Reviews
Adam Sweeting
It’s not what he says, it’s the way he says it. Few filmmakers have bent the term “auteur” to their own ends more boldly than Wes Anderson, whose arresting visual style, oblique wit and skill in picking actors who can mould themselves to the unique demands of Wes-world is surely unequalled.You might argue that The Phoenician Scheme is little more than fanciful nonsense – I might be tempted to do so myself – but once on board you’ll want to stick around for the ride, even if much of it is barely comprehensible. It’s 1950, and the story revolves around Zsa-zsa Korda, a maverick tycoon who has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not only because of its title. An early scene brings a nostalgic recap of highlights from the series’ history (which stretches back to 1996), with a voice-over from Angela Bassett’s President Sloane (pictured below) pleading with Ethan Hunt to return to save the world one more time. Comeback roles for M:I veterans Henry Czerny (as Kittridge) and Rolf Saxon – reprising his role of William Donloe from the first M:I film – reinforce the sense of a circle being closed Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV detective series, the spotlight has now landed on Canterbury. Code of Silence frequently inserts a dramatic aerial shot of the city, its streets radiating out from the towering ecclesiastical landmark at its centre, to remind us where we are.It’s an eerily empty version of Canterbury, its streets untroubled by tourists and traffic. Our sparky heroine, Alison (Rose Ayling-Ellis), zips around it on her bike; motoring up to London for a night out seems to be standard. At the heart of the story, though, is a real live Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about witchcraft and revenge resonates so strongly today.In an article in the New Yorker he described how he wrote the play as an “act of desperation” that was “motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals”. Back then, the paralysis was in response to the tyranny of McCarthyism – now it’s the result of more complex forces that many of us are still trying to decode.Ola Ince’s blistering, humane production paints the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Pixies might just be the ultimate Radio 6 Dad band. They’ve been around (on-and-off) for around 40 years; they’ve got a fine back catalogue of slightly weird, guitar-driven scuzzy rock music and they have absolutely no pretentions to being flash at all.However, while Black Francis and his crew pulled in plenty of their core fan base into Birmingham’s O2 Academy this week, it was also pleasing to see plenty of young men and women who couldn’t have even been born when Pixies temporarily decided to knock things on the head and go their separate ways in the early 1990s. It was also clear that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With French baroque opera all but banished from the UK’s major opera companies, it’s left to concert halls and country houses to fill the void. There’s a full-length treat ahead this summer with Rameau’s opéra-ballet Les Indes Galantes at Hampshire’s Grange Festival, but first Temple Music served up an amuse-bouche from Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company.Before there was George Bernard Shaw (or My Fair Lady, for that matter) there was Rameau’s take on the myth of Pygmalion – the artist so in love with his own creation that she comes to life. The composer’s one-act opera is the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter. The Fifth Step, though, is a gentler beast whose humour ends with a simple visual gag. Maybe because this is more personally sensitive territory?Ireland sets the piece in an AA meeting place, somewhere he got to know well in his early twenties in Glasgow. As props, there are just a few folding chairs and a refreshments table with paper cups. The sides of the performing space are raised, turning it into a kind of arena. There, a succession of bouts takes place Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two established favourites from big names of the 20th century plus a new-to-me piece by a forgotten figure worthy of re-discovery.And the LSO under Susanna Mälkki didn’t disappoint in any regard: this was a great night in the Barbican hall. I came across the black American composer Julia Perry (1924-1979) a few years ago, but this was my first chance to hear her music live. There are a few black and women composers getting performed these days who, I fear, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative talent – more than a decade ago, but he reached a new audience with his appearance as the good guy-goes-bad-then-good-again Nate in the lovely television comedy Ted Lasso.Now’s he’s touring with Mr Swallow: Show Pony. Part-way through, something unexpected happens: Nick Mohammed takes over, while still in the guise of Mr Swallow. It’s a meta moment for sure, and slightly discombobulating, but it allows Mohammed to play with the character-within-a-character guise Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.Quarter of an hour later, the singer Luna Roja (pictured left) takes to the small indoor stage. She tells the small crowd that she wants her music to “connect South America and spaghetti westerns”. With long straight black hair, she’s clad in a powder blue fringed jacket, pale jeans and a cowboy hat. Her guitar adds the Morricone twang but the songs mostly Read more ...
David Nice
There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions and the “wonder-working spear” is a knife in a Cain and Abel story superimposed on Wagner’s myth (as if that wasn’t complicated enough). Kundry, whom the composer defines as literally flying between “good” and “bad” worlds, enters primly in the first two acts bearing a tea-tray.Strong tableaux abound in young Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen’s production, Glyndebourne's first Parsifal, but they restrict to this world Wagner's sublime swansong score, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. This focused on the dogged and agonising search for truth by Jim Swire (played by Colin Firth), whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and raised a host of possibilities and theories about who did it and why.The BBC’s new six-part series takes a different tack. While it explores the investigation into who planted the bomb on the plane and the ensuing trial of two Libyan suspects, one of its prime concerns is to make Read more ...