Reviews
Lovesong, Lyric HammersmithFriday, 13 January 2012
Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and opened in London last night. For about 90 minutes, we watch... Read more... |
Lanterns on the Lake, CargoFriday, 13 January 2012
Shock, horror. London audience keeps quiet. And in Shoreditch too, under a railway viaduct. Newcastle’s Lanterns on the Lake did something virtually no band achieves – directing the focus onto them. London audiences will babble through anything and... Read more... |
Dido and Aeneas/ Actéon, Wigmore HallFriday, 13 January 2012
The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel. Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company looked beyond predictable partners for Purcell’s inconveniently short Dido and... Read more... |
The Good Wife, More4Friday, 13 January 2012
Much has been made of the quality of drama currently or recently on British television - Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Cranford, any number of Dickens adaptations we are about to see during 2012 - and rightly so. But as The Good Wife starts its third... Read more... |
Survivor, Hofesh Shechter & Anthony Gormley, Barbican TheatreFriday, 13 January 2012
Empty vessels make the most noise. That pithy old aphorism floated into my head a scant few minutes into the much-heralded new work by the undoubtedly talented, but here way off-beam, Hofesh Shechter. And again, a few minutes later. And again, and... Read more... |
ShameThursday, 12 January 2012
When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon... Read more... |
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... |
