Reviews
Steve O'Rourke
It was all going so well for Bethesda Games Studios, the developer behind some of the best single player action-RPGs to ever grace consoles. The Elder Scrolls titles combined with the Fallout games have kept the Maryland-based developer raking in the dollars for the best part of 20 years.The last Fallout game, released back in 2015, was a universally loved epic adventure that The Arts Desk nominated for game of the year. This latest offering, a game that suffered such drastic performance issues it had a launch day patch of over 50GB followed by a subsequent update of 47GB, is a pale shadow of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The penultimate concert in the eclectic and impressive K-Music Festival of contemporary Korean music on Monday at the Purcell Room featured some of the most exquisite and affecting performances of the season, with the traditional Gayageum stringed instrument paired with an effects-laden, ambient-cum-exploratory jazz quartet featuring one of the most distinctive and arresting drummers anywhere, making remarkable music from her kit (shimmering cymbal solos, anyone?). K-Music tends towards surprising as well as enthralling its audiences, and that was certainly the case here.In 2016, solo Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This opening episode of My Brilliant Friend was a stunning symphony in grey. For any viewers concerned that HBO’s long-awaited Elena Ferrante adaptation might be tempted to sweeten the visual experience of the writer’s impoverished 1950s Naples world to suit the expectations of an international television audience, the sheer subtlety of colouring here was the first sign that everything was going to be right.Director Saverio Costanzo will be receiving a whole range of plaudits for his work with the wide ensemble cast (including many non-professionals) that surrounds his two remarkable young Read more ...
Chris Harvey
There was barely a black-clothed, white-faced Numanoid in sight in the packed auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall as Gary Numan made his first ever appearance at the Victorian concert hall. His fans appear to have left that kohl-eyed look behind them as they’ve aged over the four decades since he first broke into the charts with Tubeway Army, but their love for him seems undimmed.Black might have looked a little out of place anyway as the electronic pop pioneer and his band loped on stage looking like a cross between extras from Mad Max: Fury Road and refugees from the desert planet of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The toughest subject you can imagine: when, and how, would you choose death over life? This riveting film examined that excruciating dilemma within the legal frameworks on offer to some of the terminally ill in the United States. Louis Theroux, narrator and interviewer, met people who wished to take control of their end, and encountered all the moral complexities of the issue along the way. It was an absolutely absorbing, and often very moving experience.Seven states in the US have legalised self-administered lethal medication (with professional safeguards), and such a law is being considered Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The choice of what to go and hear in the London Jazz Festival can be bewildering: this first weekend of its 10-day run presented over 120 events. I managed to attend eight, of them at least in part, including some of the show that has predictably soaked up most of the media attention: the first of Jeff Goldblum’s two concerts on Saturday at a packed Cadogan Hall.Goldblum’s credentials as an A-List celebrity, as an entertainer, as a stage presence, as a charmer, as a quick-witted comic improviser are in no doubt. He can turn literally anything into part of a highly entertaining show and have Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It probably goes without saying that there will be "dream teams" in a football-mad city like Liverpool. What might be a little unusual is that this particular one has long been associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and has turned into one of the most potent marketing forces for the organisation for many a long year. It has nothing to do with the "beautiful game", though. Instead, Vasily Petrenko and Simon Trpčeski have become the organisation’s box office golden boys, with concert tickets selling almost instantly and recordings garnering cupboards-full of trophies.Indeed, as Trpčeski Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Many established artists, when out on tour, can get all a bit bashful about their new material. In fact, it’s not unusual for bands to hide a couple of new tunes in the middle of their live set with embarrassed mumbling about “you don’t really want to hear the new stuff anyway” before launching into a note-perfect rendition of a tune that was a hit several years previously. This is not the way of Florence + The Machine, whose High as Hope tour features a set that pulls almost half of its material from their recent, Mercury-nominated album.Without even a “hello”, Florence Welch and her eight- Read more ...
Tom Baily
It is appropriate that Keanu Reeves sounds especially croaky and muffled throughout Siberia. Business meetings for his character Lucas Hill (a diamond trader) don’t normally involve much talk, just a swift briefcase handover and a confidential handshake. He is forced to get engaged, however, when his partner Pyotr (Boris Gulyarin) disappears, forcing him to travel to Russia to meet with the clients and track down his colleague. Hill (and you can’t help but thinking Keanu Reeves, too) doesn’t seem pleased with either: the acting, or the talking.In St Petersburg, Hill is given two days to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up last year to help rectify the acute, and long-standing, gender imbalance among authors translated into English, is supported by the University of Warwick. This year, the panel of judges again consisted of Professors Amanda Hopkinson and Susan Bassnett – both eminent translators, and teachers of the art – and myself. We read 53 submitted works (an encouragingly sharp hike compared to 2017) across a broad Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marianne Faithfull’s recent album Negative Capability featured a new version of “As Tears go by”, the Jagger-Richard song which had been her first single. Also heard was an adaptation of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. The A-side of her second single was a cover of his “Blowin’ in the Wind”. While nodding back to 1964 raises the question of whether a circle has been closed, it also suggests Faithfull is saying that the intervening years have brought a fresh perspective on when she first hit the charts at age 17.The new, descriptively titled compilation Come and Stay with Me - The UK Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’re not good at lack these days. Just look at the concert hall, where increasingly you turn up to find not just an orchestra and soloists but a giant screen. Videos, projections, live speakers, "virtual choirs"; if there’s so much as a chink of an opening in the music, you can bet that someone will try and fill it. It seems to come from a place of generosity, a desire to reach out, to supplement, to amplify, to explain, just in case we didn’t feel or see or understand before. But it’s also a gesture that takes away our agency as an audience, turns us spongy, limp as listeners.English Read more ...