Reviews
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In 1922 Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, a water boy with Howard Carter’s archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings, accidentally uncovered a step in the sand. It proved to be the breakthrough for which Carter, on the hunt for the final resting place of King Tutankhamun, was looking. The tomb they uncovered showed signs of having been robbed in ancient times but inside thousands of items remained, selected for a journey to the afterlife, which had lain undisturbed for millennia. The survival of some was almost inconceivable: wooden boxes, linen gloves, unguents and cases packed with food. Others Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ian McKellen, his Mr Holmes director Bill Condon and Helen Mirren play clever, nasty games with conman clichés and presumptions about the elderly in this sometimes absurdly twisty thriller.McKellen’s Roy Courtnay is an irascible, whiskery cad, Mirren’s Betty McLeish the trusting, rich widow he entraps. His slow courting of her in her genteel, suburban estate home is only part of a wide portfolio of dishonesty, aided by his avuncular partner in crime Vincent (Jim Carter), a fake lawyer ever ready with dummy investment papers, whether enticing a widow over cream teas, or luring a businessman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Roland Emmerich has been trying to make this movie since the 1990s, and battled hard to raise its $100m budget from individual investors. But why? The result is an old-fashioned war film in praise of the heroic American servicemen who defeated the Japanese fleet in the battle of Midway in 1942, which turned the tide of Japan’s imperialist expansion in the Pacific, but while it sticks diligently to the historical facts, it feels bizarrely out of time and out of place. It doesn’t reinvent the war movie, as Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan or Christopher Nolan did with Dunkirk, Read more ...
Heather Neill
This is one play by Shakespeare ripe for tinkering. It's well nigh impossible now to take it at face value and still find romance and fun in the bullying: the physical and psychological abuse as a supposedly problematic wife is "tamed" into submission. And there have been experiments. Earlier this year, the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff presented a new play by Jo Clifford based on this source but set in a matriarchal world, and in 2003 Phyllida Lloyd directed a sparky all-female version at the Globe with Janet McTeer as Petruchio caricaturing male crudity to hilarious effect.If something radical Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Chauvinism is the worst form of ignorance” is the maxim of Dr Pozzi, the hero of Julian Barnes’s latest book, The Man in the Red Coat. This historical biography follows the life of a renowned gynaecologist during the Parisian Belle Époque, the “locus classicus of peace and pleasure, with more than a flush of decadence”. Once described by the Princess of Monaco as “disgustingly handsome”, Pozzi is a fascinating subject for Barnes’s obsessive attention; an exceptional doctor and rational thinker, embedded in the most fashionable Parisian social circles. From 1885 to 1916, we travel through Read more ...
Tom Baily
John Simpson remains the BBC’s longest serving foreign correspondent. Here, he returns to the biggest moment of his career. This personalised retelling of the collapse of the Berlin wall encompasses fond remembrance, factual detail and the confidence of retrospective analysis. And, the big BUT question is addressed: where are we now?Simpson interviews a crew of historians and journalists who were close to the events. One news cameraman, Mark McCauley, used a hidden camera to record the first protests against the communist regime held in Leipzig. In blurred and blackened images of shouting Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Much has been made of Martin Scorsese’s recent dismissal of Marvel films. Putting that debate aside, there’s no escaping the fact that in an era of rapid-fire sequels, with the same ensembles trotted out year after year, there’s far more frisson to be felt when the reunion is after not one or two, but 25 years – and what the filmmakers are seeking to recreate really is movie magic. That’s the case with this reteaming of Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who made a trio of classic films together – Raging Bull, Goodfellas and the last, Casino, in 1995. Read more ...
David Nice
In a flowering branch of London theatre, Norway comes to Notting Hill with what's becoming revelatory regularity, thanks to the cultural support of that admirable country. Two visionary-searing Ibsen productions are now joined by an off-piste piece of performance art from the techno-innovative Oslo-based company De Utvalgte. Jon Fosse, Norwegian playwright of international fame, hasn't had much celebration in our too-literal theatre world: I am the Wind appeared at the Young Vic in 2011, directed by the late, great Patrice Chéreau, and the Coronet/Print Room's previous venture, in Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Wild Rose director Tom Harper blends fact with fiction in a charming Victorian ballooning adventure that reunites Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones for the first time since The Theory of Everything.Redmayne gives an earnest performance as the real-life James Glaisher, an aspiring aeronaut who aims to vie with the mutton-chopped scientific community by soaring higher than anyone has ever gone before. However, Jones steals the show as Amelia Wren, Glaisher’s derring-do pilot. A fictional wealthy widow, she has little interest in petticoats and doilies, preferring to soar through the heavens, Read more ...
Ellie Porter
With US number one singles and Grammys coming out of his ears, a record-breaking streak at the top for debut album This One’s For You and collaborations with country big-timers aplenty, Luke Combs is riding high. The North Carolina-born toast of Nashville (he was also inducted into the Grand Ole Opry this summer) keeps things going with second album What You See Is What You Get, a rambling, occasionally brilliant collection of drinking songs, lovelorn ballads and earnest tributes to the working man.The first five songs will already be familiar to fans – they made up The Prequel, a massive- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre is forging its own special relationship with American playwright Annie Baker, having now produced three of her plays within four years, all in their smallest Dorfman space. The result has allowed a gathering acquaintance with a genuinely startling theatrical voice that mixes detailed hyperrealism with a leap into the void. Baker in this latest play more than ever invites us into a twilight zone all her own, and the theatre is a richer place for her creative shape-shifting even as her worldview gets grimmer with each premiere.The Antipodes may represent her most Read more ...