Reviews
Aleks Sierz
During the current pandemic, stories about isolation have a particular resonance. Feelings of claustrophobia, loneliness and frustration slide off the stage and echo in our subconscious – yes, this is us alright. One of the most prescient is Athena Stevens’s Scrounger, an impassioned autobiographical account of how the crass inefficiency of an airline results in a wheelchair user being stuck at home for weeks on end. Written during her residency at the Finborough fringe venue, and staged early this year, it is now streamed as a film and beautifully conveys both its modernistic aesthetic and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At the age of 80, John Cleese probably doesn't care what people think of him. But then, when you were one-sixth of Monty Python and co-creator of one of TV's funniest sitcoms, you can afford not to play to the gallery as the royalties from Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers still roll in (even if, as he never tires of telling his audiences, a fair chunk goes in alimony).A cynic might say that explains why his new show, Why There Is No Hope, has so few laughs – but, to be fair, it was livestreamed from an empty Cadogan Hall, which killed many of his jokes stone dead. He began, though, with a Read more ...
India Lewis
It is no surprise, given her Cambridge Intellectual literary style, that Ali Smith’s Summer is multi-layered, referential, and filled with cameos from giants in the fields of art and science. It is arguably the best of the four novels in her Seasonal Quartet, pulling through the threads from the previous three, without opting for easy conclusions or tying all the ends together neatly. Summer is also not as challenging as some of her texts can be, which (admittedly) is a bit of a relief.Summer begins with Grace (former actress), her ex-husband and new partner who live next door, and her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The feather in this particular cap is a DVD of director John T. Davis’ 1979 film Shellshock Rock. Filmed from October 1978 to April 1979, its 50 minutes thrillingly catch the Troubles-era Ulster getting to grips with punk rock. Vox pops from disgusted Belfast shoppers vie with live footage of Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, Protex, Victim, the thoroughly unvarnished Parasites and more in a gritty verité portrait of a scene which, due to its contemporary context, was beyond being a pose for the region’s punks. A nervy Stiff Little Fingers are seen admitting they were scared that the Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the bizarrely personable world of the clinical organ farm, but South stretches the theme. She introduces the poignant figure of a fully-grown, childlike person with no language capabilities. Elsewhere in her debut collection, we run up against vicious pre-teen internet trolls, OAPs with a hankering for phone sex and the wavering figure of online celebrity, revealed to be a piecemeal mess in person.South’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel universes, the threads that connect us. Vincent, an impoverished bartender in a remote hotel on Vancouver Island, leaves her job to enter a new life in the “kingdom of money” with Jonathan Alkaitis, an immensely rich, much older New York financier. But she has an unsettling sense of other versions of her life being lived without her. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in.”In Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This sober French space movie is concerned with what a female astronaut leaves behind on Earth, not what she finds in the cosmic dark. Sarah (Eva Green) has been selected for a European Space Agency mission towards Mars, realising a childhood dream. Punishing training prepares her for separation from Earth, and from eight-year-old daughter Stella (Zelié Boulant-Lemesle).Green’s layered performance of female strength rebukes Hollywood's erotic exotic typecasting, letting rage and tears ripple through her then striding on. Men aren’t Sarah’s enemies, but privileged, different and to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Minutes into Make Up, Claire Oakley’s auspicious first feature as writer-director, unearthly sounds welcome unwitting Ruth (Molly Windsor) to her intimidating baptismal adventure as an 18-year-old who's not so much bi-curious as bi-phobic. A nail-biter to begin with, she’s soon hearing and seeing portents of horror everywhere, not least on the tips of her fingers.An adolescent-seeming Derby woman, Ruth has travelled by coach and taxi to a coastal Cornwall caravan site to join her longtime boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn), a regular winter worker there. The sly middle-aged manager Shirley (Lisa Read more ...
David Nice
A front-rank pianist only takes on Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in full confidence of being able to handle the massive bells and blazing chants of its grand finale, “The Great Gate of Kiev”. To risk it in a far from large café space adds to the element of danger and excited anticipation. Louis Schwizgebel, sonorous master of the house Bechstein – already an instrument designed not to overwhelm – carried it off with high radiance. It will be a long time before we can experience again the full orchestral blaze of Ravel’s peerless orchestration, so this was – despite even the pianist’s Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Ah, 2015. Those halcyon days of packed theatres. Thank God the RSC had the presence of mind to film Polly Findlay’s production of The Merchant of Venice, now streaming on BBC iPlayer. Condensed into just over two hours, it’s a thoughtful take on Shakespeare’s most problematic of plays, with a blinding central performance from Patsy Ferran as Portia. The character of Shylock (played here by Arab-Israeli actor Makram J Khoury, pictured left) and the gentile characters’ hostile reactions to his Jewishness have always sat uneasily in the Shakespearean pantheon. As has the play itself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be one of the first movies to be shown in cinemas post-lockdown, but Unhinged is a pale ghost of some much better movies. Its headlining hook is the presence of Russell Crowe in the central role of a road-rage vigilante itching to find victims upon whom to vent his spleen – at one point he gives his name as Tom Cooper, but it probably isn’t – yet Crowe is barely recognisable as the star who bossed Gladiator or rocked the house in LA Confidential. You could almost imagine he picked this role because they paid him to loom large on screen while having to learn hardly any dialogue.Director Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like a sub-par Natural Born Killers for Gen Z, director-screenwriter Joshua Caldwell’s latest film, featuring Disney-child-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne, tackles the perils of social media like a parent trying to navigate TikTok. Arielle (Thorne) is a provocative Florida teen whose sole desire is to become famous any way she can. After a video of Arielle beating up a girl in a night club goes viral, she sees her road to stardom lies in making videos of violent acts to boost her online profile. Having dragged reluctant ex-con Dean (Jake Manley) along for the ride, Read more ...