Reviews
Marina Vaizey
“I don’t like the family Stein; There is Gert, there is Ep and there’s Ein; Gert’s Poems are bunk, Ep’s statues are punk, And nobody understands Ein” (Anon).Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) did indeed sculpt Albert Einstein when the physicist was briefly interned in London on his way to America in 1933; Epstein’s bust of the quizzical shock haired scientist is currently on view at the Victoria and Albert. Epstein described his subject, already legendary, as humane, humorous and profound and was particularly struck by his hair going every which way. Henry Moore said Epstein was the pioneer in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"If you ride like lightning you're going to crash like thunder" Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendlesohn) tells his reckless partner-in-crime Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who will later be dubbed the "Moto Bandit". Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that threatens to do likewise, never quite keeping up with its own soaring ambition. Nevertheless it's a compelling, occasionally exciting saga with an invigorating aesthetic and a gently melancholic tone - akin to that of the director's previous picture Blue Valentine.With a narrative stretched over 15 years and a cast who zoom in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Jane Austen would approve, I think, of the plot of La Bayadère, which is about class and wealth getting in the way of love. She might have difficulty with the setting. It is a grand, exotically located ballet offering us an fantastical India of Rajahs, tiger-hunts and sex-slaves - or rather temple-dancers, whose job is to carry holy water to the needy and put up with the unwanted lust of the High Brahmin. There is jealousy, murder, drug-taking and mayhem as the temple collapses, and final union beyond this world for the leading couple. And all of that comes with the single most heavenly scene Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul F Tompkins has been lauded by Rolling Stone magazine and the Huffington Post, both for his observational stand-up and his podcasts. But for someone praised for a very modern form of entertainment, he strikes a rather old-fashioned figure when he comes on stage. Three-piece suit, shiny tie, watch fob in his waistcoat pocket, big hair - it's like he's channelling the late, great Dave Allen.The mention of that superb Irish comic is no accident, for Tompkins is, like him, a wonderful raconteur. He too favours the long-form, shaggy-dog story that meanders around the subject with accents Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shuggie Otis: Inspiration Information/Wings of LoveShuggie Otis's vanishing act after the release of his 1974 album Inspiration Information belatedly created one of pop’s great what-ifs. However, it only became so in the Nineties after the album was recognised as a soul treasure. David Byrne reissuing the album on his Luaka Bop label in 2001 didn’t plug the information gap, and Otis remained in the shadows. Now though, with this new reissue, the enigmatic soul auteur has resurfaced to supplement the album with a series of unreleased tracks dating from 1971 to 2000. Whatever else he was doing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Swedish cop drama Arne Dahl snugly fits BBC Four’s Saturday-evening slot for continental European TV imports, but it also suggests that the well might be running dry. Based on the opening episode there’s not much intrinsically wrong with it, but it’s not distinctive and – beyond Irene Lindh’s forceful portrayal of lead detective Jenny Hultin – lacks any characteristically Scandinavian markers. Things may change as the series finds its feet but, for now, Arne Dahl could have sprung from anywhere in Europe. The stock types making up Hultin’s team further that impression.Sweden’s top businessman Read more ...
graham.rickson
Goossens: Orchestral works vol.2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)British conductor and composer Sir Eugene Goossens achieved major fame leading the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s. Previously he'd given the first British concert performance of Stravinky’s Rite in 1921 and had moved to the US shortly afterwards to take up a sequence of conducting posts. His Sydney tenure ended abruptly in bizarre circumstances, and he returned, disappointed to London, dying in 1962. Goossens’s expertise as an interpreter of contemporary music undoubtedly influenced his own Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to.But that was all long, long ago, in the days when the Grand Tour didn’t allow for a quick stop-over and art-pillage in Leiden or Amsterdam, and when Read more ...
David Nice
At first it all felt too much. In addition to the garish red arum lilies either side of the platform, an overwhelming scent of eau de Cologne from a neighbour and the always hard-to-fight Wigmore Hall torpor were our diva's pink and purple attire, her flashing jewels, and above all that opulent voice, which even in recitals is more accustomed to bigger spaces and still seemed at times to be channelling her demented Salome from The Rest is Noise festival's opening night.Yet she had a pianist in fellow Finn Ville Matvejeff well up to a certain sacred-monster monumentalism, and by the interval Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sigh: here's not much of anything for anyone, actually, to indulge a self-evident riff on the title of yet another in a seemingly ceaseless parade of subpar Brit-gangster films, this one from first-time writer/director George Isaac, who produced the Kidulthood/Adulthood celluloid duo. Notable largely for casting some rather rarefied actors deliberately violently against type, the film is best seen as the pay cheque that has helped allow at least two of its three leads to take on less lucrative theatre work of late. For that largesse, after a fashion: one star. Otherwise, well, you stand Read more ...
Helen K Parker
It’s easy to understand, while you’re being chastised by a pair of psychedelically coloured elephant-like beings over your inability to collect enough coins, why this new game from indie developer Jake Clover has been described as the most WTF game ever.Aboard the spaceship Sluggish Morss, bound for a planet called Sedno Keir, your character (a pink mole-like being who is constantly smoking and languidly lounging) is disturbed from their reggae reverie by a pair of Technicolored elephants, who order you to collect coins which will lead you on a journey to find out just WTF is going on.As you Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two’s company, three’s a crowd, four’s a string quartet. Classical music movies tend to focus on the cost of individual brilliance. See David Helfgott in Shine, Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, not forgetting the talented little man who features in Amadeus. A Late Quartet homes in on that subtle and complex quadratic equation, a string ensemble which thrives on the interplay of four barely subordinated egos.The Fugue String Quartet is all set to celebrate its 25th anniversary in New York when its cellist and senior member Peter (Christopher Walken) announces that after one last Read more ...