Reviews
Saskia Baron
Pixar's recent work raises the question, how much overt spiritual guidance do you want in your animation? In their latest film, Soul, middle-school music teacher Joe (Jamie Foxx) aspires to play New York’s famed jazz clubs but is living hand to mouth. On the same day he’s offered a full time teaching post, he also scores a dream gig playing at the Half Note with a top band. It’s no wonder that a random street accident sees him unwilling to ascend the escalator to Heaven (someone at Pixar has been watching A Matter of Life and Death).Instead Joe jumps into the limbo-land of The Great Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Cinderella ****I did worry that pantomime – that most audience-driven of theatrical pursuits – might not work through the tube, but Nottingham Playhouse's warm and funny show dispels any doubts. Pandemic jokes abound (the audience must be smelly because they're sitting far apart, for instance) in writer-director Adam Penford's inventive romp.The cast of seven inject a lot of energy into the show as distances must be kept on stage – the Prince (David Albury) and Cinderella (Gabrielle Brooks) can't share even a chaste kiss – but that doesn't stop the fun. Sara Poyzer as Fairy Godmother and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The winter solstice occurs tomorrow, 21 December. Stonehenge, one of this island’s most significant structures, is constructed in alignment with the setting sun on that day. After the solstice, the days lengthen and a new cycle of the year begins.An image of what could be Stonehenge appears inside the back cover of the booklet coming with Sumer Is Icumen In – The Pagan Sound Of British & Irish Folk 1966–1975. Inside its front cover, a similar edifice is seen. Within it, a circle of woman kneel each with arms outstretched. The image is taken from the 1973 film, The Wicker Man and the Read more ...
David Nice
Adaptability backed up by funding has been the course of the most successful musical organisations since mid-March – but it’s been especially tough from November onwards. One abrupt lockdown meant that anything scheduled to be performed before a carefully limited live audience within or around that month bit the dust, and the London Symphony Orchestra’s series planned to match Beethoven piano concertos with Stravinsky’s smaller-scale orchestral works at the Barbican with Krystian Zimerman as soloist and Simon Rattle conducting was a major casualty. So was the Beethoven concertos marathon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pairing of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Superman’s surrogate parents in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did not go unnoticed, and here writer/director Thomas Bezucha has reunited them as Montana residents George and Margaret Blackledge. He’s a retired sheriff, she’s a former horse-trainer, and now their lives revolve around their son James, his wife Lorna and their baby son Jimmy.In the early sequences, Let Him Go (adapted from Larry Watson’s novel) looks as though it has a sort of On Golden Pond vibe going on, a sentimental story of growing older, changing Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life was cut tragically short this year from bowel cancer. This adaptation of Wilson’s play is the second in a ten-part cycle that chronicles the Black experience throughout the course of the 20th century. It’s produced by Denzel Washington, who himself starred in Fences, another Wilson play, back in 2016. This chapter focuses on the life of Ma Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A person in a brown polo neck turns away, looking down (pictured below right). The encounter feels really intimate; we are almost breathing down this beautiful neck and exquisitely painted ear. Yet the subject retains their privacy; you can’t even be sure if this is a man or a woman.Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints people, yet her pictures are not portraits. They are not drawn from life, but from her imagination and the store of images inhabiting her mind. Her subjects are not sitters, posing at her behest, but characters minding their own business and getting on with their lives. Such an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of phrase and line makes this music feel as natural and necessary as breathing, sang Handel’s nine German-language arias to pious texts by Bartold Heinrich Brockes (who also wrote the words to the “Brockes Passion”). In between clusters of songs, the Arcangelo players – violinist Matthew Truscott, lutenist Thomas Dunford and cellist Jonathan Manson, with Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
At just under five hours, Troy Story, the RSC’s adaptation of as many tales from Greek myth, takes about a third as long as it does to recite the whole of the Iliad. It feels like longer. Gregory Doran’s production is ambitious in its starkness, but never quite manages to break out of the plodding rhythm of its lines – or to bring the stories into the 21st century. (The venture, undertaken without sets or costumes, was livestreamed this past weekend and is available through Saturday to ticket-holders via catch-up.) Unlike Homer, Doran and dramaturges Cathleen McCarron and Anna McSweeney Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After months of watching movies on computer screens, how delightful to have a press screening at the Waterloo IMAX cinema, albeit under Covid restrictions. Not so delightful was the realisation that Wonder Woman 1984 is crying out for some editing shears (151 minutes! Are they serious?), while the uninspired climax that Gal Gadot’s title character spends so long labouring towards really isn't worth the wait.Whereas 2017’s Wonder Woman found World War One mysteriously arriving at the island of Themyscira, mythical home to the Amazon women, this one (again helmed by Patty Jenkins) leaps forward Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Voces8 are the Rolls-Royce of British a cappella ensembles and their LIVE From London - Christmas online festival is the Rolls-Royce of online festivals. Amazingly, it is their second such festival of the year: the first, during the summer, which I regret I didn’t catch any of, featured recorded, streamed performances by leading vocal groups from this country (I Fagiolini, Stile Antico) and the US (Chanticleer). The Christmas edition that has followed soon after has mopped up some important groups missing in the summer, with expanded international element and a Young Performers Spotlight.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The twelve days of Christmas have nothing on the flotilla of Christmas Carols jostling for view this season, each of which is substantially different enough from the next so as to give Dickens's 1843 story its prismatic due. Hailing from Broadway, where it was a seasonal perennial for a decade, this adaptation from Disney regular Alan Menken, Ragtime lyricist Lynn Ahrens, and the late, much-missed Mike Ockrent puts the emphasis squarely on the big and the brash. If you want quiet moments of revelation, Shaun Kerrison's musical staged concert is not for you. On the other hand, I all Read more ...