Reviews
Simon Munk
The videogames industry is changing, and not in a good way. There are fewer and fewer people creating single-player stories of depth and ingenuity in games. The sad truth is fewer and fewer people are willing to pay enough (or anything even) for games that are artistic, slower or deeper. Instead, videogames are increasingly falling into one of two woeful categories.The big "AAA" console games are now skewed to multi-player online action – forget the plot, it's all about the twitchy fragging; and (while you're not looking) it's all about getting you to drip-feed payment for new add-on packs Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Humankind's desperate struggle for survival is exquisitely rendered in this post-apocalyptic set sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves, the director of another end of the world type scenario in found footage film Cloverfield, takes the reins of this smart and attractive franchise and runs confidently with visceral wanton destruction and a blunt message about gun control.Living a peaceful existence in the wilderness of a San Francisco forest, the apes have carved out a life without humans who they presume have long died out due to the simian flu virus (seen taking hold Read more ...
fisun.guner
The year 1915 was a big one for Kazimir Malevich, as it was for the course of modern art. It was the year the Black Square was first exhibited (June 1915 is the likeliest date of the painting’s execution, though Malevich himself dated it to 1913, insisting it derived from his designs for Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun). A simple black square on a white ground, it presented a gesture so bold, so audacious that it can only be rivalled by Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917. Just think of the all-black or all-white canvases by the likes of Ad Reinhardt or Robert Ryman some 40 and 50 years later and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for the Parisian performing arts, the festival prospered, and in this its 10th year, has brought the Americans back with a stonking programme. Every night of the 17-date run at the Théâtre du Châtelet features a different triple bill, covering in total 18 pieces by twelve choreographers – and that’s not counting the opening gala. A treat indeed for Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A few months ago, Glasgow Girls - Cora Bissett and David Greig’s 2013 musical based on the true story of seven teenage girls from Drumchapel, Glasgow and their campaign to end the forced removal of school-age asylum seekers - returned to the city’s Citizens Theatre for another sell-out run. It makes the timing of this all-new reinterpretation of a story that has already been the subject of two TV documentaries a little strange, particularly as it too was billed as a “musical drama”: surely a more effective approach, I thought, would have been to adapt the existing critically acclaimed show, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If you like middle-market tabloids, you’ll be into Coast. Like a reliable tide, the show about the sea has been washing up on BBC Two’s shores since 2005. A factual series defined by the ocean main which surrounds the British Isles, it comes with a stock of stories that, unlike the mackerel population, seem in no danger of running out. They are so plentiful, in fact, that last year David Dimbleby felt free to fish in pretty much the same waters with his series Britain and the Sea.Rather than rely on a single presenter, Coast goes for the multi-person approach. Nicholas Crane, geeky in specs Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
La Bayadère is one of the ballets I recommend to people who have never seen ballet before. It has high drama, exquisite tragedy, fabulous costumes, one of the best "white" acts going, and it almost passes the Bechdel test. Sitting in a mostly empty Vue cinema in Harrow watching last night’s live broadcast from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, I had a chance to try my own prescription. If it were my first experience of ballet, would this 19th-century gem as beamed worldwide by the hallowed Russian company for whom it was originally created, convince me to splash considerably more cash Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Do we need more? Over the past 60 years thousands of books and bibliographies about Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and the group of friends, lovers, spouses, partners, children, and houses with which she is associated, have been published, not to mention movies and plays and a more hidden mountain of academic dissertations. There have been books about the books, and thousands upon thousands of photographs of the various permutations of their social life have been archived and many published. There have been major exhibitions in the past 20 years, a continual drip-feed of small specialist Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
One of the joys of attending an opera in the Concert Room at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, is the feeling that the audience is sitting in the set itself. Now one of the city’s foremost concert venues, this Victorian gem never ceases to amaze, even though it was reintroduced to active use in 2006 after extensive refurbishment. This summer and autumn, much of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s musical activity has decamped to the venue as the Philharmonic Hall has closed for a multi-million pound refurbishment and partial rebuild.So it was that the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra came Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the opening scene of Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History, the cash-strapped Fabian (Sid Lucero), a law school’s star student until he dropped out, sits in a trendy café pontificating to his friends about the absence of truth and meaning in the Philippines of the 21st century. A nascent absolutist vigilante who extols such 1890s liberationist revolutionaries as José Rizal and Andrés Bonifacio – “they did what they needed to do, and then they died" – Fabian also regrets that Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship of 1965-1986 failed because he softened, culminating in today’s corrupt Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first, and shattering, series of Utopia ended 18 months ago there were alarming suggestions that its ratings weren't good enough to justify a second, even though there was plenty of potential for one. On the other hand if there were to be a series two, could it ever be good enough?Admittedly watching one episode of six isn't enough to form a conclusive verdict, but it is with joy (as well as terror, unease and anxiety) that I can report that so far, series two is well on track to compete with the original. Writer Dennis Kelly clearly has a mind like a black labyrinth and a sadistic Read more ...
Jann Parry
This is the heart-wrenching time of year when dance school students give their graduation performances and professional dancers bow out at the end of their careers. How poignant to watch Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Nicolas Le Riche, alone on the vast Palais Garnier stage, bidding farewell to his fans at 42, and then to witness Royal Ballet School youngsters making their debuts en masse at the Royal Opera House.For many RBS students, the annual matinée may be their only experience of performing on the Covent Garden stage. Of this year’s 26 graduates, just three have been accepted into the Royal Read more ...