Reviews
Tom Birchenough
“Loving people doesn’t save them” could be the epitaph to the young Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s exuberant, emotionally draining fifth feature Mommy. Its vivid colours, concentrated in an unusual square screen ratio, seem to burst out with devilish energy as we follow the attempts of a loving but stretched mother to look after her 15-year-old son who suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.Over 139 minutes – Dolan again doubles as his own editor, and a degree of trimming would certainly have worked to crystallize the film further – we’re buffeted by the conflicting emotions Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Even for a dancer of Akram Khan’s sublime gifts, “Now” is an evasive concept to convey. During last night’s Sadler’s Wells extravaganza of Azerbaijani jazz and contemporary dance, “The Pursuit of Now”, Khan and his co-performer, the German-Korean dancer Honji Wang, mesmerised in a series of vignettes, gorgeously choreographed and lit. Azeri pianist Shahin Novrasli, whose ensembles’ charismatic folk-jazz comprised far more of the programme than the dance, offered a compelling snapshot of the Azeri music scene, beautifully positioned between Eastern and Western traditions. In the end, though, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Alexander McQueen designed some dresses to die for. Dominating a wood-panelled room dedicated to Romantic Nationalism, in acknowledgement of his Scottish origins, is a crimson cape worn over a simple white dress. The high collar, puffed sleeves and long train lend the shimmering red taffeta a baronial splendour perfect for dramatic entrances.Nearby is a white tulle dress whose bodice is encrusted with tiny red beads, worn beneath a red silk taffeta jacket layered into exaggerated folds reminiscent of coral. One could imagine sporting these garments with great pleasure, knowing that they made Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst has some stellar credits on his CV (Shameless, Exile and The Street among others), though I don't know if Ordinary Lies is going to rate among his finest achievements. Over six episodes, the series will tell the stories of six employees of a car showroom, JS Motor Group Ltd (seemingly somewhere in the north-west), and how being frugal with the actualité blights their lives.This opener starred Jason Manford as Marty, a salesman who prided himself on his glib motormouthing skills. However, it looked like his career was heading for the ditch. No longer brimming Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After waiting a quarter of a century for Blancmange’s last album, 2011’s Blanc Burn, this new offering, effectively a Neil Arthur solo project, almost feels like a rush release. There’s a much changed visual aesthetic – gone is the stylised, Fifties cover kitsch, replaced by something much more stark and impenetrable. Now, I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about CDs?This new collection is certainly darker, but, before we address that, let’s get the negative stuff out of the way. Don’t worry, it really won’t take long. So… “Useless” sounds like the Wedding Present trying Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally Sean Penn, earnest Hollywood liberal and hard-working humanitarian, didn't lightly undertake his role as professional hitman Jim Terrier in The Gunman. "The idea of making violence cute – I've never been interested as an actor in those things," Penn has commented. "But when I read this I thought there were a lot of real-world parallels to it."But let's face it, the fact that The Gunman is directed by Pierre Morel, who also helmed the irony-deficient revenge yarn Taken, doesn't augur well for anyone expecting nuanced dissection of moral conundrums, and the amount of promotional Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Nowadays, playwrights do their apprenticeships at university, studying drama. But, once upon a time, they had proper jobs before they started making theatre. Such is the case of the late Michael Hastings, who died in 2011 and whose most famous piece is Tom & Viv (about TS Eliot and his wife). Before becoming a playwright, he worked for three years as a tailor's apprentice. The Cutting of the Cloth, written in 1973 and accumulating dust in a bottom drawer ever since, is based on those early work experiences. But is it worth staging?This is a wintry play for a cold nightThe story is set in Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Blues is an old man’s game. To do it properly you really have to have lived, and to have the scars and the criminal record to show for it. How do I know? Because Mac “Dr John” Rebennack is living proof. As he shuffled on at Ronnie Scott’s last night to join his NiteTripper four-piece, with a walking stick in each hand and his dreadlocked pony tail hanging over one shoulder, he had the look of a man who’s done himself serious damage over the years. But his music was all the better for it.For starters, life has given him the voice that every bluesman wants, a throaty growl that Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For somebody who never seems to be short of things to say, journalist and author Caitlin Moran doesn’t half like to repeat herself. Raised by Wolves is, for those of you keeping score at home, her third attempt to tell the story of growing up chubby, eccentric and poor in Wolverhampton. Like last year’s novel How to Build a Girl this one is nominally fictional, but the addition of younger sister Caroline (Caz) as co-writer introduces something new.That something, as Raised by Wolves returned for a full series after 2013’s pilot, was red-haired Aretha (Alexa Davies), cynical, precocious and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Writing about writers: exploring what you know, or the very definition of stifling egoism? Either way, it can be a terrible trap for the playwright, with craft becoming not just the subject of a work, but its defining feature. Hugh Whitemore narrowly avoids that fate in his unashamedly writerly 1977 piece about poet and novelist Stevie Smith, which is packed to the gills with erudite bon mots, yet, in Christopher Morahan’s leisurely revival, somewhat lacking in dramatic thrust.Whitemore’s play sticks with the most tried-and-tested version of biographical theatre – namely, the semi-narrated Read more ...
fisun.guner
Made an Honorary Royal Academician just a few months before he died, in 1993, it’s taken till now for a posthumous Royal Academy survey to finally bring one of the absolute greats of American postwar painting to a UK audience. Of course, for those with long memories, there was the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of 1991, but though it provided the impetus for the belated honour, it seemed to do little to bring the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn into the public realm.Diebenkorn, who spent most of his life in California, finally settling in Santa Monica in the mid-Sixties where he began his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ventriloquist Nina Conti, along with her wisecracking sidekick Monkey, has emerged as one of the sharper comedy acts of the past few years but Nina Conti Clowning Around was an uneasy, far from comic film. Embarking on a new direction, away from “entertaining drunk adults” as Monkey put it so winningly, Conti set herself to trying to entertain sick children as a hospital clown, or “giggle doctor” to give them their title at the Theodora Children’s Charity which was her starting point.It followed two years of her life, and this certainly wasn’t one of those triumphing-against-the-odds Read more ...