Reviews
Berlinale 2014: The WinnersSunday, 16 February 2014
The Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice by director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the closing ceremony of the Berlinale last night, as well as picking up the best actor prize for its star Liao Fan.It was a night for Asian cinema in general,... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Yves Saint Laurent, La belle et le bêteSunday, 16 February 2014
You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: The Circle, Love Is Strange, Land of Storms, Praia do FuturoSunday, 16 February 2014
Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: BoyhoodSaturday, 15 February 2014
Not the least remarkable thing about Richard Linklater's Boyhood is its being shot over a decade – that’s probably a first in film history. And it’s more than a sociological experiment, portraying in vibrant contemporary detail and a lot of... Read more... |
Miles Jupp, TouringSaturday, 15 February 2014
It's a mark of Miles Jupp's charm that he can do a show with a long segment about being the father of four young children and win over both non-parents and those who wish to forget for two hours that they have left their own offspring at home with a... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: TriptyqueFriday, 14 February 2014
French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off... Read more... |
HerFriday, 14 February 2014
Pretty well the last film in the current array of Oscar hopefuls to reach Britain is also (in my view, anyway) the best. That's saying something as we gear up for an Academy Awards ceremony paying tribute to the strongest selection of nominees... Read more... |
King Priam, English Touring Opera, Linbury Studio TheatreFriday, 14 February 2014
Tippett’s selective, often compelling and mostly well-structured take on Trojan War myths will never capture the wider public’s imagination as much as even the least of Britten’s operas. His ideas sometimes pierce the soul but don’t stick there in... Read more... |
JazzpunkFriday, 14 February 2014
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." thus begins Hunter S Thompson's seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. And the spirit of that book and HST's surreal "gonzo" take on reality live on... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: Cathedrals of CultureFriday, 14 February 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the... Read more... |
Rigoletto, English National OperaFriday, 14 February 2014
Old sins, the saying goes, cast long shadows. These are nothing, however, to the shadows cast by old productions. Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto looms larger than most in this regard – a lowering giant of directorial inspiration, with 30 years in... Read more... |
The Strypes, Concorde 2, BrightonThursday, 13 February 2014
The Strypes broke through initially with an amped-up version of the blues, akin to the sounds of the early Sixties London blues rock explosion that gave us the Rolling Stones. Tonight proved that they’ve since taken a Tardis through the decades -... Read more... |
