Reviews
Jessica Payn
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood. It was Rasputin’s favourite, he Read more ...
Line of Duty, Series 6, Episode 6, BBC One review - the pace accelerates for AC-12's final countdown
Adam Sweeting
As the finishing line begins to materialise through the haze of fear, suspicion and zany acronyms, the pace of this sixth series of Line of Duty (BBC One) has hotted up appreciably. In earlier episodes, there sometimes seemed to be a lack of intensity, and even the fabled interview scenes didn’t always grip like they used to. Maybe filming under Covid conditions had something to do with it.But times are changing. Last week’s episode 5 unleashed the stunning revelation that Joanna Davidson shared a DNA match with evil (though deceased) criminal kingpin Tommy Hunter. This week, in an interview Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“God gave us 12 notes,” said Jon Batiste as he accepted the Best Score Oscar for the animated film Soul. True enough, even if it felt from very early on as if the 93rd Academy Awards might well last 12 hours, the ceremony flickering to life in its rushed final moments, and only then because of a pair of last-minute surprises.As expected Nomadland won Best Picture and Best Director, Chloé Zhao (pictured below) entering Oscar annals as the second woman to win the directing trophy as well as the first woman of colour. Less anticipated was that film’s producer and leading performer, Frances Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What comes to mind when you think of Brian Elias? The violence and humming, background threat of The Judas Tree, his score for Kenneth MacMillan’s brutal final ballet? The outpouring of Electra Mourns, cor anglais a schizophrenic double for the mezzo’s monologue? Or perhaps his breakthrough 1984 Proms commission L’Eylah, a Middle Eastern love-song gradually revealed at its core?Elias’s output isn’t enormous, but there’s a real breadth within it. Thanks to a series of fine recordings on NMC, it’s easy to lose an afternoon in the British composer’s taut, carefully crafted music. But Read more ...
Owen Richards
We’ve all experienced the “fast food film” – enjoyable while we watch it, but realise afterwards it was an empty thrill with little nutritional value. Much rarer is the film that can only be truly appreciated once the credits roll. Black Bear, with its segmented presentation and recurring themes, is one such film. Risky, baffling, and more than the sum of its parts.Aubrey Plaza stars as Alison, a director staying at the rural house of artsy couple Blair and Gabe (Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott). She’s acerbic, ironic, and an agitator in this combustible household. Or is Plaza in fact Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It has been a hard coming for this RSC Winter’s Tale. Erica Whyman’s production was cancelled by the virus days before its premiere last spring, with plans to stage it in the autumn frustrated by the second lockdown. This broadcast version, retaining that original cast in full, is the first time that a RSC production has gone first to screen, scheduled as part of the BBC's Lights Up season.Needs must, perhaps, and what a frustrating on-again, off-again process it must have been, but there’s little sign of any resulting radical disruption – in a play that itself revolves around radical Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A few hurdles need jumping before grappling with the essence of Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album. Endless Arcade is their first without bassist and founder member Gerard Love. He, alongside Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, was one of the band’s songwriters. And this is their first with former Gorky's Zygotic Mynci mainstay and solo artist Euros Childs in the line-up on keyboards. Blake and Childs made the Jonny album together in 2011. Childs has recorded a fair amount of other collaborations but joining Teenage Fanclub in 2019 was a different type of commitment. Following this arrival, TFC Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lazer Guided Melodies was great. It still is. Spiritualized’s debut album built from what was already there in Jason Pierce’s previous band Spacemen 3 and took it into newer, more textured territory. While softer-focussed and more dynamic than Spacemen 3 there was still an edge, a brittle carapace which ensured Spiritualized was its own thing. There was also a gospel-informed sense of drama. What came together on Lazer Guided Melodies became the endlessly malleable raw material which Pierce is still redrafting. Indeed, his last album, 2018’s And Nothing Hurt, was recognisably one by Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I Fagiolini do not just do choral concerts. Indeed, director Robert Hollingworth claimed in the pre-concert chat, he finds choral concerts boring. Instead what he and his group provide are experiences that go beyond straight recitals, bringing together elements of poetry, theatricality and unlikely juxtaposition, making old music sound new and allowing new music space to breathe alongside established classics.At Christmas I reviewed their contribution to an earlier Voces8 online festival, in which they combined Charpentier, Howells and Dylan Thomas. Also around the same time they released a Read more ...
Jon Turney
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become. Time structures music, rhythmically and in its implied narratives. From outside, we place it in biographical time, whether cradle songs, serenades to a lover or wakes. Then music sits in history, yet somehow also apart from it, the latest sounds prone to evoke links between sonic effects and emotion that feel inexpressibly ancient. More ancient still, when we muse on bird choruses, animal cries or the thousand mile songs of whales, human music seems to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Oscar Wilde's fabulous play satirised Victorian England and contained a shedload of quotable quips. Now Yasmeen Khan has written an updated and uprooted version, set in the North of England, which takes aim at any number of class and ethnic stereotypes.The joint production (by the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield and The Dukes, Lancaster) is set, the onscreen captions tell us, “somewhere in a posh bit of the North" and “somewhere else in the North” and a running gag has several characters saying: “I'll go to the foot of our stairs. No, nobody says that.” Other lines upend British-Asian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read our review of the season finale hereDark family dramas set in unglamorous, unprosperous communities in the north-east of the USA have become a genre unto themselves. One thinks here of the work of writers such as Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone), and maybe Chuck Hogan and The Town for good measure.New from HBO, Mare of Easttown (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a fine addition to this lineage, thanks to a superb and surprising lead performance from Kate Winslet and excellent work from the show’s writer and creator Brad Ingelsby ( Read more ...