Reviews
Freddie Flintoff: Hidden Side of Sport, BBC OneThursday, 12 January 2012
The recent suicide of Wales's football manager Gary Speed prompted angstful outpourings about the hidden menace of depression in top-level sport, even though there was no evidence that Speed was a sufferer. But depression clearly is an occupational... Read more... |
A Useful LifeThursday, 12 January 2012
Richly nuanced in its sideshot view of Uruguay’s film world and Montevideo street atmosphere, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is a small film that picks up on suppressed emotions which are only released in its second half. Its black-and-white images... Read more... |
War HorseWednesday, 11 January 2012
The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play.... Read more... |
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, BBC TwoWednesday, 11 January 2012
You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much... Read more... |
Margin CallWednesday, 11 January 2012
Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried... Read more... |
Huis Clos, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 10 January 2012
Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all... Read more... |
Above Suspicion: Silent Scream, ITV1Monday, 09 January 2012
Since Prime Suspect introduced television viewers to the writing of Lynda La Plante, the concept of event television has lost a little of its lustre. Such was the remarkable heft of La Plante’s storyline about a serial killer and Helen Mirren’s... Read more... |
TatsumiMonday, 09 January 2012
The Western image of manga comes from the thick volumes of knicker-flashing schoolgirls and lurid s.f. teenage boys pore over, and the anime (cartoon films) which adapt them. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of five stories by... Read more... |
The Iron LadySunday, 08 January 2012
There is a moment some way into The Iron Lady when its titular heroine presides over a celebratory domestic soiree. Around the table are arrayed ageing Tory nabobs and their peachy consorts, one of whom at the evening’s end tremulously approaches... Read more... |
Borgen, BBC FourSunday, 08 January 2012
Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she... Read more... |
New Girl, Channel 4Saturday, 07 January 2012
Since the departure of Friends and Frasier from our screens, fans of the genre have been waiting for the next generation of mates-based US sitcoms. A few - including Two and A Half Men and The Big Bang Theory - have crossed the Atlantic and... Read more... |
Strictly Gershwin, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 06 January 2012
Craig Hassall, English National Ballet’s managing director, apologised ironically at theartsdesk’s Dance Question Time in November for putting on popular work at ENB, meaning Strictly Gershwin, a song-and-dance entertainment to follow the music-and-... Read more... |
