Reviews
Katherine McLaughlin
Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M.Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn’s (Chiara D’Anna) relationship is presented in a slyly funny manner with tinges of sadness delivering harsh truths about the dark side of devotion. Evelyn likes it rough and Cynthia Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ushering in the mucky-minded art-house crowd like the Pied Piper lining up kids for the snatching, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely describes itself as an erotic thriller set amidst the Kentucky wilds, while its fluid, meadow-fresh depiction of forbidden romance recalls Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. However, it's a film that turns surprisingly savage with 'hillbilly horror flick' a more apt description of where things end up.In fact diverse influences abound throughout; John Steinbeck’s East of Eden provides partial inspiration and there are allusions to the work of Carlos Reygadas (Post Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
England is in the throes of an unusual Teutonic love fest, and in 2014 no doubt deliberately. Music of course has always been omnipresent: Bach to Wagner, and a passion for Beethoven and Schubert that knows no bounds. But there has been a love-hate relationship with the visual arts. We are somewhat uncomfortable with the Northern Renaissance, preferring the Italian, and as for expressionism, that was, for a long time, far too blatantly emotionally strident and in your face. There was a moment in the 19th century when artists fell for the Nazarenes, but that helped to lead to the Pre- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Benedict Cumberbatch leads a superb cast in The Imitation Game, the highly-anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, gifted mathematician and father of modern computing. The opening film for the LFF this year, this beautiful period drama, adapted from Andrew Hodges’ book The Enigma by debut screenwriter Graham Moore, travels between Turing’s formative days at boarding school and miserable existence in the 1950s, centring on his unique and crucial work defeating the Nazi’s Enigma encryption device during WWII.The English-language debut by Norwegian director Morten Tyldum (best known for the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stratford-upon-Avon calling. The City of London Sinfonia has embarked on a series of three Bard-based October concerts in London to commemorate the 450th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death. The first of the three stopping-off points last night was Southwark Cathedral, in some ways a logical starting-place, since the building proudly asserts its credentials as the parish church nearest to the Globe Theatre. The main work of the evening was Mendelssohn's charming and graceful incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, presented semi-staged, which occupied the whole of a delightful Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
What can another film about American malfeasance in its War on Terror add to our knowledge and disapproval? Camp X-Ray has too narrow a scope to offer much; yet it’s impossible not to be affected by its depiction of utter hopelessness for those illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.Written and directed by Peter Sattler, it stars Kristen Stewart as a female private, Amy Cole, posted to the base where soldiering takes on the role of prison guard. Peyman Moaadi is Ali, an innocent detained for eight years and with no end in sight, whose determination to connect, with anyone, will slowly Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as though 2014 was the year in which the Twitter generation finally woke up and realised what it had done. For five years a quiet, unassuming baking competition had risen through the ranks to become the most polite BBC One ratings juggernaut in the corporation’s history. Frankly, the world was ready for a bearded ginger Irishman to throw his baked Alaska in the bin and storm off into the great British countryside.In the end (and let’s not pretend that there won’t be spoilers from the off), it was slow and steady that won the race. Retiree Nancy Birtwhistle’s creations rarely brought Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Bebel Gilberto seemed very tentative when she first appeared onstage; dressed in semi-Goth black, she kept saying how nervous she was. “Calm down, Bebel. It’s only the Barbican,” she muttered and we did get a sense of the terror and exhilaration of performing live to a big crowd. Her shambolic approach is in some ways, though, preferable to some slick operators who have their stage patter timed to the second. There’s a problem with a wire, she goes off-stage. Then she can’t work the mic stand and tells the stage hand to get her a drink. It’s all a bit of tightrope act, and there’s a sense of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A peculiar slice of 19th-century cultural life is mined to minimal effect in Effie Gray, a stillborn labour of love that doesn't justify the long slog from screenwriter and supporting player Emma Thompson required to bring this tale to the screen. It's not just that her husband, Greg Wise, is miscast in a part - that of the visionary critic, educator and sometime-painter John Ruskin - for which he's several decades too old. But the saga of the famously unconsummated marriage between Ruskin and his Scottish wife, Effie, in this telling raises more questions than it answers, and one can imagine Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's tempting with this show less to write a review per se than to simply pile on the puns, but that would be to piss on - sorry, I meant do a disservice to - both the musical that is Urinetown and to the exceptionally deft UK premiere that the Broadway sleeper hit from a dozen or more years ago is currently receiving at the hands of the director Jamie Lloyd. In New York, Tony-winners Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis's wilfully self-conscious pastiche was by turns winning and wearing, in accordance with a piece that has barely begun before it starts to self-deconstruct. Lloyd, by contrast, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We all romanticise the olden times. Those we think of as belonging to them are no different. The Castle of Otranto – by common consent, the first Gothic novel – was published a quarter of a millennium ago. “Otranto ‘lost its maidenhead’ today,” wrote its author Horace Walpole. To him, if not to us, the 1760s reeked of modernity so he claimed that this was a true story plucked from a cobwebbed Neapolitan library in 1529 – that is, a quarter of a millennium before.“Tranflated by WILLIAM MARSHAL, Gent,” fibbed the frontispiece. “From the Original ITALIAN of ONUPHRIO MURALTO, Canon of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brian Cox has a very beguiling way of expressing quiet wonder. He’s taken on the very largest of subjects in Human Universe, extending traditions of science and natural history broadcasting towards a wider study of how the human race has come to be what it is, where it came from and where it may be going, and he doesn’t raise his voice on a single occasion. Other BBC presenters carried away by their subject matter could certainly take a hint.This first episode of Cox’s five-parter was titled “Apeman-Spaceman”, and we first saw Britain’s favourite physicist at Star City outside Moscow, the Read more ...