Reviews
Lucy Popescu
“The challenges of the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountains. If you stand too close, you won’t be able to see their peaks. Once you step away from the currents of life, you will have the full view…” This is the advice a grandmother offers to her beloved granddaughter in Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s lyrical family saga. Born in North Việt Nam, Nguyễn won a scholarship to study in Australia and currently lives in Jakarta. Aged thirty-nine, she wrote The Mountains Sing in English rather than her Vietnamese mother tongue. These factors presumably offered the Read more ...
David Nice
So the bubble of reactionary brouhaha over the Last Night of the Proms quickly burst: there can be no argument about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Rule, Britannia!” when they’re to be presented in their original Proms forms (Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, where the tune preceded the words the composer so disliked, and Henry Wood’s 1905 Fantasia on British Sea Songs, all orchestral – only later did Malcolm Sargent rearrange the closing anthem to go with a solo voice). Apart from the death threats to conductor Dalia Stasevska and her family, what’s most lamentable is that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
William Nicholson’s Shadowlands screenplay was his most devastating expression of English repression. His second film as director goes to the source, in this fictionalised account of his parents’ divorce, which he waited till they were dead to make. Grace (Annette Bening) and Edward (Bill Nighy) are the couple who finish when he walks out one Sunday morning, Jamie (Josh O’Connor) the torn son. The Sussex coastal backwater of Seaford is the picturesque backdrop, filmed with more feeling than the script.Grace is an unreasonable woman, Edward an over-reasonable man. The clockwork which let these Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Watching the semi-satirical psychological horror film She’ll Die Tomorrow conjures the last lines of TS Eliot’s "The Hollow Men": “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature doesn’t depict a widescreen apocalypse – it’s a low-budget indie, after all – but offers a collective whimper from a not very likeable group of people living in relative comfort.If no atoms are split above Seimetz’s’s bourgie LA, there’s still a chain reaction. The protagonist – another Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil, pictured below) – is a thirtysomething lapsed Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An endearing cast does what it can to keep Get Duked! aloft until writer-director Ninian Doff's movie sinks under the weight of too many wearisome shifts in tone. A coming-of-age film that is alternately silly and sentimental while wanting at times to be scary as well, the result leaves no doubt as to the talents of its gifted young cast. Rather more debatable is music video alum Doff's control over material that lurches all over the map, buoying up the audience on the back of some fresh-faced leads before devolving into absurdity by the final reel. The setting suggests an odd amalgam of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m going to be a Disney princess!” Thirty-five-year-old actress Suzie Pickles (Billie Piper) is screaming with joy at having got the part, and her deaf, seven-year-old son Frank (Matthew Jordan-Caws) looks excited too. Her husband’s reaction? “I thought you were too old.”Hardly surprising, perhaps, that she’s cheated on him, but unfortunate that this comes to light in a celebrity phone hack, with pictures released all over the internet, just as a team of make-up artists, hangers-on and two wolf-hounds arrive at the low-ceilinged Pickles country house for a magazine photoshoot. “We’re going Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In normal times, Edinburgh Festival audiences would now be packing into the city’s invaluable Traverse Theatre, home to some of the most vibrant new writing in the country. Instead, the Traverse has created a new online venue, Traverse 3, that exists to extend its festival programme throughout the year and can point to an immediate success in a new 30-minute online film, Declan, adapted from a recent stage hit at this same address.The source material for the actor Lorn Macdonald’s directorial debut is Mouthpiece, the 90-minute play by Kieran Hurley in which Macdonald Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of the destruction of the natural environment are depressingly common, but Frank Gardner brought a fresh slant to this punchy account of a botanical expedition to Colombia (BBC Two). Best known as the BBC’s security correspondent, Gardner was partially paralysed in a terrorist attack in Riyadh in 2004, but was determined that this wouldn’t stop him. “I traded in my wheelchair for a pack horse,” he declared.It almost didn’t work, because a panicky Gardner, unable to cling on with his legs, was almost flung from his horse while descending a steep mountain track. The local Colombian Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Go back over Christopher Nolan’s films and count the clocks. He has an obsession that would give a horologist a run for his money. Time is a continual motif of his body of work and it finds its zenith in his latest work Tenet. Beneath the highly polished spy-thriller aesthetic lies a head-spinning, temporally warped plot, laced with concepts and conceits that will delight and baffle in equal measures. At the heart of the story is The Protagonist (John David Washington, pictured below with Robert Pattinson), a highly trained agent who stumbles upon a time-bending technology Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to one interviewee here, a young Mancunian woman festooned with eyeliner, tattoos, pumped-up lips and huge hoop earrings, a major motivation for having cosmetic treatments is to make yourself look like Kylie Jenner and the Kardashians. “Big lips, square jaw, tiny waist, big bum, big boobs – now it’s become commercial enough that we can get it,” she explained.This may not be an aspiration shared by everyone – and what happens if the Kardashians switch to a gamine, Twiggy-style new look? – but you might at least expect that the people who provide such easily-available appearance- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the malignant fantasist Carl Beech is one of the more iniquitous episodes in British legal history, a stomach-turning swamp of lies, gullibility and heinous incompetence. It shook faith in some of our supposedly most robust institutions to the core, and Beech’s lies tainted the reputations of some innocent victims who went to their graves with a shadow still hanging over them.Vanessa Engle’s documentary (BBC Two) told Beech's story with a sardonic eye, though the repeated jokey images of a Pinocchio figure tended to undermine the gravity of the tale. In 2012 Beech had cashed in Read more ...
David Nice
In seach of Orpheus, and following a route from the Hades of (thankfully) masked beings on the underground to Archway, then up to a windy, grassy plateau just below Highgate village, this wandering critic encountered another myth about the power of life over death. Holst fashioned his Sāvitri, the only successful early (1907-8) fruit of the Sanskrit-translating composer’s quest to compose an Indian opera, as a short, bittersweet shoot from the riches of the epic Mahabhrata, remarkably concise (under half an hour) for its pre-war time. The composer thought it would be best performed in the Read more ...