Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Not to be confused with Nineties supernatural sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Netflix’s new incarnation of the high-schooler with infernal powers is a ghoulish thrill-ride which boldly surfs the dark side, with a pronounced feminist and gay slant. It’s the story of the titular Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka, who played Don and Betty Draper’s daughter Sally in Mad Men) as she struggles to reconcile the half of her which is a human teenager with the supernatural lineage of her warlock father Edward.As her 16th birthday looms, Sabrina prepares for her “dark baptism”, when she must sign Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Italian pianist Federico Colli, 30, best known so far as winner of the 2012 Leeds International Piano Competition, last night arrived for his Wigmore Hall debut sporting an emerald-green cravat, but the sonic colours he magicked out of the piano quickly put its gleam in the shade. He is an artist developing at an impressive rate, and one of whom I think we’ll be hearing a great deal more in years ahead.Colli had nevertheless picked a somewhat unforgiving programme – a first half entirely of Scarlatti and a second of chewingly unremitting D minor – and if at times the result was more Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Two countries; two histories. Being black in the US; being black in the UK. Compare and contrast. Which is exactly what debbie tucker green’s amazingly ambitious new epic, which straddles centuries and continents, succeeds in doing. Taking a forensic look at what it means to be at the sharp end when you are Black British or African American, the show has a thrillingly unexpected theatre form and is written in green’s distinctive style of reiterative and repetitive punchy dialogues, which here are both emotionally passionate and imaginatively modernistic. Covering both contemporary experience Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“We will be taking you on a journey,” promises Caro Emerald at the start of tonight’s return to the Royal Albert Hall, which she last played back in April 2017 – and for the next 90 minutes, that’s what jazz-pop queen Emerald and her slick seven-piece band, the Grandmono Orchestra, do. Having bustled in from the cold and dark Halloween night, the audience is ready to be swept away to somewhere a lot more sunny.Prior to departure, however, is a sombre, six-song set by Loren Nine – not a nine-piece jazz combo but a diminutive Dutch singer-songwriter who sits down at her keyboard and smilingly Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Adultery seldom looks less adult than in the form of the mild-life crisis – that much-satirised condition in which desire is eclipsed by delusion, wisdom by foolishness, and sensible coats by leather jackets. Joanna Murray-Smith’s scalpel-sharp drama – first performed in Australia in 1995 (and acted here at the National Theatre in 2003 with Corin Redgrave and Eileen Atkins in the starring roles), now revived at the Park Theatre - triumphs because it anatomises marital breakdown with a cold-eyed clarity that goes beyond cliché to ask profound questions about the meaning of love decades after Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The young Dublin folk trio fuse vocal harmonies with superb acoustic musicianship, primarily on cello, fiddle and Nyckelharpa. They bring together Irish and Nordic – specifically Finnish – folk traditions, building them to dizzying heights on a foundation of acoustic drones and group interplay. The trio brought their second album, Starfall, to the Southbank for the last date of a UK tour on Wednesday night. Fresh from touring their original score for Swan Lake with Teac Damsa dance troupe, they’ve also performed with The National and headlined The Gloaming fiddler Martin Hayes’ Masters Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Considering how the UK prides itself on having created the "Mother of Parliaments" and its citizens having once chopped off a king's head for thwarting its will, remarkably little is taught in our schools about one of the seminal events on the way to fully democratising this country: the Peterloo Massacre.Mike Leigh's spawling, intricately detailed film will give you a good overview of that appalling day in British history; on 16 August 1819 an undisciplined and badly led group of mounted and foot soldiers – whose commanding officer had a more pressing date at the races – charged with sabres Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mark Kidel has made a beautiful, ethereal film projecting his version of Cary Grant and as such it’s destined to be picked over by the actor’s legions of fans, each of whom will have a different version. But what would the man himself have thought if he’d lived to see Becoming Cary Grant? Notoriously protective and ambivalent about his image, one can only hope that he’d approve of the documentary's sympathetic, melancholic tone.One of the biggest stars in Hollywood’s golden age, Grant appeared in over 70 films before retiring at 62. Kidel makes generous and judicious use of scenes from his Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Yukon Assignment tracks a 500-mile canoe journey along a remote river in Canada taken by a British adventurer and his father. The feature-length documentary is a gentle, unpretentious love-letter to untamed nature and its ability to bring two people together. For Chris Lucas, director and expedition leader, it is a chance to connect on a deeper level with his father Niall, a former actor and less adept adventurer. Chris tells us that his goal is to overcome both the “risk of bears” and the “risk of our relationship”.The Yukon wilderness is a stunning backdrop for this intimate voyage. It Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seeming to spend an interminable amount of time wandering around in a daze and blundering up blind alleys, Strangers finally gathered its wits and cantered towards the finishing tape with a renewed sense of purpose in the final two episodes. One couldn’t feeling that if two or three of its eight instalments had been surreptitiously hidden behind the dustbins round the back of ITV Mansions, few would have been any the wiser.In the end, university professor Jonah Mulray (John Simm, revealing an aptitude for morbid dullness which he’d previously kept to himself) got most of the answers he’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those. It was Lauren Gunderson, and here is the UK premiere of her intimate two-hander Young Adult play, I and You, which is directed by Edward Hall and has two striking stage debuts.We are in a teenage bedroom – messy, with lots of pinks, fairy lights and glitter. There's a slightly claustrophobic air about it which makes sense when we learn that its occupant, Caroline (Maisie Williams, Arya Stark in Game of Thrones), is all Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Realistic open world games need the little touches to convince you of the reality within which you play. Perhaps it’s your character’s beard that grows a little more each day, maybe it’s the way mud builds up on his boots during wet weather, or how he makes a cup of coffee and talks to members of his 20-strong gang in the morning. But the little touches add to the big picture and Red Dead Redemption 2 is full of the former, creating a sumptuous, deliciously immersive open world adventure that does everything it can to redefine the big picture concept in a videogame context. The Read more ...