Reviews
Daniel Lewis
It is as unsurprising as it is vital that a spotlight has been thrown on writing by people of colour this year. It is unsurprising, too – looking at bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since June – that most of that light is being shed on particular kinds of writing by people of colour: stories and histories of struggle and suffering. These books, non-fiction and fiction alike, are typically said to “bear witness” – as they should. The forgetting, overlooking or erasing of these stories and histories is just one of the things that makes having conversations about race, and trying Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson’s views on his band Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album are measured. In the essay accompanying its reissue, he writes “Axe Victim is one brief snapshot of a band in the process of becoming something else…a modest beginning, flawed but not without charm. And not the end of the story. I’ll always be grateful for the way that it helped launch a more appropriate vessel for my music, a ship which sails onward to this very day.” He sees the album as transitional.When it was issued in June 1974, NME’s dismissive Ian MacDonald was less restrained in his review: “I confidently predict that Be-Bop Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Since snobbery and deference have a big part to play in Nick Hayes’s exhilarating book, let’s start with the obligatory name-drop. I have lunched – twice, in different country piles, and most enjoyably – with one of the principal villains of The Book of Trespass. Richard Scott, tenth Duke of Buccleuch, owns around a quarter-million acres of Britain (no individual has more, although the Crown Estate, the National Trust, the Forestry Common, the RSPB and MoD outgun the Buccleuchs). So he sits at the apex of the system of private landed property that grants total control to elite proprietors, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In the gloomy splendour of Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch gazes up at Rembrandt’s Old Woman Reading, 1655. The painting has belonged to the Scott family for more than 250 years, and like generations before him, the duke has known it all his life. “She is the most powerful presence in this house.” He pauses: “Do you see what I mean?”It is a statement of spine-tingling acuity, hinting at the peculiar magic that hangs like a charm around Rembrandt's paintings, and leaves its mark on this documentary by Oeke Hoogendijk, which follows on from her 2014 film The New Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Babyteeth gets off to a terrific start. A semi-naked, manic Moses (Toby Wallace, full of scabby charisma) almost pushes 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen; Sharp Objects, Little Women) on to the Sydney train tracks as she waits on the platform in her school uniform, carrying her violin. It’s a thunderclap: she’s smitten. The next scene is just as intriguing, with Ben Mendelsohn (The Outsider, Bloodline, Animal Kingdom) on fantastic form as Henry, a psychiatrist, eating a sandwich and having sex with Anna (Essie Davis; The Babadook, True History of the Kelly Gang) in his consulting room.The fact Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mandy started life in the Comedy Shorts season last year, and has now been given a six-part series. Diane Morgan, who has a solid CV in other writers' work including Philomena Cunk, Motherland and After Life, here writes, directs and stars as the title character, who has a messy beehive, always wears thigh-high boots, has a fag on the go and a face set to permanent grimace.She's a walking disaster, finding that her aim in life – to own doberman pinchers – has many hurdles, and we follow them knowing that Mandy will never prosper. But Morgan, while keeping her creation just this side of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
What if there was a pill you could pop that gave you superpowers? The only catch is that, while it might make you invisible or bullet-proof, it might also boil your brain or make you explode with just one hit.That’s the premise of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s serviceable new sci-fi thriller by Mattson Tomlin. The concept isn’t as original as it needs to be, and it has a lot in common with 2011’s Limitless or Luc Besson’s Lucy, combined with the extreme violence of Deadpool.Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jamie Foxx might get top-billing, but the real star is Dominique Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman were bringing it all back home when they performed their first live stream concert from Cooper Hall, in Frome, Somerset, close to were they live and where they recorded Dillon’s 2017 album, Wanderer. Like that somewhat “accidental” album, Thursday’s concert was strong on “songs of departure and longing for home”, many of them drawn from Wanderer and many referencing the places close to where she grew up and some of them specific childhood experiences. Homesick blues, but not so subterranean as it were. All the crew was local.And what a glorious 75 minutes it was, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allergic to that word “influencer”? Afraid that social media is the death of civilisation as we’ve known it? Then this movie may be for you.Despite its overt absurdity and compulsive over-the-topness, director Eugene Wobble Palace Kotlyarenko has delivered a cortex-frazzling alarm about the hazards of living a life wholly defined by touchscreens, emojis, tweets, selfies and narcissistic self-obsession. Goofy, floppy-haired Kurt Kunkle (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) drives a cab for the Uber-like service Spree, and meanwhile has been failing miserably to build himself an online following as @ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This seems a perfect project for Matteo Garrone, a director who has found new ways to conjure old Italian dreams, and invests even his most grimly realistic films with fairy tale logic and wonder. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story is here returned to its local time and place, as Pinocchio’s picaresque journey of experience unfolds in a deliberately traditional, lovingly crafted children’s film.Roberto Benigni’s Geppetto, pictured below, adds Spielbergian sentiment and expert comic business to early scenes, and touching frailty later. Garrone’s two best-known features, the sociological gangster Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.The pandemic, though, requires something different. With the announcements and performances on a live video stream, and extra interviews and video clips on an app, the Association of Independent Music had Read more ...
David Nice
Composer Gian-Carlo Menotti once asked rhetorically what society wanted of performing artists – “the bread of life or the after-dinner mint?” There were a couple of audience members last night – unique in my experience so far of the Fidelio Orchestra Café’s set-up – who clearly wanted pianist Charles Owen’s recital to be the pre-dinner amuse-bouche; one was reading a book from the start, another came down from upstairs during the music to demand a bottle of wine. But generally the small groups of attendees have relished what we’ve had on every musical programme, from Isserlis via Ibragimova Read more ...