Reviews
theartsdesk in Rennes: 33rd Trans Musicales FestivalThursday, 08 December 2011
Glass crunches underfoot. It’s been raining constantly, but the odour reveals that a fair amount of what's in the cobbled street's central gutter is urine. Everyone appears to be drunk. The French equivalent of crusties aren’t content with one dog-... Read more... |
The Mighty Uke, Hyde Park Picture House, LeedsThursday, 08 December 2011
Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony... Read more... |
Pippin, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 08 December 2011
Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because... Read more... |
Richard II, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 07 December 2011
A recent newspaper article championed the topicality of Richard II, laboriously rewriting it from camp conservatism to a politically current meditation on the “sad stories” we still tell of the deaths of kings. Heads may have rolled and states... Read more... |
First Aid Kit, Bush HallWednesday, 07 December 2011
When theartsdesk last saw folkie Swedish sister act First Aid Kit, they were both still teenagers. It was a dank February night and they beguiled a tough Edinburgh club with voices that sounded like they belonged somewhere in A Midsummer Night’s... Read more... |
Puss in BootsWednesday, 07 December 2011
The Shrek series is resurrected once again for this amiable, action-packed - if less than purr-fect - 3D spin-off, featuring everyone’s favourite diminutive swashbuckler. If the franchise was a feline it would be running out of lives (and good will... Read more... |
Imagine: The Lost Music of Rajasthan, BBC OneWednesday, 07 December 2011
That Alan Yentob gets around. I’ve run into him backstage during Jay Z's set at Glastonbury and in a jazz club in Poland, and here we found him in Rajasthan fronting a fascinating and well-shot programme, albeit workmanlike rather than really... Read more... |
Another EarthTuesday, 06 December 2011
Another Earth begins, like many more reliable but less ambitious films, with a life-changing event. A young astrophysicist is involved in a collision. Climbing unharmed from her vehicle, she finds a woman and child dead by her hand. Four years later... Read more... |
Louis Lortie, Wigmore HallMonday, 05 December 2011
It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the second half of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s even bigger all... Read more... |
Black Mirror, Channel 4Monday, 05 December 2011
It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism –... Read more... |
Little Dragon, Shepherds Bush EmpireMonday, 05 December 2011
About a year ago, when I saw Gorillaz’ sensational show at the O2 Arena in London, one of the highlights of the evening was “To Binge”, the duet between Damon Albarn and Yukimi Nagano, the Swedish-Japanese singer with the Swedish band Little Dragon... Read more... |
MargaretMonday, 05 December 2011
Idiotically buried by a release which sees it appearing on just one screen nationally, Kenneth Lonergan’s triumphant follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut You Can Count on Me (2000) is, without a scintilla of a doubt, one of the finest films of... Read more... |
