Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Diarist, novelist and writer of erotica Anaïs Nin lived a brilliantly-coloured life littered with affairs with literary A-listers (Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell et al). She might have been delighted by this playfully-written and shrewdly cast dramatisation of her Little Birds story collection (Sky Atlantic), which creates a fabulously vivid and decadent picture of Tangier in the mid-1950s.In this opening pair of episodes, we followed sheltered American heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) as she ventured forth from her family’s palatial New York apartment to meet her intended Read more ...
Gaby Frost
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My Neighbourhood, a series of surreal and playful short stories offering a glimpse at the most curious and intriguing of all beings: neighbours.It’s like a dream woven from the fragments of a world seen from a window. Each story is just three or four pages long. Sometimes the chapter titles only make sense in the final line of the story, and even then, we ask: why that detail? There are themes which link individual stories: gambling brings together the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shall we talk about racism? Currently we seem to be talking about it all the time, and it’s the question non-white parents in Britain sooner or later find themselves pondering as they watch their children grow up in our increasingly confrontational society. For this Channel 4 film, director Geoff Small had assembled a cross-section of notable black and mixed race personalities, and let them describe their often conflicted emotions.Some took a pragmatic approach. Writer Gary Younge long ago took the view that “racism exists, you are going to have to navigate it.” He considers that teaching his Read more ...
David Nice
So much for the assertion that nowhere in the world would be staging the big Strauss and Wagner operas for the indefinite future. With a combination of lavish funding and good pandemic management on Austria's part, it’s been possible in Salzburg. Ironic, then, that though no holds are barred in terms of how close everyone on stage and in the pit can be, with any amount of feeling and touching permitted short (I’m guessing) of osculation, this Elektra feels, for the most part, distanced not socially (or, in the case of this work, anti-socially) but in psychological terms.Some of that could be Read more ...
aleks.sierz
During the current pandemic, stories about isolation have a particular resonance. Feelings of claustrophobia, loneliness and frustration slide off the stage and echo in our subconscious – yes, this is us alright. One of the most prescient is Athena Stevens’s Scrounger, an impassioned autobiographical account of how the crass inefficiency of an airline results in a wheelchair user being stuck at home for weeks on end. Written during her residency at the Finborough fringe venue, and staged early this year, it is now streamed as a film and beautifully conveys both its modernistic aesthetic and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At the age of 80, John Cleese probably doesn't care what people think of him. But then, when you were one-sixth of Monty Python and co-creator of one of TV's funniest sitcoms, you can afford not to play to the gallery as the royalties from Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers still roll in (even if, as he never tires of telling his audiences, a fair chunk goes in alimony).A cynic might say that explains why his new show, Why There Is No Hope, has so few laughs – but, to be fair, it was livestreamed from an empty Cadogan Hall, which killed many of his jokes stone dead. He began, though, with a Read more ...
India Lewis
It is no surprise, given her Cambridge Intellectual literary style, that Ali Smith’s Summer is multi-layered, referential, and filled with cameos from giants in the fields of art and science. It is arguably the best of the four novels in her Seasonal Quartet, pulling through the threads from the previous three, without opting for easy conclusions or tying all the ends together neatly. Summer is also not as challenging as some of her texts can be, which (admittedly) is a bit of a relief.Summer begins with Grace (former actress), her ex-husband and new partner who live next door, and her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The feather in this particular cap is a DVD of director John T. Davis’ 1979 film Shellshock Rock. Filmed from October 1978 to April 1979, its 50 minutes thrillingly catch the Troubles-era Ulster getting to grips with punk rock. Vox pops from disgusted Belfast shoppers vie with live footage of Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, Protex, Victim, the thoroughly unvarnished Parasites and more in a gritty verité portrait of a scene which, due to its contemporary context, was beyond being a pose for the region’s punks. A nervy Stiff Little Fingers are seen admitting they were scared that the Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the bizarrely personable world of the clinical organ farm, but South stretches the theme. She introduces the poignant figure of a fully-grown, childlike person with no language capabilities. Elsewhere in her debut collection, we run up against vicious pre-teen internet trolls, OAPs with a hankering for phone sex and the wavering figure of online celebrity, revealed to be a piecemeal mess in person.South’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel universes, the threads that connect us. Vincent, an impoverished bartender in a remote hotel on Vancouver Island, leaves her job to enter a new life in the “kingdom of money” with Jonathan Alkaitis, an immensely rich, much older New York financier. But she has an unsettling sense of other versions of her life being lived without her. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in.”In Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This sober French space movie is concerned with what a female astronaut leaves behind on Earth, not what she finds in the cosmic dark. Sarah (Eva Green) has been selected for a European Space Agency mission towards Mars, realising a childhood dream. Punishing training prepares her for separation from Earth, and from eight-year-old daughter Stella (Zelié Boulant-Lemesle).Green’s layered performance of female strength rebukes Hollywood's erotic exotic typecasting, letting rage and tears ripple through her then striding on. Men aren’t Sarah’s enemies, but privileged, different and to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Minutes into Make Up, Claire Oakley’s auspicious first feature as writer-director, unearthly sounds welcome unwitting Ruth (Molly Windsor) to her intimidating baptismal adventure as an 18-year-old who's not so much bi-curious as bi-phobic. A nail-biter to begin with, she’s soon hearing and seeing portents of horror everywhere, not least on the tips of her fingers.An adolescent-seeming Derby woman, Ruth has travelled by coach and taxi to a coastal Cornwall caravan site to join her longtime boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn), a regular winter worker there. The sly middle-aged manager Shirley (Lisa Read more ...