Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“I See Your Face” opens with a short burst of Phil Spector-ish tambourine rattling. The sort of thing also employed by the early Jesus & Mary Chain. Then, a cascading folk-rock guitar paves the way for a disembodied voice singing over a spooky one-finger keyboard line and chugging, reverbed guitar. Occasionally, what sounds like a syn drum goes “pff.”“Gorgeous Weather” is equally remarkable, equally other-worldly. A spiralling, distant-sounding creation, its subterranean feel suggests an oncoming storm rather than what’s usually thought of as gorgeous weather.Then there’s “There's A...” “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula One season was all set to start in Australia last March when it was derailed by the Covid emergency. The F1 organisers insisted that they’d get the racing back on track somehow, and what sounded like foolhardy bravado was justified when they successfully staged a 17-race championship between July and December.It proved to be a surprisingly exciting and often emotional season, with all kinds of human and political dramas woven through the action, and Netflix’s ubiquitous Drive to Survive crew was there to catch all the nuances. F1 had an advantage over most other sports Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Track two on Dream Of Independence, the new album from Sweden’s Frida Hyvönen, is titled “A Funeral in Banbridge”. An account of attending a funeral in, indeed, Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, it’s bright, melodically jaunty, piano-driven and moves along at a fair clip.But there’s a disconcerting disparity between the buoyant arrangement and the lyrics. The direct, almost deadpan, voice sings a rolling melody. “A funeral in Banbridge/ I took the train here/ From London/ Through Wales/ Beautiful day/ I had a salad, I had a drink,” it begins. The song is a diary entry recounting Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This heartfelt documentary follows twin girls who are just starting primary school. We first meet Amber struggling to pop her head through her shirt, helped by her sister Olivia. Amber has Down Syndrome and everything is just that bit harder for her; not just dressing, but understanding what cake her dad wants when they’re playing with her toy grocery shop. Olivia, who provides fragments of voice-over in an otherwise narration-free film, worries that other girls at school are mean and tease her sister. Her filmmaker father, Ian Davies, reassures Olivia from behind the camera that Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé are back in the Bridgewater Hall for the first programme in the second tranche of the orchestra’s digital Winter Season – filming that had to be postponed from its original planned date but is triumphantly achieved now. As before, the full orchestra is accommodated with a monster extension of the platform to allow for adequate distancing. It’s a full-length, three-course concert, too – extraordinary value for money if you consider all the filmic extras provided on top of the excellent musical performances.The lighting this time is subdued, with a lot of background Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“David, don’t run,” is the refrain that runs through the first scenes of Lee Isaac Chung’s affecting, autobiographical Minari, acclaimed at Sundance, winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film (it’s mainly in Korean) and nominated for several Academy Awards. David, played by wonderful seven-year-old newcomer Alan Kim, has a heart problem that causes his parents, especially his mother Monica (Yeri Han) to worry about him constantly.They have plenty of other worries too. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun; Sorry to Bother You, Burning, Okja, The Walking Dead) has brought his family from South Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Readers of John Marrs’s 2017 novel The One should probably look away now, since Netflix’s dramatisation of the story bears scant resemblance to the book. The basic premise – that a corporation has invented a method of DNA testing which can match individuals with their perfect partner who “you are genetically guaranteed to fall in love with”– remains, along with a group of characters who experience the repercussions of this techno-dating app, but their identities and storylines have all been reinvented for the TV incarnation.By and large, this is not a good thing. The One has a chilly Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize now in its ninth cycle. Since its launch in 2008, it has responded to the state of the world with urgency and compassion, its shortlists all the more intriguing for their oscillations between the universal and the personal, the global and the local.Last year, four of the 88 living photographers shortlisted for the prize to date were commissioned in a joint project with The Guardian, their brief to move beyond fast emerging Covid tropes, of “deserted cityscapes, overflowing hospitals Read more ...
aleks.sierz
All theatre is local — if you can’t get to where a show is playing you can’t see it. That is, until a pandemic closes all theatres and forces their shows to go online. The latest offering from Sheffield Theatres, now streaming to your home, is local in another way: Chris Bush’s The Band Plays On is an entertainment that has place at its very heart — it is a musical and historical love letter to the city of Sheffield. Over about 100 minutes, we get a mixture of female monologues and some spirited covers of mostly well-known songs by local heroes, from Dave Berry to Jarvis Cocker.This is a show Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“They think it’s all drugs and sex up here, Mrs H.” “Bless me.” The reality, at Kitchenly Mill Race, runs more to a nice pot of Tetley’s and a plate of Gypsy Creams. But “people are funny around famous folk”. At this Tudor manor house in Sussex – boldly enhanced in the 1930s by an Arts-and-Crafts wing – resides none other than Marko Morrell, lead guitarist of prog-rock legends Fear Taker. Or rather, he doesn’t, save for the odd impromptu overnighter with his lofty Danish consort Auralie and little daughter Molly, being otherwise engaged with his Chelsea townhouse, his Manhattan recording Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued by misperception? For my money, I would argue A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most people encounter it at school age because of the ease with which it can be dressed up as a light comedy involving fairies. Yet at heart this is a deeply primal work which draws upon the raw power of the elements to look at the arbitrary nature of desire and how radically it can rewrite any individual’s life.This aspect of the play has informed the RSC’s latest interpretation, though it is rightly the high-tech nature of its Dream that has dominated all the preview Read more ...
Charlie Stone
If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the science section by mistake. It's a novel that throws its reader in at the deep end, where that end is made of "streaks of bacteria" and "vigorous mycorrhizal networks" that would take a biology degree (or a browser) to decipher. As is often the case, though, it’s worth it once you’re in. Double Blind is one of those rare books that does everything the blurb claims it will do. Humorous, philosophical, gripping and – yes – scientific in turn, this is a Read more ...