Reviews
Matthew Wright
He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market with the precision of one of those cruise missiles that can navigate up a jihadi’s u-bend. If you don’t see it on a date, you might just as easily watch it with children, grandparents, or your long-lost step-sister from Patagonia. Perhaps only the soundtrack, a slick dovetailing of originals and some of the 1980s’ more stylish tunes from Duran Duran Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In its final episode Undercover tied up a lot of loose ends and introduced a number of new ones. The biggest loose end to remain unaddressed was pretty big. Nick Johnson was the alias of a policeman who in 1996 went undercover to spy on black activist Michael Antwi and his lawyer Maya Cobbina. Nick promptly fell in love with Maya; they married and had children. For the next 20 years, Maya, possessed of such a brilliant legal mind that she ends up as Director of Public Prosecutions, never once questioned Nick’s claim to be a writer despite his prodigious – nay absolute – lack of output.OK, so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What makes a musical performance? The final of Young Musician 2016 presented five judges with this philosophical teaser to ponder. For the previous 90 minutes three contestants with three radically contrasting styles of delivery cleared every bar in front of them, with the help of Mark Wigglesworth and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Giving the nod to one meant the elbow for the others. In the end it could hardly be disputed that cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a young musician of extraordinary charisma, was a deserving winner.Ben Goldscheider went first with Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto, which Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Looking past the ballets for Diaghilev, there are still many superb scores by Stravinsky honoured more in scholarship than performance. In Myths and Rituals, the Philharmonia addresses that lack of wider appreciation with five concerts from May to September. The series got off to a promising start last night with the tiny fanfare for three trumpets – Monteverdi with attitude and wrong notes – from 1955, which was one of Stravinsky’s first thoughts for his last ballet, Agon.The Symphonies of Wind Instruments are often played and heard as a Cubist funeral rite, moving in discontinuous blocks of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ladies and gentlemen, in view of the controversy already aroused the producers of this film wish to re-emphasise what is already stated in the film: that there is no established scientific connection between mongolism and psychotic or criminal behaviour”. With these opening words, Twisted Nerve instantly defined itself as a film out to attract attention. Despite this questionable exploitation aspect, the genuinely unsettling 1968 work is ripe for reassessment.Like their predecessor feature The Family Way, Roy and Thomas Boulting’s Twisted Nerve starred Roy’s then wife Hayley Mills. She Read more ...
stephen.walsh
War may be a dramatic affair for anyone involved in it, but staging it is another matter. In fact describing it satisfactorily at all needs either a Tolstoyan flair for the large canvas, or else a poetic genius for directing its force inwards, into self-reflection or religious contemplation or the kind of intense verbal music, rich in historical and literary allusion, that the great Welsh artist and writer David Jones made his own in his long, tragic prose-poem, In Parenthesis.I can just about imagine an In Parenthesis opera in the form of a one-man show with the author seated on a wooden Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The comedy of widowhood is the brave territory of Mum. Lesley Manville plays Cathy, whom we meet on the day she is burying her husband Dave – although not literally doing it herself, as has to be explained to the nice but dim new girlfriend of her stay-at-home son Jason (Sam Swainsbury). As the mourners gather at her Chingford semi, each fresh arrival proves more grotesque than the last, and poor Cathy’s face becomes a little more pinched as her heroic reserves of tolerance run almost dry.First there’s Kelly (Lisa McGrillis, pictured below) who arrives in a short red dress, needing to borrow Read more ...
David Kettle
For a festival of wild, genre-colliding musical experimentation, Tectonics is almost starting to feel like part of the establishment. Which shows, if nothing else, that it must be getting somewhere with its boundary demolishing. The 2016 weekend over 7-8 May was its fourth outing in Glasgow – conductor Ilan Volkov founded it in Reykjavík in 2012, and since then it’s spread its all-embracing eclecticism worldwide to Tel Aviv, Adelaide, New York and beyond. And it feels like the event has settled nicely into its quirky, iconoclastic identity – and established a faithful and committed audience Read more ...
graham.rickson
Maurice Greene: Overtures Baroque Band/Garry Clarke (Cedille)Maurice Greene. Who? No worries: conductor Garry Clarke's notes fill in all the useful gaps. Greene was a prominent 18th century English composer, remembered by the well-educated for his choral music and for holding down several plum jobs, including Master of the King's Music and a professorship at Cambridge. As a young musician he was a close friend and admirer of Handel, the pair falling out over an unfortunate case of plagiarism on the part of one of Greene's colleagues. Greene didn't leave behind much instrumental Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang. The discerning among them would likely be bowled over by the outstanding feature debut of the Ankara-born, French-educated filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven. On the other hand, our daughters would be irked by having no grounds to complain about anything again after realising how fortunate they are not to be subjected to the restrictions imposed on high-school Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.It’s also when Green Room becomes less interesting than Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, Blue Ruin, which was saturated in inexorable sadness and dread, with an unpredictable, steel-trap plot, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Complete Deaths refers to the complete onstage deaths in Shakespeare’s work, all 75 of them, including the “black ill favour’d fly” in Titus Andronicus. The latter becomes a persistent theme throughout, appearing even as the audience take their seats, a joke shop plastic approximation attached to wire, being poked up the nose of a prostrate cast member. The whole is the work of two respected Brighton-based theatrical entities, the four-person physical comedy troupe Spymonkey and writer/director Tim Crouch. And it’s a fantastic, hilarious, consistently imaginative hoot from start to finish Read more ...