Reviews
Florence Hallett
The former home of 19th century architect Sir John Soane has long been celebrated as one of London’s hidden marvels, an astonishing treasure trove of architectural models, paintings, sculptures and historical artefacts concealed behind an elegant but unassuming facade. Now, parts of Sir John Soane’s Museum can be accessed even in lockdown, the result of an ongoing project to create a 3D digital replica of the site and its contents, accessible online by anyone, anywhere.Created using 3D scanning technology, the digital replica follows a major restoration project, intended to return the museum Read more ...
David Nice
Vintage champagne was served up last night, and whether you found the glass half-full or half-empty would depend on your perspective. In the bigger picture, it's disappointing that not more musicians could return to the Royal Opera House stage, and no-one to the auditorium, as they've been doing to concert halls in Norway, Sweden and Czechia, and to a car-park transformed as operatic space in Berlin (next Saturday, when Covent Garden starts charging for content, more players will, for Schoenberg's chamber arrangement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde). But given the constraints, the Royal Read more ...
Jessica Payn
The epigraph chosen for Holiday Heart locates the book within the tense of an “afterwards”: not passion, but what follows, the wakeful lull and wide-eyed studying of another, in which scrutiny supplants desire: “Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other.” It’s a poem by Sharon Olds called ‘The Knowing’, a title appropriate to Margarita García Robayo’s central characters, Lucía and Pablo, a married couple who have been together for nineteen years, who are in their different ways difficult to like, and who are fully familiar with the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Lee Hooker’s recording career began on Friday 3 September 1948. He’d attracted the attention of the Kiev-born Bernard Besman, who was in Detroit after his family moved there in 1926 following five years in London’s East End. By the 1940s Besman, who played piano, was a veteran of dance bands and also worked as a booker. In 1946 he began working with records. At the time of encountering Hooker, Besman co-owned Sensation Records. Its early, pre-Hooker, signings included The Todd Rhodes Orchestra, Lord Nelson and his Boppers and the Doc Wiley Trio – who variously traded in boogie, jazz and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
History, as protestors around the world currently insist, can be the art of forgetting – and erasure – as much as of memory. Although it explores a single incident from a century ago, Yuri Herrera’s brief, forensic but quietly impassioned account of a Mexican mining disaster may speak directly to the movements that now seek to reclaim a buried past from beneath official records. Over his three previous novels, above all in the award-winning Signs Preceding the End of the World, the author has poured the molten conflict and change of contemporary Mexico (and Latin America) into individual Read more ...
India Lewis
The Pet Shop Boys' film It Couldn’t Happen Here, originally released in 1988, has been given a new outing on a BFI Blu-ray/DVD that contextualises it with special features. While it's an entertaining snapshot of a particular time in British and pop history, and while I don’t wish to be churlish, that's about as far as it goes.
It's one of those films that one watches and spends a large amount of time wondering what it means, before realising that it doesn’t mean all that much. It's essentially an overblown music video soundtracked entirely by songs from two albums (Actually Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s taken over 18 years for Artemis Fowl to reach the big screen, with Miramax originally buying the rights in 2001. Finally, Disney have brought the world’s youngest criminal mastermind to life, but was it worth the wait? Well, the fact it’s appearing on streaming service Disney+ rather than waiting for a cinematic release probably answers that question.Loosely based on Eoin Colfer’s popular novels and helmed by Kenneth Branagh, 12-year-old Artemis Fowl II (Ferdia Shaw) must save his kidnapped father by infiltrating the secret society of fairies, dwarves and goblins. Alongside his bodyguard Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Echo in the Canyon is a lamentably thin documentary about the vibrant folk-rock music scene that flourished in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Laurel Canyon from 1965 to 1967. Though it features priceless vintage footage of the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas and interviews with some surviving members, it weirdly comes across as a vehicle for Jakob Dylan.The singer-songwriter was born in 1969, the year in which Jacques Demy’s only American film Model Shop was released. Inspired by the mood of Demy’s semi-documentary love-letter to Los Angeles Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It has been the fate of George III – who on many levels was a visionary and accomplished monarch – to go down in history as a comic figure, most famed for losing first America and then his mind. This Nottingham Playhouse production tells his story with all the wit and elegance of a tune played on a harpsichord, yet it is made remarkable by the way in which it simultaneously excavates the pain and pathos underlying his condition.That is due not least to an extraordinary performance from Mark Gatiss in the title role. Gatiss arrives in this production on the wings of a prolific and varied TV Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Spike Lee’s ambitious tale of five American veterans returning to Vietnam to settle unfinished business, should have opened out of competition at Cannes last month. He was set to become the first African American film-maker to head the festival jury. Instead, coronavirus wiped out Da 5 Bloods cinema release and the film debuts on Netflix. Its 63-year-old director has had to self-isolate at home in New York, watching Covid-19's terrible impact on the BAME community and George Floyd’s murder rock the world. Under these circumstances, it would be great to be able to give Read more ...
Tom Baily
“Never get rattled”. For some, it might sound like a trite self-help mantra. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it was an essential daily memo and a practical self-affirmation. In recent public memory, she is the political figure who has been rattled the most, often with sinister intent. The four-part Hillary (Sky Documentaries, 11 June) delves into that life of rattles, placing her biography alongside an in-depth account of the most bewildering election campaign in history.Series director Nanette Burstein gives Hillary centre stage to recount her life the way she saw and felt it. Each episode Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The first series of What We Do in the Shadows, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary about vampires in Staten Island (a TV spin-off from their cult New Zealand-located film) was a joy, and although it’s a hard act to follow, it’s delicious to be reacquainted with these timeless Transylvanian transplants and their mission to conquer the Americas. At least, that’s what their master, a crumbling vampire baron, has told them to do. Trouble is, as Laszlo (plummy-voiced Matt Berry; Toast of London, The IT Crowd) noted in the last series, the New World is “fucking massive”. Best stick to Read more ...