Reviews
David Nice
Only the birds will be singing at country opera houses around the UK this summer. Glyndebourne seems over-optimistic in declaring that it might be able to launch in July; other companies with shorter seasons have made the regretful but right decisions to call it a year. This reminder from 2017 of what such setups can achieve at the very highest level, newly downloaded on to the excellent OperaVision website, could hardly be more timely, nor the choice more uplifting for the soul: opera's greatest comedy, at a level of intimacy which the last major production to launch this year to date, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Michelle Wolf, best known to UK audiences as the comic who upset Donald Trump with some smart barbs aimed at his staff at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner, has done some occasional dates this side of the pond (plus a run at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe), so her fans will be grateful for Joke Show, a Netflix special, where she is on top form.She starts with a very strong section on the modern trend for people to get offended by just about everything, which must be a pain in the backside for a comic such as Wolf, much of whose material is edgy. Yet instead of laying into the easily Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), in this, his fifth novel featuring the inventive, imaginative, intelligent trouble-shooter Maggie Costelloe. Maggie – see her name – is Irish turned American. Aside from an off-again on-again Israeli partner, her only relative is her sister, a school teacher computer nerd, who lives a fairly normal life in the American South with (gasp) a husband Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”Well Bob, that’s how you remember it. Dylan was writing in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One about encountering Dalton at the Fred Neil-compered Cafe Wha? in the first half of 1961. Part of what he says seems fair. On 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You, the first of her two albums, she melded Billie Holiday’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Friday night is Amami night” – that was the ad that ran from the 1920s through to the 1950s for a brand of “setting lotion”, a delightfully old-fashioned term. Those were the days when young women stayed home and did their hair, in preparation for a Saturday night out. Perhaps some of the girls (they weren’t yet “chicks”, maybe “birds”) in the late 1950s used the product when they went to Eel Pie Island, one of the country’s legendary music scenes.The nine-acre island in the Thames, just above the river’s only lock, was the subject of BBC Four’s documentary Rock ‘n’ Roll Island: Where Read more ...
Richard Williams
A combination of chopped-up newsreel and fever dream, “Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s most striking piece of work in years. This is the author of “Desolation Row” populating a 17-minute song with a lifetime of remembered cultural fragments, zooming out and panning back and forth from the single pivotal event of the Kennedy assassination, plucking references out of the heavy air.The voice is sombre, the mood subdued, occasionally lit by flashes of the absurd. Images like frames from the Zapruder film – date, time, location, automobile, wound, wife – are gradually eased aside to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Saudi director Haifaa Al Mansour is back on home territory with her new film, and you’ll recognise much here from her characterful 2012 debut Wadjda, itself the first-ever feature to emerge from her home country. That was about challenging the restrictions that the culture of Saudi Arabia imposed on women, and some really have gone in the intervening years – women can now drive, for one. As if to mark that progress, the opening scene of The Perfect Candidate has Mansour’s doctor heroine, Maryam (Mila Alzahrani), her face hidden except for the eyes by a black niqab, behind the wheel as she Read more ...
mark.kidel
Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson’s reputation was much enhanced by the story – never substantiated – that he’d met with the devil one night at a crossroads, and was miraculously taught exquisite guitar licks that astounded his juke-joint audiences and later the world. A pact that – as it goes with such shady deals – led to him succumbing, a few years later, to a violent death. He was also a source of inspiration for many who came after him – electric Chicago blues giants like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, and later, white boys such as Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and others.There’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Miles – where to begin? Some 21st century revisionists find his art fatally tainted by his personal life, and his violent behaviour in relationships. His rasping, epithet-scarred voice, the sound of a snake sloughing off its own skin, able to weaponise ‘motherfucker’ to some kind of deadly bio-mass, his long rich history of drug use and abuse, his vivid, aggressive take on race relations and his studied indifference to his audience – this is not how musicians and artists are supposed to behave, especially nowadays.Miles Davis comes from a creative and political world that is the polar Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Imagine being trapped in your perfect home forever. It’s easy if you try now, as Vivarium’s allegory about property and parenthood is deepened by events. Following young couple Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) through a Black Mirror-style real estate nightmare, it constructs a creepy alternative suburbia which tests their relationship to destruction.Director Lorcan Finnegan’s first image is the unsettling alien maw of a cuckoo, as it tosses rival birds from their nest. “It’s only horrible sometimes,” keen primary school teacher Gemma says of nature to a watching child, before Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Benni, the central character in German writer-director Nora Fingscheidt's haunting new film, has a life of tragedy and violence. She’s the product of a dysfunctional family and an abusive childhood that has left her rage-ridden and incapable of controlling her anger. Playing Benni is talented newcomer Helena Zengel. Over the course of two hours she rages, weeps and wails across the screen in an utterly harrowing performance. Behind her waif-like appearance lies a fury that most people don’t achieve in a lifetime, much of which is conveyed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...