Reviews
Joe Muggs
This documentary is bittersweet viewing on quite a number of levels. First, it’s got all the glory and tragedy of the most compelling music stories: a Liverpool band struggling from humble beginnings, trying to find an identity, fraternity and fallings-out, coping with huge success and its aftermath – not to mention sex, drugs, mental illness and death. On top of that there’s a constant layer of narrative about the endless pressures of racism on black British musicians, told brilliantly both explicitly and in the micro-details of 1960s and '70s life.Maybe most devastating thing of all, though Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We live in strange times, so it's appropriate that a socially distanced pop-up arts festival – of theatre, comedy, improv, music and magic – calls itself The New Normal. I went to the first comedy night of its August run, curated by Good Ship Comedy, a great comedy club which is normally located at a pub in north London, but is decamping to south London for a couple of dates here.And what a here: The New Normal is taking place at a gem of a location, the baronial gothic Royal Victoria Patriotic Building in Wandsworth, once an asylum for girls (for which read workhouse), later an MI5 Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mike Skinner got out just in time, pulling the plug on The Streets at the point of exhaustion. After Original Pirate Material’s hopeful bedroom dream of English rap came true in 2002, four further albums wearily analysed fame and self-destruction, and ended in 2011 when Skinner saw only dead ends ahead. The garage laureate of clubland and kebabs had set his own template too well, and was too gloomily self-aware to fake progress.Subsequent work has suited his discursive mind, from rock band The D.O.T. to DJing. The Streets’ 2017 return for a Greatest Hits tour still protectively distanced them Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Filmed, as one would, well, imagine, prior to lockdown, Imagine .... My Name is Kwame hearkens to what now seems a bygone era of full and buzzy playhouses and adventurous theatre-making that was about the live experience and not some facsimile online. That the hourlong film, directed by Charlie Sever, tells of the multiple iterations over time of a theatre practitioner, Kwame Kwei-Armah, now running the Young Vic makes one long to be back in the whirligig of playgoing again to see where this multi-hyphenate talent will lead us next.But the focus of such programmes is inevitably to look Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Barrie Kosky’s production of Moses und Aron was staged at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Schoenberg’s opera is philosophical and open to a variety of interpretations. Kosky emphasises the story’s Jewish heritage, and the production is all about Jews and Judaism. That might seem a natural choice, given the occasion, but Kosky’s message is subtle, fully acknowledging the Holocaust, but presenting the Jewish people as complex and contradictory, and not just as victims.The production is dominated by the huge chorus, who are onstage Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.The screenplay is based on a four-part New Yorker short story called Sell-Out by Simon Rich. That piece of writing along with other short stories earned him a reputation as a modern-day PG Wodehouse, not to mention being SNL’s youngest ever writer and polishing scripts for Pixar. Rich’s writing is sharp, often high-concept, and very, very funny. But the story has lost some of its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, except somebody had renamed it The House at Knockdara. This was the title of the first novel by Michael Callaghan, Cambridge literature don, aspiring writer and serial seducer of his female students. Played here by Emmett J Scanlan, in young-fogey tweeds and Ernest Hemingway beard, Callaghan had “F for Fake” running all the way through him.Running over four consecutive nights this week, The Deceived sounded promising on paper, not least because it was written by Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee and her husband Tobias Beer, but is proving to be less Read more ...
Owen Richards
Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival. Surely by beating Bong Joon-Ho, Celine Sciamma and Ken Loach, the film would stand up to scrutiny?The titular Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi, pictured above right) is an introspective teenager, thoroughly devoted to his imam’s strict interpretation of the Qu’ran. Both his Muslim Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Diarist, novelist and writer of erotica Anaïs Nin lived a brilliantly-coloured life littered with affairs with literary A-listers (Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell et al). She might have been delighted by this playfully-written and shrewdly cast dramatisation of her Little Birds story collection (Sky Atlantic), which creates a fabulously vivid and decadent picture of Tangier in the mid-1950s.In this opening pair of episodes, we followed sheltered American heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) as she ventured forth from her family’s palatial New York apartment to meet her intended Read more ...
Gaby Frost
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My Neighbourhood, a series of surreal and playful short stories offering a glimpse at the most curious and intriguing of all beings: neighbours.It’s like a dream woven from the fragments of a world seen from a window. Each story is just three or four pages long. Sometimes the chapter titles only make sense in the final line of the story, and even then, we ask: why that detail? There are themes which link individual stories: gambling brings together the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shall we talk about racism? Currently we seem to be talking about it all the time, and it’s the question non-white parents in Britain sooner or later find themselves pondering as they watch their children grow up in our increasingly confrontational society. For this Channel 4 film, director Geoff Small had assembled a cross-section of notable black and mixed race personalities, and let them describe their often conflicted emotions.Some took a pragmatic approach. Writer Gary Younge long ago took the view that “racism exists, you are going to have to navigate it.” He considers that teaching his Read more ...
David Nice
So much for the assertion that nowhere in the world would be staging the big Strauss and Wagner operas for the indefinite future. With a combination of lavish funding and good pandemic management on Austria's part, it’s been possible in Salzburg. Ironic, then, that though no holds are barred in terms of how close everyone on stage and in the pit can be, with any amount of feeling and touching permitted short (I’m guessing) of osculation, this Elektra feels, for the most part, distanced not socially (or, in the case of this work, anti-socially) but in psychological terms.Some of that could be Read more ...