Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.Set in Baltimore, the story is filtered through separate though overlapping perspectives, personified by the twinned leading characters Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first TV role) and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).Maddie is a Jewish housewife and mother from suburban Pikesville, who seems, superficially, to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural fantasy-land of his favourite series.Bursting into the room, Owen’s brutish widowed father (Fred Durst) pulls him from the wreckage. The scene is a metaphor for gender dysphoric Owen’s inability to start transitioning into a girl, a block that will leave him emotionally crippled. That is the nub of Jane Schoenbrun’s dazzling second feature, not so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” urged King Lear, accompanied by the Fool, on the blasted heath. But that’s not quite snappy enough for the storm-chasers of Twisters as they drive their souped-up four-by-fours across the tornado-blitzed flatlands of Oklahoma. Their motto is “if you feel it, chase it!” which is pretty much all they do for the movie’s two-hour duration.So OK, it isn’t Shakespeare, but Lee Isaac Chung’s movie, with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, sustains a hectic and frequently hysterical pace while delivering oodles of gobsmacking footage of terrifying storms threatening Read more ...
Sarah Kent
El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.Tatiana Huezo’s visually stunning film opens with Luz Ma and her mother rushing to save a sheep from drowning in one of the deep pools formed by the torrential rains that seem never to stop. With her father working away most of the time, this bright-eyed girl is her mother’s only helper. She can’t be more than 11 but we see her Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest is a test of stamina: a 3hr 15min study of a man paralysed by negative thinking. It also contains striking freeze-framed portraits of people and places that you want to pause and look at even longer than the editing allows, so beautiful are they.These shots presumably represent the photography of Samet (Deniz Céliloglu), a disgruntled late-thirtyish art teacher doing what he hopes will be the last year of his training in a remote part of eastern Anatolia. He yearns to return to a big city, preferably Istanbul. When we first see him, he is a very small Read more ...
David Nice
Returning after ten months to the unique vasts of Albert’s colosseum, especially for a Verdi Requiem as powerful as this and a packed hall, felt like a rebirth. There was immediate purging in the focused whispers of the first “Requiem aeternam”s, BBC National Orchestra of Wales Principal Conductor Ryan Bancroft instilling a confidence you knew would last the evening, and instant thrills in the clarion “Kyrie”s of all four world-class soloists.Were there imperfections? Fleetingly. Bass Soloman Howard sometimes ran ahead of the orchestra in “Confutatis maledictis” – Bancroft seems like a Read more ...
Robert Beale
For 50 years Clonter Opera, the song-on-the-farm project in rural Cheshire, has been encouraging would-be opera stars by giving them a chance to perform in undemanding conditions under the guidance of experienced professional.It all began with audiences sitting on straw bales in a barn, and only after a purpose-built theatre came into being was there a small pit enabling something more than piano accompaniment for major productions.To celebrate the anniversary, they’ve done something very different from the more-or-less complete opera productions that were often a highlight of high summer in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This looked like a classic Prom in the grand old BBC tradition: two big but lesser-known pieces by pivotal figures (Schoenberg and Zemlinsky) played by a major non-metropolitan ensemble, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. And so it proved, with powerful, refined and meatily satisfying versions of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid conducted by the NOW’s chief, Ryan Bancroft.Here, surely, where entertainment meets enlightenment, the Proms heartland used to lie. But, on a perfect July evening, the house was much sparser than it should have been Read more ...
Liz Thomson
You can take the woman out of the Left Bank, but you can’t take the Left Bank out of the woman. Madeleine Peyroux would be perfectly at home in a boîte in the Latin Quarter, or perhaps Montparnasse. Alas, we were in the sadly unromantic surrounds of London’s Barbican, where the lighting crew had done a good job of creating a smoky vibe before curtain-up.If the smell of Gauloises and Lillet were of necessity left to the imagination, Peyroux and her four-piece band provided a 90-minute transport of delight to the near-capacity audience that was, surprisingly, notably older than the singer Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before Lucas Hnath wrote Red Speedo, he had heard a 2004 speech at a hearing investigating baseball doping that declared the practice “un-American”. That started him thinking about the concept of fairness. After the play had been produced in New York In 2016, another politician was boasting that Americans were going to win such a lot, they "might even get tired of winning”. Red Speedo inhabits the ground between these two positions and is a timely arrival at the Orange Tree, just as athletes prepare for the Olympics, where performance-enhancing drugs may well crop up as an issue. But a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a version of the 15th-century French song "La pernette se lève." It tells the story of Jeannette, whose parents want her to marry into the gentry or royalty. She, however, is in love with Pierre. He is in prison. She vows to be hanged at the same time he is. In France, “Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a nursery rhyme. Versions have been recorded by Les Compagnons De La Chanson and French children’s TV favourite Dorothée.“Aux marches du palais” is also French and has been sung by (again) Les Compagnons De La Chanson, Marie Laforêt, Nana Mouskouri, Yves Montand and Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A group of young people rent a cabin in the woods. A masked killer lingers nearby. Surely you know how the rest unfolds. The slasher and its well-worn tropes have been parodied, satirised and subverted for as long as it has existed. In fact, we seem to prefer watching these deconstructions compared to the actual, pulpy thing. Scream is after all the most successful horror franchise in history. But In a Violent Nature is arguably the most intriguing experiment in the genre so far. Here, the schlocky slasher is told from the perspective of a silent killer named Johnny who stalks a group of Read more ...