Reviews
mark.kidel
Ravi Shankar was one of the giants of 20th century music. A musician, composer and teacher, he had an extraordinarily fruitful career that spanned nine decades and reached the entire world. He did more to build a bridge between the music and spirituality of India and the West than any of his contemporaries.He is probably most widely-known known for his relationship with George Harrison and the association of the sitar with the psychedelic explorations of the 60s. There was however, a good deal more, as we discover in an outstanding, forensic and deeply sympathetic biography by Oliver Craske: Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
After his two mysterious, tightly-coiled and idiosyncratic first features, Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, the masterful Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho lets his hair down with an exhilarating, all-guns-blazing venture into genre. Bacurau is equal parts spaghetti western, ultra-violent horror and political conspiracy, with a dash of sci-fi for good measure. While paying homage to John Carpenter, Sergio Leone and Eastwood, among others, it also evokes a rich period of Brazil’s own film lore and, as ever with Filho, offers commentary on Read more ...
The Trip to Greece, Series Finale, Sky 1 review - bittersweet swansong for the cantankerous comrades
Adam Sweeting
Could this mock-mythic journey, emulating the trek homewards to Ithaca of Homer’s hero Odysseus, really be the final series of The Trip (Sky 1)? Or will Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon see sense, and realise that they’ll never have as many free lunches as this again?This concluding episode continued the bantering, competitive tone of its predecessors, but director Michael Winterbottom had added some additional portentous wrapping. The opening depicted Coogan voyaging (in Ingmar Bergman-esque monochrome) through a cavern with a mysterious boatman – Charon, the ferryman of Hades, perhaps. Then Read more ...
Czech Philharmonic Benefit Concert online review – profound musicianship in sombre masked fundraiser
David Nice
Less than six months ago Prague’s most prestigious concert hall, the neo-Renaissance Rudolfinum, was all glittering lights and packed, smartly dressed audience for the Czech Philharmonic’s hot ticket first performance there for 49 years of its national epic, Smetana’s Má vlast (My Homeland) – a grand one indeed under principal conductor Semyon Bychkov. No greater contrast could be imagined to this, its most recent event, in which an auditorium devoid of everyone but camera operators, presenter and two guests rippled with a filleted performance of the most famous movement – "Vltava", or "The Read more ...
Owen Richards
The UK-wide lockdown has thrown the cinematic release schedule into chaos. Some films are postponed indefinitely, while others have opted for direct digital releases. It’s not ideal for anyone, but in a strange way it may play to The Whalebone Box’s favour. Specialist arthouse streaming service MUBI has secured the exclusive rights, and their captive subscribers are the ideal audience for such a strange, hypnotic piece.Experimental artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting has built a reputation for idiosyncratic documentaries, and The Whalebone Box is true to form. Essentially, the plot follows Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cringe-making horror of adolescent schooldays is vividly re-lived in this US import (on Sky Comedy), but with a cunning twist. Its supposedly confused and hormonal leads are played by 30-somethings Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who blend themselves in with a cast of actual 13-year-olds with uncanny skill.The year 2000 setting has been painstakingly crafted through clothes, Teen magazine covers starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and a breezy power-pop soundtrack. Despite the American location and terminology (the girls are just entering 7th grade, which means middle school), the dramas and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As we are learning each day during lockdown, necessity is the mother of invention. In Channel 4's case, it is learning how the wonders of modern technology can save a situation: to wit, The Steph Show was meant to come live daily from a shiny new studio in Leeds Docks, but yesterday debuted from host Steph McGovern's front room in North Yorkshire. McGovern, despite her self-confessed nerves and an occasional wobble from the technology, played a blinder in what she described as “Yorkshire Big Brother with one contestant” as robotic cameras captured her from various angles in her open Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Available in Britain now on YouTube for only a couple of days, Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America was put together in less than a week and was broadcast in the US on Sunday evening. In normal circumstances, the slot would have been occupied by the iHeart Radio Music Awards, which were to have been carried live from the Shrine Auditorium in LA.When the ceremony cancelled earlier this month, Fox execs wondered what they might replace it with – what would be appropriate given the encroaching horror? And if they could put something together, would the public be forgiving about Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With everyone in lockdown, observing physical if not social distancing, a story about isolation can have a particular resonance. And there are few places in the UK that are as isolated as some parts of the Scottish Highlands. Ali Milles’s tartan gothic thriller, The Croft, is partly a study of the advantages and disadvantages of living in a remote location, and partly a more speculative and suggestive account of how family tragedy repeats itself down the generations. This staging, an Original Theatre production, was touring the UK until the lockdown happened, and this hastily filmed recording Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since she burst onto the global scene in 2014 with her debut album, Chaleur humaine, Christine and the Queens' (aka Chris, real name Héloïse Letissier) work has been difficult to pin down. Is the French pansexual singer-songwriter-performance artist's music synth-pop, alt-pop or, as she describes it, “freakpop”?No matter, because her records – the latest is February's surprise release of a six-track EP, La Vita Nuova, about a difficult time in her life – prove that she is endlessly inventive, both with music and lyrics (Letissier's as happy speaking and singing in English as she is in French Read more ...
Jessica Payn
South London-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has once more been awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize, confirming its status as a vital home for ambitious, edge-defining fiction. Now in its fifth year, the prize seeks to promote and reward the best in literary fiction from small presses in the UK and Ireland, which it defines broadly as publishers with fewer than five full-time employees. This year’s winning title, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne, follows four generations of a peasant farming family in rural 20th century France, investigating their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been saturating the globe with its multi-format superheroes, leaving its DC rival looking clumsy and disorganised by comparison. However, DC’s “Arrowverse” – a roster of TV shows including Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl – is part of its fight-back effort, and now joining its ranks is this new take on the Batwoman character (E4).Kate Kane and her Batwoman alter ego first appeared in comic form in 1956, but this latest reincarnation leaps into the present with its androgynous-looking lesbian heroine, played by Ruby Rose (familiar from Netflix’s Orange is the Read more ...