, the Elias Quartet led us gently by the hand with James MacMillan’s Memento. The 2022 BBC Proms began pianissimo, massed forces at the ready for the intermittent blazes of Verdi’s Requiem.It should have been a moving start to a Proms season which is rightly celebrating the big and the awe-inspiring. But those two years have Read more ...