Reviews
Saskia Baron
Girl opens in a golden haze of sibling affection; a teenager is tickling a little boy one sunny morning in their bedroom. Lara is 15 and has just moved to a new flat with little brother Milo, 6 and single dad Mathias. The family have changed cities because Lara has been offered an 8-week trial at a prestigious ballet school. It’s a trial not just of dance skills but whether Lara can convince the teachers that although born a boy, a future as a ballerina is viable. After winning prizes at Cannes and being snapped up by Netflix, Girl looked set to be an arthouse hit, possibly even an Oscar Read more ...
David Nice
Vibrant rustic dancing to conclude the first half, a heavenly barcarolle to cast a spell of silence at the end of the second: Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday celebrations of middle-European mastery wrought yet more magic in Dvořák and Mahler after his first concert of Mozart and Bruckner. He seemed perhaps a little more frail, less spiritually concentrated this time; but that wasn't going to get in the way of the phenomenal stick technique nor of the London Symphony Orchestra sounding, once again, more like its counterparts in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna than ever before.It's possible that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Flying boldly against the #MeToo grain, Triple Frontier is a rather old-fashioned story of male buddyhood and the disappointments of encroaching middle age. The protagonists are five Special Forces veterans, brought together by private security specialist Santiago Garcia (Oscar Isaac) to raid the jungle lair of a South American drug warlord. Strangely, things don’t go according to plan.An underlying theme of the piece is the bum deal that military vets get when their service years are over. “They take your best 20 years and then they spit you out,” grunts Tom “Redfly” Davis (Ben Affleck), Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Having long been immersed in folk and world music and acoustically-oriented singer-songwriters, it’s a surprise to be given a CD of music by someone who’s never crossed your radar, especially when the artist concerned turns out to have sold some 14 million albums, though mostly in Europe and North America. It’s probably the case that Loreena McKennitt’s considerable following owes to word-of-mouth, for the music-loving friend who gifted me her 1994 album The Mask and The Mirror had been put on to her by a friend in Europe. Instantly hooked, I explored further, giving her live 2006 CD/DVD set Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Gamble starts the hour by telling us why his latest show is called Blizzard; he and a bunch of comic friends we stranded in New York by bad weather and it made the news - yet, strangely, the headline wasn’t a play on his name - a gift for hacks - but on the monicker of one of his mates. Cue faux outrage.Gamble is too nice a guy to really mind someone else getting the spotlight - in fact he namechecks the other comics on the ill-fated trip - and the excellent audience work he does attests to an easygoing style that firmly underpins his personal, observational comedy.A large part of the show Read more ...
David Nice
A rum cove sidles up pimping with a tatty business card offering the services of Sonyetka. Not for me, I say, pointing out that in any case she’ll be dead three hours later. "That's more than I know," he says and wanders off to hook other possible clients. Further on, rodent-headed creatures flit by. One seems to be in an altercation with a Rentokil officer. Odd, too, that there should be policemen parading the disco-lit, dilipidated Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir. If you've ever been totally immersed in the Birmingham Opera Company experience - I only had once previously, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The grand finale of Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season is this starry production of one of the writer’s greatest – and certainly most personal – works, inspired by his extramarital affair with Joan Bakewell. The 1978 play is famous for its reverse-chronological structure, however Lloyd’s stylish, expressionistic take emphasises the daring not just of the formal trickery, but of the unsparing scrutiny of humanity.Soutra Gilmour’s stark set resembles a gallery, with the tangled trio as its shades-of-grey exhibits; it’s a reminder, too, that these yarn-spinning schemers Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Disappointment is instant, anyway. David Robert Mitchell’s second film, It Follows, was a teenage horror tragedy of perfectly sustained emotion. His third, Under the Silver Lake, seems superficial and scattershot, a callow effort at a magnum opus, in which the former work’s feeling is replaced by pop culture riffs. Keep watching, though, and the superficiality at least has a point, and its lead actor, Andrew Garfield, makes its heart beat.Garfield’s Sam lives in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, resenting work and so unable to pay his rent. Binoculars to ogle his topless neighbour and phone- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Joshua Harmon knows how to stir and excite an audience and does that and more with Admissions, newly arrived in the West End as part of the ongoing tsunami of American theatre across the capital just now. Opening the same day as news reports of financial bribery and malfeasance deployed to gain admissions to America's top universities, Harmon's portrait of a family poleaxed by their teenage son's fraught route to college comes with an unexpectedly topical urgency. But neither this writer nor his exceedingly smart director, Daniel Aukin, needs to coast on headlines to make their point. As Read more ...
Tom Baily
Benjamin is the debut feature of Simon Amstell, a young director who has thought cleverly about the torments (and hilarities) of artistic creation in an information-soaked world. The protagonist Benjamin (Colin Morgan) lives in a contemporary London swimming with creative abundance and social disconnection, in which everyone suffers their own brand of affliction. Benjamin broods with a unique kind of vim, as though self-doubt were an addictive substance, crippling him in fitful questioning and social mishaps. Amstell brings enough ingenuity and bawdy whimsy to his story to keep it feeling Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Can it happen? That one comes away from a concert with the sense that all of the truth, the shape, the beauty and the urgency of some great works from the classical repertoire has been conveyed as well as is humanly possible? That the programme itself has been a completely satisfying and thought-out whole and has held the attention throughout? Yes, it really can. This Wigmore Hall recital by violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk (pictured below by Marc Borggreve) of works by the Schumanns, Brahms and Franck was an evening to cast aside doubts and niggles; to appreciate a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
As China and the US arm-wrestle for world domination in everything from trade to military power, we find ourselves in the throes of a space race again. After China became the first nation to land on the dark side of the moon this January, it seems particularly apt to revisit The Twilight Zone in all its retro glory to examine what aliens can – among other things – reveal to us about our humanity.The continual osmotic reaction between what happens on a stage and the news headlines outside the theatre means that this return of a production first seen at the Almeida in 2017, now transferred to Read more ...