London
Nick Hasted
Julien Temple’s directing career has been struck seemingly stone-dead twice. After working with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1979), then again after the flop big-budget British jazz musical Absolute Beginners (1986), he was made a notorious cinema untouchable in the UK. Exiled in Hollywood, he fell back on his parallel life as a landmark pop video auteur.But during the last decade Temple has bounced back to become the world’s most exhilarating and influential rock documentarian, with films using cut-up, rapid-fire film grammar to tell a story of post- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appearance of the Goldfinger-era Aston Martin DB5 in the new Skyfall is prompting cheers from audiences, and as Richard Hammond commented in this celebration of Bondmobiles down the ages, the Bond movies have been unique in their ability to turn cars into personalities. From the absurd to the spectacular, 007's transport has rarely been less than memorable, apart from a disastrously lacklustre flirtation with BMWs during the Pierce Brosnan era.Hammond's jokey, blokey, anecdotal approach, mixed with some notable specimens of jerry-built science, made this a hugely diverting hour. He Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they more than a cockney slanted, pie ‘n’ mash Wurzels? This programme, prompted by their 2009 retirement, made a valiant – heroic – attempt to elevate them to the level of the greats. Peter Doherty declared them “just like The Clash, The Smiths, Keats”. Obviously, he was thinking of “Snooker Loopy”.They are pretty great. But by not taking their good-time Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As the title suggests, It Always Rains on Sunday wasn’t one of Ealing Studios' famous comedies, but a film suffused with resignation and realism. That’s not to say the 1947 classic is monotonous: how could it be when it’s a bickering domestic drama, a panoramic portrait of Bethnal Green street culture, and a thriller that draws on French poetic realism and American film noir? And given its provenance, it does at least include a wryly comic story about petty criminals.It’s not hard to divine why the film’s director, Robert Hamer (better known for the elegant aristocraticide of Kind Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Pop is a cruel mistress. Watching numerous BBC4 rockumentaries, such as the recent one on Squeeze, a pattern emerges. You make it, go through an imperial phase when you can do no wrong, then the honeymoon ends. The records are still great but the parade has moved on. This struck me again listening to the 10th studio album from Madness, which comes complete with a classy Peter Blake sleeve design. But despite plenty of TV coverage and an unforgettably moving profile-boosting performance of “Our House” on the Buck House roof at the Diamond Jubilee concert I cannot see this album topping the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's Bond number 23, and if you were to suggest to me that it was the best of the lot, I might very well agree with you. This is a terrific James Bond movie, thoughtfully written, shrewdly cast and taking stock of everything that the 50-year-old franchise has come to mean. But even if it wasn't a Bond film, it would still be darn good.In this year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, it's also surprisingly and rather touchingly British, right down to Adele's stridently Bassey-esque theme tune. In a staggering feat of cross-marketing, they even got the Queen to appear in that Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Can a septuagenarian wear skinny trousers? It is not a question that I ask myself very often, but it was my first thought on seeing the frighteningly fit 73-year-old Ian Hunter stroll onstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire last night. Life in America clearly suits the Shropshire-born former frontman of Mott the Hoople, as he led a band young enough to be his children through a storming, age-defying 110-minute set.Ian Hunter has been around long enough to know what the fans want and he was happy to give them plenty of it, with a show that mixed tracks from his latest album, When I'm President, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The latest film from innovative firebrand Sally Potter is something of a surprise given her back catalogue. Her last feature, Rage (2009) premiered on mobile phones and the internet and comprised a series of to-the-camera monologues; the one before that Yes (2004) was told in iambic pentameter; and, she is of course the maestro behind gender-bending masterpiece Orlando (1992). Ginger & Rosa – a sweet and sour coming-of-age story - by contrast seems pretty conventional, following two teenage girls who have been best friends since their simultaneous birth.It’s London, 1962, and Ginger and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you asked a bunch of foreigners to describe the British, I bet one of the phrases most frequently used would be “a nation of dog lovers”, so it was no surprise to discover that film-maker's Vanessa Engle's latest bulletin about the British and the way they live (shown as part of the excellent Wonderland strand) was about this nation's love affair with canines.Engle and her assistant studied those walking their dogs on Hampstead Heath (London's largest open space) over the course of a year, after making contact with some owners first online and others by the simple method of accosting Read more ...
josh.spero
Things have come to a pretty pass when the old is a breath of fresh air and the new just old hat, but the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent's Park, which closes this weekend, is just that. New sister to Frieze London, which features art since 2000, Frieze Masters is about the best of what came before. And boy is that good.If you've ever been around Frieze London, with its shiny artworks and 170 galleries and thousands of connoisseurs, collectors, rubberneckers and art-world hangers-on committing visual and aural assault on the innocent art-lover, you'll probably fear Frieze Masters as a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I daresay some of you, like theartsdesk, have been pining for the sadly departed Spooks. Its production company, Kudos, knows how you feel, and has rustled up this pacey, knotty and deliberately complicated thriller in its place.The decision had clearly been made to seize the viewer's windpipe in a throttling grip even before the credits had stopped rolling, and the opening 15 minutes of this debut episode charged along like a herd of furious buffalo overdosing on amphetamines. We were in Tangier, armed with high-octane cinematography and a panicky sense of encroaching danger. Sam Hunter ( Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his romantic tragedy. But if it’s admirably courageous, truth be told, it makes for rather punitive viewing.The new translation of Racine's 1670 text, which was originally composed in Alexandrine couplets, is by Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker-winning novelist. In unrhymed pentameter, it is cool, pellucid, direct; what it is not, and perhaps does not Read more ...