After a successful – and very welcome - summer season of gigs in its outdoor courtyard, Battersea Arts Centre has come indoors for its autumn season of comedy from the Grand Hall; it started with this strong mixed bill curated by the promoters Berk's Nest. BAC was using, for the first time, technology similar to that which has been used for a little while now by BBC One's Question Time and Radio 4's The News Quiz – an interactive experience in which presenters and performers can converse directly with the audience at home, and can hear their applause.Sarah Keyworth, MC for the night, Read more ...

Rarely have I seen so many smiles on stage as at Kings Place on Saturday. The combination of the delight of the performers being back in their natural environment with the genial and generous-spirited music they were playing brought out the best in everyone. From Mozart to Schubert via the up-and-coming Perivolaris this programme offered a bit of everything and I walked away with a smile on my face too.Aurora Orchestra’s five year long project to programme all the Mozart piano concertos was to have reached its final stages with the final three concertos, big boned and magisterial. These have Read more ...

La Locura de Machuca translates as “the madness of Machuca.” A Colombian label which issued its first record in 1975, Machuca was active until 1995. Around 26 singles and 36 albums were released. The new compilation brings together 17 tracks from its first five years.While choosing the word “madness” as the title's operative word is questionable, there’s no doubt that what’s heard is arresting and unusual. The opening track is “Eberebijara” by Samba Negra. It sounds like a DIY collision of “Life During Wartime” Talking Heads and West African drumming with a repeated chant as a vocal overlay. Read more ...

“Thank you, Shepherd, for allowing us to be your wives. Come down upon me and fill me with yourself.” Collective ecstasy – and a lot of wool – is the order of the day in this cult led by Michael, aka Shepherd (Michiel Huisman; Game of Thrones; The Haunting of Hill House), a handsome, bearded chap who looks soft and likeable but has a sadistic Jesus complex. He is surrounded by adoring women (there’s a whiff of The Handmaid’s Tale in evidence) wearing coloured robes: red for wives, blue for daughters. If he’s the father of these daughters, things are even darker than they seem.Polish director Read more ...

If “things” hadn’t intervened, September would have seen the Divine Comedy play a five night residency at the Barbican, playing their entire back catalogue, two albums a night, to mark 30 years since the band was started. Instead we got just one night – which Neil Hannon described as “the first night of the tour, and the last night of the tour” in front of a well spaced out live audience and a remote streaming audience (which included me). In a short, 13 song set, we had a canter through all the favourites which would remind anyone who needed reminding that the Divine Comedy are a jewel in Read more ...

The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl was brilliantly explored in last years’s HBO series, but here, prolific Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska finds an alternative purpose for the disaster. As a child Zhenia, the Ukrainian protagonist of Never Gonna Snow Again, fell under the shadow of the doomed reactor, as we see in bleak, colour-drained flashbacks. The film’s title refers, in part, to the pervasively swirling radioactive dust particles created by the catastrophe.The adult Zhenia has transported himself to Warsaw, where he works as a freelance masseur gifted with extraordinarily Read more ...

Though live performances are, thankfully, starting to reappear throughout the country, and socially distanced seating, mask-donning and constant hand sanitising becomes the norm for audiences south of the border, those in Scotland are still eagerly anticipating the opportunity to once again be in a concert hall experiencing live music first hand. Thankfully that hasn’t deterred the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from returning to Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall for a series of live streamed chamber concerts. Thursday evening’s focused on French repertoire, with Francis Poulenc’s Sextet, paired with Read more ...

In 2012, two great Danes, director Thomas Vinterberg and actor Mads Mikkelsen, teamed up for the powerhouse drama The Hunt, about a teacher victimised by his community when wrongly accused of abusing a pupil. For their reprise, Mikkelsen again plays a teacher and is again phenomenal; though this time the film fails to deliver on its premise. Four male, middle-aged school teachers and friends are stuck in a rut: Martin (Mikkelsen) is the worst, so overcome by ennui that he barely speaks to his wife and kids, and has completely lost the trust of his history students; sports master Read more ...

After nine successful series, a Bafta and an Emmy nomination, Taskmaster has moved from Dave to Channel 4 – amusingly, the broadcaster that its creator Alex Horne first took it to but which turned it down. It has made the transition seamlessly – ie, without changing a thing – and is still utterly daft and a joy to watch. But then, when you have a great concept that's well executed, why muck around with it?For the uninitiated: in each series a different group of five comics or comedy actors solve a succession of parlour-game tasks, using just silly props and their ingenuity, against the clock Read more ...

It’s fair to say that the idiosyncratic, surrealist films of Roy Andersson are not everyone’s cup of tea. Whether you find his films impregnable or incisive, it’s impossible to argue with the artistic imprint the Swedish auteur has had on European cinema. Now at the age of 77, he has made his last film, About Endlessness. Accompanying this apparent final feature is an insightful documentary from Fred Scott, which examines the artistic process of the director as he moves towards retirement. The danger of such projects is that they can feel like a tagged-on "making-of’" featurette. This is Read more ...

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had watching Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a mature couple pootling around the UK in their humble camper van. They bicker about the satnav voice, argue the merits of the shipping forecast, and both give such convincing performances that you’d think they’d been together for decades. While this might all sound as comfy as an old sweater, director/writer Harry Macqueen’s (Hinterland) sophomore feature is anything but, being a tender, heartfelt drama concerning love and loss, and tackling the tough subject of dementia. Tucci is Tusker, a Read more ...

Sometimes in fictional cinema, a character can seem so strong, so righteous, that you begin to doubt the reality of the piece. How can anyone be that good when faced with such hardship? Perhaps these thoughts make us feel better about ourselves, and what we do with our lives. But we can make no excuses with Time, a documentary about a woman so remarkable that it could only be true.In 1997, married couple Fox and Rob Rich had a family and a failing business. In desperation, they attempted armed robbery of a bank. Fox was incarcerated for three and a half years, and her husband was sentenced to Read more ...