Reviews
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously commented that football is far more serious than a matter of life and death. This couldn’t quite be said of Harry Redknapp’s renewed adventures of footballers reunited (ITV), yet behind its jokey facade of a bunch of Nineties-era England veterans drinking their way across Europe, Harry’s Heroes is strangely poignant and delivers some painful emotional truths. The cameras follow Harry as he tries to prepare his squad for a re-match against their German counterparts (England beat them in last year’s first series), but the real story is the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The limitations of life on screen are all too apparent at the moment, and yet still there are instances where online can offer something beyond the reach of an old-fashioned trip to an art gallery. Ultra-high resolution reproductions of works of art are a case in point, and many museum websites now allow us to examine their collections in the microscopic detail once reserved for conservation departments. A new photograph of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, 1642, renders it in a whopping 44.8 gigapixel image, itself a composite of 528 exposures, and allows anyone interested to zoom in on Read more ...
India Lewis
The most obvious comparison for The Changin’ Times of Ike White (BBC Four) is 2012’s Searching for Sugar Man, with its story of a potential star having vanished into thin air at the brink of fame and fortune. The documentary began in the usual way of music biopics, with talking heads listening rapturously to the musician in question, then archive footage.However, although the first heads are true musos (drummers for Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone) the majority of the voices in this programme were those of wives and girlfriends, characteristic of its whole tone. Because he had a Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and post-Soviet) Ukraine, starts, predictably enough, with Lenin. Instead of an austere symbol of ideology, he’s a statue who “squinted into the smoggy distance. Winter’s first snowflakes settled on its shoulders like dandruff.” A clumsy figure, whimsically at one with the amplified dreariness around him, he fits comfortably within the brisk, deadpan comedy of the stories that follow. By the end of the book, he’s been reduced to “a concrete pedestal”. “Only his feet remain Read more ...
Billy Bragg in support of The Leadmill, Facebook Live review - a fundraising success of a lounge act
Liz Thomson
On Saturday there was a stark choice: BBC TV’s not-the-Eurovision special or Billy Bragg live on Facebook in support of The Leadmill’s campaign to raise vital funds for both the iconic Sheffield venue, 40 years old this year, and the Music Venue Trust Crisis Fund. So no choice at all, the canning of Eurovision being one of the few plus-points of lockdown.As Bragg later observed, his job will be one of the last to come back “so now I’ve worked out how to do this perhaps I’ll do a few more down the line.” He reminded everyone to hang on to their tickets because he’d be back next year for sure. Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from Khaled Nurul Hakim. Perhaps audaciously billed as a “degraded epic”, The Book succeeds in what is an extremely ambitious undertaking, following its unlikely protagonist across the backstreets of London and Birmingham to motorway service-station toilets as he attempts to cash-in on his latest smack haul.That The Book should exist as a novel at all owes itself as much to chance as to Hakim’s dedication. Adapted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d moved to France in 2003. His first internationally issued full-length album, Ravinahitsy, followed in 2007. Since then, there’s been three more albums: the last of which was 2018’s Valimbilo.The new compilation Early Years – Madagascar Cassette Archives soundtracks a previously untold backstory by revealing what Damily’s music was like on his Read more ...