Reviews
Helen Hawkins
Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be having a field day.Back in the saddle is Nicole Kidman, some 25 years after she appeared naked on the tiny Donmar stage, almost within touching distance of the audience. She has been eliciting cooing responses for her “bravery” in taking on her latest role, of a sexually unfulfilled CEO of a big robotics company who embarks on a dangerous affair with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Iris (Laure Calamy) and her husband Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz) haven’t had sex for four years. Waiting at school for the parent-teacher conference (they have well-behaved daughters aged ten and 15), she bemoans this fact to a friend, though, she maintains, she has no intention of leaving him.“Have you considered taking a lover?” asks a mother (Olivia Côte) who’s overheard her. There are apps, she tells Iris, even ones specifically for married people. No sooner said than done. From then on, Iris’s phone doesn’t stop buzzing.It’s Raining Men, (Iris et les Hommes is its more elegant French title) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Cold Blows The Rain encapsulates it. A mournful, unembellished female voice sings of loss. The musical backing is sparse. Rhythms are measured. Nothing is hurried. If this album was a weather forecast, it would predict impenetrable mist followed by cold rain and wind. Then, more mist.This is Bridget Hayden’s first album which can clearly be defined as folk. Since the late 1990s, her music has been experimental, impressionistic – most often made with Schism and Vibracathedral Orchestra. She has also played and recorded with edgy shoegazers The Telescopes. Tellingly for Cold Blows The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from festival showings and its American release.This isn’t the easiest moment in history to be launching a film exploring its author’s Jewish heritage, thanks to the violent repercussions of events in the Middle East, but the historical baggage that comes with that heritage is all part of Eisenberg’s theme. Set to an eloquent and frequently melancholy Read more ...
David Nice
There’s nothing like an anodyne new(ish) work to give a masterpiece an even higher profile. Rachel Portman‘s Tipping Points, promising to address climate change issues, was so bland and featureless it could have been composed by AI. Any one bar of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, on the other hand, shows originality of throught within a tradition, and unlike the Portman near-vacuum it challenged the musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland to the limits.That they pulled it off was obviously due in no small measure to the guidance of Jessica Cottis. I’d like to have seen more urging Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”“Different Drum,” the September 1967 single by an outfit dubbed Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, was immediate, had a country edge and was written by Mike Nesmith – then best known as a member of The Monkees. The band had already issued Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Does absolutely everything have to get more difficult with each passing year? Apparently so. The amount of time I’ve spent deciding which of the many truly excellent albums I’ve reviewed this year should get the ‘top prize’ has, frankly, been ridiculous. I’m not an indecisive person. And, for God knows that reason, I feel personally loyal to the artists upon whom it would have been easier to bestow this huge honour (Nadine Shah, Elbow, Joan as Policewoman, see below). I am choosing the road less travelled. Sort of.Get over yourself, I hear you cry. And you’re right. The reason I’ve plumped Read more ...
David Nice
In one sense it was a New Year’s Day “nearly”, just stopping short of giving us the already great Irish lyric-dramatic soprano Jennifer Davis in the music of the man she was born to sing, Richard Strauss. Berlin will witness her Arabella shortly, but the one Bavarian intruder in the otherwise all-Viennese carnival yesterday afternoon, the Moonlight Music from Capriccio, stopped before the Countess’s final scene.Yet that slice of heaven still served as a breath from another planet in a glittering programme: did the audience realise it was getting one of the world's best horn players, Alec Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having carved a swathe of terror and destruction through the Axis forces in North Africa, the SAS return for a second series (again written by Steven Knight, and with another rockin’ soundtrack featuring the likes of The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”, Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” and Magazine’s very apt “Shot by Both Sides”).With the SAS’s founding father, David Stirling, a prisoner of war in the medieval pile of Forte di Gavi, command of the unit has passed to Paddy Mayne, played with a kind of barely-controlled madness by Jack O’Connell. Now the unit is tasked with being the point of the Read more ...
David Nice
As always, great concerts have outnumbered great opera productions over a year, and all of our national orchestras can be proud of their record. I’ve sometimes started by celebrating youth, and it’s good to be able to do that in the shape of two competition finales totally satisfying as programmes. The palm, though, goes to two veterans who made me wonder at their ease and natural communication.In the case of 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt conducting Mahler’s immensely taxing Ninth Symphony, it was the Philharmonia which did all the burning and intensity, while the conductor’s natural sense of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In an ideal world an end-of-year roundup would applaud only new ventures – fresh productions that you may curse for having missed but whose success would almost certainly ensure a second run.The past 12 months in dance has offered few of these. Instead, it was a year of fine revivals. At a time of tightened belts, tightened as never before, it made sense to programme the tried and tested. There were some novelties, of course, but it was the best of the seen-befores that made the bigger splash.The Royal Ballet, flush with its new status as the dominant company at Covent Garden after 80 years Read more ...