Reviews
Graham Fuller
The most painterly and ominous sequence in Nocturnal naturally occurs at night. Until recently strangers, 33-year-old Pete (Cosmo Jarvis) and 17-year-old Laurie (Lauren Coe) gaze across a body of seawater to a miniature chemistry set – a tract of illuminated industrial buildings and smoke-belching cooling towers. Initially these bright satanic mills occupy the foot of the frame, the rest of it a vast black void; then they glide disarmingly close to Pete and Laurie as he drives among them.Perhaps the film’s director Nathalie Biancheri and its inspired cinematographer Michal Dymek intended Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rocks is a beautifully made slice of neo-realist filmmaking which deserves to get a wide audience but may well slip off the radar in the current climate. It really should be experienced in a cinema as the camerawork by Hélène Louvart is stunning and the sound design is excellent.Co-written by playwright Theresa Ikoko from her original story, it follows a few days in the life of Rocks, a 16-year-old girl growing up in Dalston. It’s the end of the summer holidays and her widowed mum is having mental health problems and has taken herself off. She’s left a bit of cash and a note saying that she Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
GogolFest:Dream in Kherson, somewhere near the Crimea in Ukraine was the music festival of the summer. Admittedly, in my case and for many, having missed out on WOMAD, Glastonbury, Fez, and others it was the only festival of the summer, and the bar didn’t have to that high to satisfy a festival junkie in need of a fix. It was, in any case, a fascinating event, featuring not merely some of the best bands of Eastern Europe, but theatre, lots of opera, and assorted talks and seminars.How to do a festival that maximises social distancing was the challenge in a country where Covid numbers are Read more ...
David Nice
An early hero of lockdown, livestreaming from his Berlin home in terrible sound at first, Igor Levit is a supreme example of how adaptable musicians can survive in times like these. True, he has the advantage of being the go-to pianist of the moment, but who else would take Satie’s 18-hour Vexations into a recording studio for more live broadcasting, or master the complete Beethoven sonatas more thoroughly for the most exciting of live experiences at the Salzburg Festival (in full) and now the Wigmore Hall (a telling selection)?There is focused brilliance in the playing as well as deep Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s no denying the Faulknerian ambition to the construction of Anthony Campos’ latest feature Devil All the Time. It’s a brooding, blood-soaked Semi-Southern Gothic drama spanning two generations through a plot that wrestles with the nature of good and evil like Jacob at Penuel.The film takes place in the wake of World War II and up to the outbreak of war in Vietnam, a time when the media would become weaponised as never before in the US. The pernicious nature of media was central to Campos’ previous works, Simon Killer (2012) and Christine (2016), but in The Devil All the Time, he Read more ...
David Nice
It wouldn’t be true to say I’d forgotten what a solo cello in a fine concert hall sounds like; revelation of an admittedly sparse year will undoubtedly remain Sumera’s Cello Concerto played by young Estonian Theodor Sink at the Pärnu Music Festival in July. But Alban Gerhardt, exactly the sort of enquiring musical mind likely to take up that masterpiece, brought tears to the eyes with the lower resonances and upper sweetness of what I presume to be his 1710 Goffriller instrument in the Wigmore Hall. It offers a superlative acoustic for stringed instruments, if less kind to pianists, though Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This warm-hearted and informative documentary series about life in a Welsh special education school probably isn’t going to be a ratings buster for the BBC but it’s one of the most touching and well-made shows I’ve seen in a long time.A Special School adheres to the classic format originated in Educating Essex back in 2011. We are rapidly introduced to a cast of quirky teachers, loving parents and the remarkable young pupils they support. Producer-director Ffion Humphries filmed the series last year at Ysgol y Deri near Cardiff, which claims to be the largest special school in Read more ...
David Nice
Music going back to nature, or rather the managed nature of a London park, can make you think and feel quite differently about great composers’ responses to the world around them. To hear Dvořák’s blissful “American” Quartet the Friday before last in the tender hands of the Maggini Quartet was to realise something of the circumstances around its swift (16-day) composition on a summer holiday in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa, and to go back to the essence of rustic music-making as well, of course, as the essence of folk music which links the composer’s native Bohemia with Afro- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Fires are raging: by human agency – unthinking greed – in the Amazonian rainforest, by climate change, arson and accident in California and the American Northwest, and barely under control in Australia, another country whose leading politicians and media deny climate change. But these were only the awesome symbols, the underlying context, in which Extinction: The Facts reached BBC One, under the aegis of the broadcaster’s "Our Planet Matters" banner.Under attack in Extinction was the biodiversity, the ecosystems of our planet that allow life in all its guises to – well – carry on. There are Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“It’s SO good to be back,” said Catherine Bott, and it would be impossible to disagree with her. She was presenting the livestream of the first concert to be performed in front of an audience at Wigmore Hall since March. The rules as originally in place (presumably from Westminster council) were going to limit that audience to a meagre maximum of 56 people, or just 10% of the seats, but the ruling was suddenly overturned, and the capacity last night was expanded to accommodate 112 of us fortunate souls.It felt not just like an imperative, but also a duty and a pleasure, to be able to produce Read more ...
Saskia Baron
ITV’s Sunday evening costume drama slot is filled for the next six weeks with this lacklustre adaptation of JG Farrell’s satirical novel, The Singapore Grip. Set in 1942, it was written in 1978 as the final part of his trilogy about British colonialism in Ireland, India and the Far East.In the Seventies, Farrell was at the cutting edge of reappraising English colonial history, crafting ingenious novels that were both ripping yarns with colourful characters and refreshingly clear-eyed re-evaluations of manipulative expats and the damage they wrought in the countries they asset-stripped. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud. William Feaver spoke with the artist perhaps almost daily for nearly 40 years, visiting frequently, taking notes, recording, and being shown work in progress. The second volume of the resulting kaleidoscope – the two together, the first published last year, come to over 1,100 pages – is a mesmerising, entertaining account of Freud’s life and art. Freud’s own comments on other artists, his own paintings, and art in general, its purposes and his own aesthetic, are intelligent, enlightening and absorbing.Feaver’s Read more ...