Reviews
Owen Richards
Scooby fans have waited over 50 years for a proper big screen adaptation of everyone’s favourite cowardly dog (sorry Cartoon Network’s Courage). The 2003 live-action version starring Matthew Lillard and Sarah Michelle Gellar failed to capture the paranormal-busting mystery of the TV series, and although the follow-up Monsters Unleashed recreated the classic villains, it was still a slog. But with a new CGI adventure from the studio behind The Lego Movie and the underrated Smallfoot, could Scoob! finally be the film Mystery Inc. deserve?Well, the plot certainly tries to squeeze in as many Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lockdown’s easing and the record shops are opening here and there. So, to help vinyl junkies on their way, here’s 7000 words of reviews, capturing the best of the last couple of months’ releases on plastic. As ever, the sounds go everywhere, from hip hop to post-punk to Moroccan trance music. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Four Owls Nocturnal Instinct (High Focus) + TrueMendous Huh? (High Focus) + Telemachus Boring & Weird Historical Music (High Focus)Three albums from Brighton’s High Focus Records which showcase many kinds of verve and ambition. The label is best known for nurturing the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Gavin O’Connor has made a career out of sturdy films that make grown men cry. His best was Warrior - a hulking, tear-jerking tale of male fragility and addiction. His latest Finding The Way Back is a potent, raw drama that explores similar terrain and reunites him with Ben Affleck (they last worked together on The Accountant).This film was initially called The Has-Been. Like a stage-actor hearing the word "Macbeth", the average Hollywood actor might recoil at such a title. Which is a shame, as it encapsulates the sense of loss experienced by the central character Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When Picasso left Barcelona for Paris in 1900, he took what by then was a well-trodden path for artists eager to be at the very centre of the art world. Trained in the academies of Barcelona, their ambitions nurtured in the bohemian environment of Els Quatre Gats - the city’s answer to the Parisian artists’ haunt Le Chat Noir – several generations of Spanish artists born in the 19th century went to the City of Light in search of the newest ideas and styles, and a market for their work.Picasso remained in Paris for much of his life, but many of his fellow countrymen returned to Spain, their Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Helen McCrory is an actor who can inject a world of feeling into one syllable that many actors would struggle to muster in an entire script. Towards the end of The Deep Blue Sea, she is telling her estranged husband what it was that attracted her to the feckless pilot for whom she has thrown away her marriage. She describes a conversation at a golf club, in which after talking about “how life seems to have no direction, no purpose”, he puts his hand on her arm and says, “I really think that you’re the most attractive girl I’ve ever met”. She explains, “In that ti-ny moment Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Colombian director Franco Lolli’s debut feature Gente de Bien (2014) was a hit at several international film festivals, and Litigante should burnish his reputation further. It’s a carefully-observed family drama centred on the relationship between veteran lawyer Leticia (Leticia Gomez) and her daughter Silvia (Carolina Sani), a lawyer for Bogota’s Public Works department. Leticia is dying painfully from lung cancer while Silvia finds herself embroiled in a corruption scandal at work, all serving to pile the pressure on to their already fractious relationship.Lolli doesn’t preach or Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Drive-ins are now firmly establishing themselves as the only method by which culture fans can see live arts in person for the future. Hot on the heels of The Drive-In Club comes @TheDriveIn, sponsored by Suzuki and produced by Jericho Comedy.The producers are staging two kinds of drive-in shows; those mainly about comedy, and others mainly about film, the latter with a broader entertainment vibe. On the evening I went, a couple of comics and a turntablist were the warm-up acts for the main event, a screening of Grease.Ivo Graham kicked off proceedings and instead of doing a truncated version Read more ...
David Nice
What music would you choose to hear for your first live event after nearly four months of lockdown? For me, it would be Bach, and probably any one of the Cello Suites. Interpreter? Ideally, one of four living cellists – so the dream came true last night when Steven Isserlis played the First and Third Suites with the fascinating Walton Passacaglia in between to an audience of 25 in the spacious, light-filled surroundings of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Farringdon.The very limited numbers include affordable places for under-30s, and each programme is played over three or four consecutive Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the midst of our increasingly confrontational politics of race and gender, it was a timely move to make this series (on BBC Two) about Seventies radical feminism and the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the USA, even if some of the minutiae are liable to sound abstract or alien to British viewers. Cate Blanchett storms brilliantly to the fore as Phyllis Schlafly, a proud Republican housewife and champion of traditional family values, and staunch opponent of the Amendment.Schlafly is that bewildering paradox, a conservative revolutionary, which apparently is what lured Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Once again the incredible healing powers of Gareth Malone swung into action, as his quest to find a universal anthem for the Covid crisis boiled up to a climax (BBC Two). Considering that he’s been masterminding his Home Choir and his songwriting quest over broadband links from his garden shed, he has managed to tap into an amazing shared reservoir of pent-up emotions.In this final episode he focused on “The Shielded”, people who through age or their medical condition have spent months under a kind of house arrest. We met 24-year old Mairin, who’s been looking after her 84-year-old Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The notion of massed aircraft dogfighting over southern England seems inconceivable now, but the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was all too horribly real for its participants. Marking the 80th anniversary, this three-part recreation of three pivotal days in the campaign began with 15 August, the day of the first major German attacks.This is fairly typical Dan Snow territory, and you can imagine that the chisel-jawed historian might secretly picture himself flinging his Spitfire through the skies in pursuit of the despicable Luftwaffe. Ironically, though, it was his co-presenter Kate Read more ...