Reviews
Helen K Parker
You have just walked into a large white room. The only thing in the room is a sign on the ceiling. You look up. The sign says, "Don’t look down." You immediately look down. Before you have time to run, the floor has melted away beneath your feet and you are tumbling into an abyss as punishment for obeying your reflexes.A motivational chalkboard sign, one of many you will encounter, awaits you at the bottom. It says, "Too much curiosity can get the best of us." And as you stare at its coyly mocking diagram of a cat about to paw a broken electrical wire, you begin to suspect that if you ever Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a socialist family between the Great War and the General Strike. Hope in 1945 resided not in the kind of militancy that emerged in Britain following the Russian Revolution, however, but in the idea that the people who had won World War II together could build the peace together.Constructed from archival footage and on-camera oral reminiscences of socialist Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What Manchester has today, Vienna will have tomorrow. The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor HK “Nali” Gruber is taking his musicians and singers back home to the Wiener Konzerthaus to reprise this concert next week. You can’t fault it for variety – Stravinsky, Britten and MacMillan, Gruber’s predecessor as composer/conductor here. But the main thrust is celebrating Stravinsky. It is the centenary of The Rite of Spring. In the BBC Phil’s series of celebratory concerts, we here came to his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, also premiered in Paris, in 1927. It hasn’t been heard in Manchester for nearly 20 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a truism of the impersonator’s art that those who can do other voices have none of their own. On Parkinson, Peter Sellers couldn’t even come down the staircase as himself. When at the end of the show Mike Yarwood said, “And this is me!” a nation switched off. The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.Martin Hurdle – even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical Read more ...
fisun.guner
One can immediately see the influence of Manet and Whistler, especially Whistler, the fellow American who spent most of his life in Paris and London. George Bellows, the first quintessentially American artist of the 20th century, made famous in his native country painting the heaving masses of New York City and the unrestrained violence in its unlicensed boxing clubs, looked first to his European antecedents, though he never left his native shores. In Frankie, the Organ Boy, 1907, a bright-eyed, eager-faced waif with a shock of blond hair and over-large, expressive hands emerges from the Read more ...
David Benedict
Without wishing to get all Kirstie and Phil about this, theatre, more often than you’d imagine, is about location, location, location. One of the reasons why the National Theatre’s knockout The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was so potent was because director Marianne Elliott welded the audience to all four sides of the action. Transferred to a West End stage, the tension between stage and audience is undeniably different. Is the show still a triumph? Oh yes.A murder mystery with added maths – and a huge emotional kick in the telling – this is a stage version of Mark Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Rick Redbeard has a pirate’s name and a voice like deep, dark water. Behind the colourful alter ego stands (or, as was the case last night, sits) Rick Anthony, singer of The Phantom Band, the Scottish six-piece whose two albums – Checkmate Savage and The Wants – have recently stretched the admittedly painfully limited parameters of contemporary rock music to thrilling extremes.The Phantom Band's sound is a manic tangle of folk, krautrock, doo-wop, post-rock, operatic excess and electro-pop kitsch. Anthony is not nearly as ambitious or eclectic when it comes to his own music, but the results Read more ...
emma.simmonds
You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical. A tawdrily entertaining tale, shot through with youthful lust and romantic delusion, The Paperboy might not deserve to be Read more ...
David Nice
Snow flurries outside, steam heat within. Writer-director Yael Farber’s transposition of Strindberg from a 19th-century Swedish estate to a contemporary farm in South Africa’s Karoo region on the eve of a storm is so painstakingly evocative that all worries about the latest publicity image – shades of blaxploitation, more Mandingo than Miss Julie – instantly evaporate.There’s much of the same giddying power-shifts and sexual violence that buffet the original, but Farber’s recent conception, fresh from acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Festival, recalibrates the context dramatically. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently on a clear day in the Shetlands, you can see Norway and Iceland. And from about halfway through the first instalment of this Caledonian murder mystery, you could see all the way to the final reel and take a well-educated guess about who did it.I was reading an opinion somewhere the other day that ITV's Broadchurch was an inferior rip-off of such fashionable Scandinavian fare as The Killing or The Bridge. Can't see it myself. Shetland, on the other hand, was riddled with Nordicisms and fit the bill perfectly. Shetland (the place) was even a Norwegian province back in the Middle Ages Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a finely drawn portrayal of loneliness and solitude encouraged by bottled-up emotions, Shell would be noteworthy enough. But it also contains two scenes – father and daughter interactions - that are deeply uncomfortable viewing. First-time feature director Scott Graham’s encapsulation of the life of 17-year old Shell and her father Pete’s life at an isolated Scots garage isn’t going to be quickly forgotten.Shell’s mother left years ago, for unspecified reasons. With an epileptic father, her routine, such as it is, is set by the infrequent customers that stop to fill up on the journey Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Watching Mr Selfridge has been like one of those whirlwind tours with the refrain, “It’s Tuesday, so it must be Rome”. Episodes have been defined by the drop-in appearances of Blériot and his aeroplane, Conan Doyle and the séance, Mr FW Woolworth and the like. They've succeeded one another like the purring Monsieur Leclair’s window displays, leaving ongoing interest in character in the shade.Crowning, in every sense, this closing episode was the private visit paid to the store by Edward VII, received with customary unctuousness by Jeremy Piven’s Harry Selfridge. Either it was the King of Read more ...