Reviews
Veronica Lee
You may have seen Desiree Burch, a Californian now living in London, on The Mash Report on BBC One. She's an engaging and energetic storyteller and Desiree's Coming Early, her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe show directed by Sarah Chew, is a fantastical tale about her visit to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, when she accidentally took LSD.But it's not just cheap laughs about expanding her mind, as Burch ruminates on race, men's sexual misbehaviour and identity. And, stepping aside from the stand-up every so often and reading from a lectern, she weaves in some interest facts about Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
John Grisham is a brand, in the sense that the reader relies on some sense of what the product is going to be. He is well up in the millions of sales, along with other writers under the “thriller/mystery” umbrella – Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Ken Follett and Harlan Coben, to name but four. Still, as eagerly as his fans may await their yearly fix, he always manages to surprise.Scores of popular authors have had other professional lives which they mine for verisimilitude, and so with Grisham: a significant proportion of his novels (forty-four in all now) have made superbly imaginative Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Collector of the Light” is based around what sounds like a treated bass guitar. As the neck is moved up and down, multiple notes are plucked at once. The instrument’s sound is subaquatic, wobbly. Over this, a distant, echoey voice sings of being the “collector of light”, restoring dreams and “silver points of wonder”. Atmospherically and structurally, a parallel is the 1968 13th Floor Elevators’ single “May the Circle Remain Unbroken”. “Sunbury Electronics Sequence”, with its obviously after-the-fact title, is a disconcerting nine-minute mélange of speeded-up snatches of voice – “mar-mi Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since it debuted in November last year, Apple TV+ has barely made a dent in a market largely shaped by Netflix, but this eight-part adaptation of William Landay’s bestselling novel is a decisive step in the right direction. It’s a mixture of courtroom drama, murder mystery and psychological thriller, and if it sometimes falls back on familiar genre-ish cliches, the show can boast some fine performances and possesses the critical ingredient of watchability. Once you start, you’ll feel compelled to know how it ends (and the TV version has a significantly different ending from the book).Casting Read more ...
Owen Richards
Don’t do drugs, kids. For the past 50 years, that’s been the consistent message. But how much of what we know about psychedelics is just fearmongering? Do you really want to jump out of a window? Will you permanently lose your mind? To find out the truth behind the campaigns, writer Donick Cary dives into the real-life trips of a gaggle of famous faces for this multicoloured Netflix documentary.When you think of rock stars on drugs, you might imagine tragic scenes of excess and overdose. It’s unlikely you picture Sting birthing a cow while tripping on Mexican peyote. But this farcical tableau Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre’s triumphant march through its archive of NT Live recordings continues this week with a glorious blaze of a show. Starring Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster and Vanessa Kirby, this 2014 revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 modern classic A Streetcar Named Desire was a Young Vic production, and its film version is presented by National Theatre at Home. Anderson had wanted to play the central role of Blanche DuBois for decades, she says, ever since at the age of 16 she learned one of the character’s monologues for a competition. So the character has been in her DNA for years – Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and curation, as its twenty chapters showcase overlooked, excellent work by far-flung filmmakers. Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and Wang Ping, socialist China’s first female director, are featured alongside film-school favourites like Denis and Akerman.The actresses Thandie Newton (pictured below) and Debra Winger are lead narrators now. Their Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A running gag in David Nicholls' novel The Understudy is that its main character is called Steve McQueen. Not that Steve McQueen, the multi-award-winning, critically acclaimed, rich and successful one. No, this Steve McQueen (Russell Tovey) is recently divorced, lives in a horrible studio apartment and has an acting career that is going nowhere. Then he lands the role of understudy to Josh Harper, aka the 12th sexiest man alive, making his West End debut in a serious role. Will his luck change?That's the promising premise of Nicholls' very readable romantic comedy and in Henry Filloux- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Equally ambitious in scope as his 900min ode to cinema The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins’ latest work, Women Make Film, is a fourteen-hour exploration of the work of female film directors down the decades.Cousins’ Irish brogue no longer narrates the action, having replaced himself with the likes of Tilda Swinton (who also produces the film), Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Sharmila Tagore and Kerry Fox (at least in the first 20 chapters that this review covers). They, and Cousins, guide us on a self-described ‘road movie’, that shifts from clip to clip, Read more ...
David Nice
How do you render pure goodness interesting? Unorthodox director Dmitri Tcherniakov and radiant young soprano Svetlana Ignatovich make us smile and break our hearts with their take on the maiden Fevroniya: living at one with nature, seeing God in everything and destroyed by her encounter with civic life. There may be a touch too much religion and even putative Russian nationalism of the kind manipulated by Putin in Vladimir Belsky's poetic rendering of a myth, marrying the legend of a saint with the story of a city that vanishes to protect itself from the invading Tatars. But Rimsky-Korsakov' Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Rams before it, the ice-glazed hillsides and stark ochre grasslands of northern Iceland are the backdrop for Grímur Hákonarson’s third feature The County, a rural drama that explores the murkier side of local politics.Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) is a middle-aged, tough-as-nails dairy farmer. She’s grieving for her late husband who recently committed suicide, jack-knifing his truck into a ravine. We later discover he ended his life because of punishing debts owed to a corrupt cooperative that dominates the local farming community. This leaves Igna running the farm near Dalsmynni alone Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Do TV companies get some sort of financial incentive to use the phrase “A Very British…” in their programme titles? This now-meaningless descriptor has been applied to airlines, brothels, political coups, the Renaissance, Margaret Thatcher, sex scandals, Brexit and lord knows what else. When you can’t think of an original title, you know what to do.As for Best Western hotels, this company is so Very British that its new UK CEO is a former Aussie Rules football player, Rob Paterson. One of his early key decisions was to outsource the company’s call centre to Italy because most people now book Read more ...