Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons. The triad people didn’t help themselves by all wearing black suits with white shirts and running like lemmings into the line of fire, where they did a funny little jitterbug dance on the spot as they were pumped full of bullets.But that’s the way they like it in Strike Back world, where there isn’t an imminent global catastrophe that can’t be solved by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it time for the rebirth of the old-fashioned wartime weepie? If so, this time next year The Aftermath will be dragging a clanking heap of statuettes round Hollywood, attached to the rear bumper of its 1940s army staff car. If not…A cynical person might summarise this movie as Brief Encounter Goes to the Third Reich, in which we find Rachael Morgan (a translucent Keira Knightly) stepping off a train in the bomb-flattened wasteland of Hamburg in late 1945, where she’ll meet her husband, British army colonel Lewis Morgan (stoical Jason Clarke, pictured below with Knightley). It’s a few months Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Well, you have to give it to French playwright Florian Zeller — he's certainly cracked the problem of coming up with a name for each of his plays. Basically, choose a common noun and put the definite article in front of it. His latest, The Son, is the last in a trilogy which includes The Father and The Mother. His other recent work is titled The Truth and The Lie — see what I mean? Peasy. Then there's The Height of the Storm, a slight variation. Anyway, the previous parts of the Moliere-Award-winning writer's trilogy have won an Olivier (The Father) and critical acclaim (The Mother) so what Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot uses irony and visual poetry to condemn his nation’s militarism. Twenty months after the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, it opens in the UK trailing a divisive history. When it first emerged in 2017, it was condemned as un-Israeli by then culture minister Miri Regev. She was subsequently barred from the ceremony for the Ophir awards (the Israeli Oscars), at which Foxtrot won eight prizes, including Best Picture.The film was designed as a triptych. The first section focuses on the grief of a well-to-do Tel Aviv couple, Michael and Daphna (Lior Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Franz West must have been a right pain in the arse. He left school at 16, went travelling, got hooked on hard drugs which he later replaced with heavy drinking, got into endless arguments and fights, was obsessed with sex and, above all, wanted to be an artist but hadn’t been to art school. His life reads like a bad novel or Hollywood’s idea of the tortured genius struggling to make his mark in a world indifferent to his talents. That world was 1970s Vienna, dominated by the Viennese Aktionists whose performances involved a lot of blood, guts and existential angst and were intended to shock. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the summer of 2014, there was little getting away from Hozier's "Take Me to Church". Whenever you turned on the TV or the radio there it was. It wasn't just in this country. Eventually, the song became number one in 12 countries and number 2 in the States. Of course, for the singer, this massive success also brought a big problem: how to top it? When Hozier sat down to write his new album he must have agonised about what he'd got so right first time around.On paper, the recipe was simply a blend of soul, gospel, folk, and rock. The clever bit was how the ingredients were mixed. Hozier's Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Give hope to all, says Despina: play-act. Così fan tutte has always been a piece about four young and silly people being appalling to one another without much need for encouragement from a cynical old manipulator and a confused maid who, in the main, is the one character capable of arousing real sympathy. The big reveal in Jan Philipp Gloger’s production for the Royal Opera is that there is no big reveal. We’re all in on the act, and we’re all as bad as each other.It’s a point made literally in lights towards the close with the kind of sledgehammer obviousness that seems to have made for a Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Anthem is an unusual game. Unlike most of its current peers it lacks any numbers after its name, making it a brand new slice of intellectual property in a risk-adverse market, where the big money is only invested in sure-fire hits. It’s also unusual because you can only play with an Internet connection. This isn’t a soup-for-one affair (although you can actually play solo missions), rather a shared visual banquet where you’re auto-matched with other players, working collaboratively in a common goal. Think Destiny or The Division as the other two big shared-world action games. And finally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I’ve remained a vital presence on the fringes of TV Land,” argues Alan Partridge in an interview with Radio Times, the man whose latest claim to… well, not fame, but at least he has been presenting Mid Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital. For this new series, Partridge has been hauled out of the low-rent regional twilight zone where somebody called Jenny does the station’s accounts in an exercise book to provide sickness cover on the anodyne BBC TV magazine show, This Time.On the This Time sofa he’s joined by Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding), who keeps the show rolling along with a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Whenever I hear the word "cosmopolitan" I think of Europe in the 1920s: German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, Czech eccentricity, Swiss DaDa, Italian Futurism and French Surrealism. With music from Weimar cabaret and visuals by Soviet agit-prop. Let's take an imaginary train journey from Paris to Berlin to Zurich to Prague to Milan. This is the world evoked by The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. This filmic theatre show, the second created by 1927 theatre company, was first staged in 2010 at the Sydney Opera House and the Battersea Arts Centre, and since then it has not only Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's a decade since Pina Bausch sadly died, and during that time her company has kept her memory alive by revisiting her amazingly rich legacy. Inevitably, though, the time would come for them to embark on a new phase; but how? The unique mix of dance and visual theatre that Bausch developed with them over 36 astoundingly creative years is so distinctive that any attempt to follow in her footsteps would most likely seem like a pastiche. In 2015 the company finally took the plunge and invited two choreographers to create new pieces for them. After premiering in Wuppertal last year Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Have you ever felt the hot shame of saying or doing the wrong thing? Not just embarrassment – that's for amateurs, says Lou Sanders in her wonderfully honest and revealing show Shame Pig, in which she essays some of her life's red-faced moments. Embarrassment is fleeting and lends itself to a good anecdote (or a fine joke in a stand-up set), she says, while shame is a much more corrosive emotion, and one that young women in particular burden themselves with unnecessarily.The show is part stand-up, part performance, as her brief but whip-smart take-off of a TED talk at the top of the hour Read more ...