Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Guy Ritchie enjoyed his greatest commercial success with 2019’s live-action fantasy Aladdin, the most atypical project of his career, but The Gentlemen finds him back on his best-known turf as a purveyor of mouthy, ultra-violent geezerism. It’s 21 years since his debut hit with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but its shaggy-dog story-telling and spirit of high-wire anarchy resurface intact.In time-honoured fashion, Ritchie has assembled a cast which looks a bit weird on paper but pays handsome dividends. Matthew McConaughey’s arrival in Ritchie-land is announced by him striding into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Talk shows can go one of two ways. You can create a welcoming space where your guests can kick their shoes off and start telling daringly revealing anecdotes. Alternatively, there’s the Dame Edna formula where the guests are cannon fodder for the host.At 85, the Dame isn’t as laser-sharp as she was 20 years ago, and her guests wore barcode badges so Edna could flash up their details on a screen, but you wouldn’t dare play poker with her. The fiction for this BBC One show was that she had taken to the high seas on the cruise ship Ocean Widow to safeguard her ill-gotten earnings, having been “ Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Notable anniversaries provided the ballast for this year’s raft of exhibitions; none was dead weight, though, with shows dedicated to Rembrandt, Leonardo and Ruskin among the most original and exhilarating of 2019’s offerings. Happily, a number of our favourites are still running, and there’s a month left to see Rembrandt’s Light at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The show skilfully eschews gimmickry in order to explore Rembrandt’s expert manipulation of light to aid storytelling and evoke nuances of mood and atmosphere (pictured below: Rembrandt, The Denial of St Peter, 1660). Rembrandt was an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just as Joker was the most divisive film of 2019, so Jojo Rabbit may take the mantle for the early months of 2020. The issue is not that director Taika Waititi is making a comedy about the Nazis – plenty of filmmakers have done that, from Mel Brooks to Tarantino – but the manner in which he goes about it. For some, his “anti-hate satire” will be funny, inventive and hopeful, for others too cartoonish for its subject matter. In fact, it's all of those things. Waititi’s determinedly wacky path is certainly challenging.Adapted from Christine Leunens’s novel Caging Skies, it focuses on Read more ...
theartsdesk
In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (Jacob Rees-Mogg's much-derided The Victorians) our reviewers share their top picks – some of which we covered, others which we didn't. From a thousand-page novel of a few sentences meditating on the everyday life of an Ohio housewife to a selection of short stories of disaffected young women, from an illustrated history of the trade routes of Central Asia to sharp insights into the life and works of Lucian Freud – the range is vast. We hope you enjoy!How odd that, in an age of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One good Sixties brouhaha deserves another. After last year’s triumphant revival of the Jeremy Thorpe affair in A Very English Scandal, here comes the sleazy saga of John Profumo, the Conservative Secretary of State for War who was forced to resign from Harold Macmillan’s government in 1963. The cause of his downfall was his brief affair with model and showgirl Christine Keeler, who was 19 when Profumo first met her.Amanda Coe is the screenwriter du jour, though it’s hard to see how the story has been made to stretch across its allotted six episodes. The first two instalments (on Sunday and Read more ...
theartsdesk
As symbolic moments go, the arrival of Martin Scorsese's new gangster epic The Irishman on Netflix took some beating. It exemplified the adage that "TV is the new cinema", and at the same time perhaps suggested a new and less digestible adage, something like "TV and cinema are now both parts of an ever-expanding entertainment continuum". Catchy, eh?The inexorable spread of the global media giants is reflected in our artsdesk critics' choice of 2019's Best and Worst TV shows. While it's well known that Succession or Game of Thrones are HBO productions, it's less widely advertised that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Liam Gallagher knows exactly how "fucking fantastic… and fucking shit I am", and proceeds to tell us so for 85 minutes. This 10-year documentary project came about as a result of director Charlie Lightening’s friendship with Gallagher, formed as Oasis came to a predictable halt. It seeks to be mildly critical, although the only person vaguely putting the boot in is current girlfriend/fiancée/soon-to-be-third-wife Debbie Gwyther – now also his manager – who describes him as "impulsive and a bit silly", and "like a toddler". Otherwise, it’s up to the other brother, Paul Gallagher, and ex- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For dance lovers, it was a year of heavy hitters. There were visits from two of America’s biggest and best, both the Alvin Ailey company and San Francisco Ballet bringing generous programmes of new work. The mighty Bolshoi’s summer programme at Covent Garden brought us Spartacus, that Soviet-era mega-fest of militarism and machismo. More intimate but just as heavily hyped was the new Matthew Bourne, Romeo + Juliet, which toured the country before settling into the August holiday slot at Sadler’s Wells. There was Christopher Wheeldon’s vast new in-the-round Cinderella for English National Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas, moreover, will have proved again to millions that Harry Potter and his wizard companions have lost none of their potency as divinities in the 21st-century household. The creatures dismissed by a sceptical thinker in 1709 as “ghosts, hobgoblins, witches and spectres” now enjoy a second life across swathes of British popular and literary culture. They have seldom seemed so robust and so resilient. Yet the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Earlier this year, the Peter Laughner box set was more than an archive release. Its diligence and scale forced a wholesale reinterpretation of the evolution of America’s punk-era underground scene. What it collected – aurally and in its book – demonstrated Laughner was more of a pivotal figure than he had so far seemed, and that his actions and vision resonate more than four decades on from his death.Moving through a different musical landscape, the CD compilation The Daisy Age cohesively soundtracked for the first time how hip-hop opened itself up to seemingly unrelated music (and non-music Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Political dysfunction and societal distress led many amongst us to the brink this year, so where better than the theatre to find succour if not always solace in the abundantly thoughtful offerings of a creative community as often as not working at full tilt? Even as a misplaced nostalgia seemed to be pulling Brexit-era Britain backwards, a contemporary light was shone on a community living tremulously on the edge in Alexander Zeldin's Faith, Hope and Charity and on the racial divide in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Pulitzer-winning Fairview, the latter one of a cluster of top-rank American plays Read more ...