Reviews
Veronica Lee
Podcasts have got many of us through 2020, starved as we have been for most of it of live comedy to leave the house to see. Here's a selection of some of the best; they are available on all podcast platforms unless stated.Dear Joan & JerichaAfter the spoof agony aunts recently went public with their first in-person appearance (pictured above), they spoil us with a third series of the award-winning podcast. Julia Davis (who plays Joan) and Vicki Pepperdine (Jericha) riff on all matters to do with sex and relationships, so prepare to have your eyes popped with their outrageously graphic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scars’s tour de force album Author! Author! has been out of sight for too long. Originally released in 1981, it first reappeared on a swiftly withdrawn CD in 2007. Apparently, there were issues about where the rights for its reissue lay. Now, it has re-emerged.Author! Author! was great. On the surface it was poppy, but a darkness coursed through its ten tracks. “All About You”, the March 1981 single trailing its release, sounds like a hit (its promo video is on YouTube). Driving, melodic and mysterious, it suggested Scars as an artier, more subtle counterpart to the U2 of “I Will Follow”. It Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
One of Marc Chagall’s last commissions was for a stained-glass window in Chichester Cathedral, which channelled his characteristically exuberant spirituality into a response to the verse from Psalm 150, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord”. One of my earliest cultural memories is going as a schoolgirl to attend the window’s unveiling and seeing for the first time the clashing colours and fusing of folk and experimental art that made him one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive artists.Emma Rice’s ravishing, colour-saturated production of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk takes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lockdowns must be good for something, right? British writer-director Rob Savage (a 2013 Screen International Star of Tomorrow, factoid fans) has made the most of the unwelcome imposition of our first national incarceration by creating a Zoom-powered horror movie, in which a group of six friends gather around their phones and laptops to stage an internet-powered seance.Previous films such as Unfriended and Searching have deployed computer screens to tell their story, but the idea of using Zoom adds a different dimension, and Savage has cannily exploited the parameters of the setup. The various Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“California is for cocksuckers and flag-burners. Did they know you were a fag in the army?” Willis (Lance Henriksen; best known as Bishop in Alien) asks his son John (Viggo Mortensen), now living in LA with his husband Eric and their adopted daughter Monica.And that’s one of Willis’s more restrained outbursts. He’s tipping over the edge into enraged, foul-mouthed dementia. Yet somehow his son, a mild-mannered pilot (he was in the air force, not the army, as he reminds his dad) who’s trying to get him to move from his isolated farm in the snowy northeast, is a model of kindness and patience – Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé have been slow off the mark, compared with some, in their response to the challenge of concert-giving in the Covid era. But now that they have delivered on the first of their winter season performances, it has clearly been worth the wait. They are offering not merely online musical performances but a set of newly made, highly creative films, watchable on Vimeo, built around the works they’re playing and the sight and sound of them doing so. Not less than a "live" performance, but quite a lot more.In "normal" times, you wouldn’t get as close to musicians in full flow as you do in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the raid on dams in Germany's Ruhr Valley by the RAF’s 617 Squadron in May 1943 has become a subject of perennial fascination as well as a potent national myth. The 1955 film The Dam Busters seems to be always showing on a TV channel somewhere, while previous TV documentaries on the subject have included Dambusters Declassified, Dambusters: Building the Bouncing Bomb and The Race to Smash the German Dams. Peter Lord of the Rings Jackson has been planning to shoot a new version of the Dam Busters movie since 2008, but there’s no sign of it yet.So what could Dan Snow’s new three- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This debut feature by writer/director Henry Blake is a shocking and remarkably assured drama about the “county lines” trade, where children are used as drug traffickers. Using mobile phones, city-based drug dealers employ kids to ferry their product to rural areas or small towns, in this case Canvey Island and the Thames estuary.Blake was inspired to make the film by his experiences as a youth worker in east London, working at a Pupil Referral Unit for problem children excluded from regular schools. He has assembled an impressive cast of young up-and-coming actors, with Conrad Khan (pictured Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Edgy comedy runs the risk of discomfiting the audience so much that they can't relax and enjoy the show. But Natalie Palamides, appearing as Nate, her alter ego, in Nate: A One Man Show on Netflix, pulls it off, and then some.The show, which has a large degree of audience participation and which I first saw at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, is wonderfully provocative. Here, to British eyes at least, it has an added layer of – perhaps in some way sadistic – enjoyment (if that's the right word) in seeing it performed before a liberal US audience at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, who appear even Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of selfhood are more than just striking self portraits, though. South African artist Zanele Muholi uses the pronouns they and them and refers to themself as a visual activist, since the photographs are a form of protest against the prejudices faced by the queer community of which they are a part.In this series begun in 2012, Muholi ratchets up the contrast, so their skin becomes ebony black, and decks themself in mundane materials such as raffia, rope, electric cables, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
For so much of the year, Tenet was cited as the film that was going to save cinema – the tentpole extravaganza that would draw virus-conscious punters back to the big screen. The assertion was always fanciful, the pandemic being too long a haul; with no disrespect to Christopher Nolan, the fanfare around his latest spoke more of industry desperation than reality.Meanwhile, along comes Mank, David Fincher’s account of the controversial genesis of Orson Welles’ landmark Citizen Kane, oft-cited as the greatest film ever made. It stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Songs from Home has been an anchor-point almost since the beginning of lockdown for many people, all of us invited into the singer’s sun-dappled Virginia farmhouse, often the kitchen, where, accompanied by Angus the most golden of retrievers, she chats and sings. Last weekend, America still celebrating Thanksgiving, she performed a concert. Solo in every respect, its punning title: One Night Lonely.It was a generous performance, two hours, filmed at the Filene Center amid Wolf Trap’s 117-acre Park for the Performing Arts, “a treasured place in the DC area” where Read more ...