Reviews
joe.muggs
Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none of them are here for some retro experience. It's hard, as a superannuated lover of electronic beats, not to feel cultural vertigo at the fact that what once felt like the most impossibly inhuman of sounds has now become so ubiquitous and so established as to be a kind of folk music. But there it is, as established as the blues or punk rock, and as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But the sheer prettiness of Léo Delibes's ballets (La Source, Coppélia, Sylvia) is too much for most dancemakers to digest. Even a choreographer so oozing charm as Frederick Ashton made no classic with his 1952 staging of Sylvia. Last night, given the bumbling performance by the Royal Ballet after a few years’ absence, it came over even more as a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mike Leigh's Another Year traverses the four seasons beginning with spring, and yet the mood is autumnal throughout. People don't sunbathe or picnic or build bonfires or for the most part respond in any particular way to the passage of time. Instead, they nurse cups of tea, share (if they're lucky) in a cuddle, and bear out in varying ways the truth of a remark that gets voiced well into the film. "Life's not always kind, is it?" asks Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a gently spoken medical counsellor who knows that no reply is needed; the answer is on full, melancholic view all around her.At first, you Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Todd Phillips’s interest in road trips as a hook for 90 minutes of male bad behaviour continues with this virtual remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. For mismatched couple Steve Martin and John Candy, read Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianakis. “I despise you on a cellular level,” Downey Jr tells the latter, whose boundless stupidity directly causes him to be banned from plane travel by Homeland Security, battered by a wheelchair-bound Iraq veteran, have his arm broken in a car crash, shot (twice) and arrested by Mexican border guards. You can’t blame him.Phillips’s films are slowly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The TMA regional theatre awards are about to be announced, which makes it perfect timing to visit a nominee - one of the UK’s most influential venues, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The SJT was the country’s first theatre in the round and has been associated with new writing since it was established, as the Library Theatre, in 1955.Joseph was the son of actress Hermione Gingold and publisher Michael Joseph, but the SJT’s most famous association has been with Alan Ayckbourn, its third artistic director, who served from 1972-2009 and premiered more than 200 plays in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own? How about with an instinct, a yearning to entertain? Surely not!Questions, questions, after seeing two typically talented dancemakers of 2010, an era when it’s common for audiences to be left drifting without paddles, wondering if there’s a map under the seat somewhere to help them to steer by. In other words, it’s either got too many confusing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There’s an interesting back story to The Trip. Before Rob Brydon was “discovered” by Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company in 2000, he was a workaday comic and Coogan was then at the height of his Alan Partridge-induced success. Since then Brydon has become a household name, not least for his role as Uncle Bryn in Gavin and Stacey, while Coogan these days features in the media more for his, er, interesting private life than his undoubted comedy genius, which some critics suggest has been on the wane.In 2005, director Michael Winterbottom brought the two comics together in A Cock and Bull Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bounding on stage in a purple version of the man dress pioneered by Mick Jagger at The Stones’s 1969 Hyde Park concert, Ariel Pink looks like a mistranslated version of what a late-Sixties rock star should be. His long hair is dyed blonde. The roots show. His make-up is already smudged, as if applied with mittens. It’s a wonky look, in keeping with his music; a music that sounds like a badly tuned radio playing the hits of the early Eighties, the smooth soul of the Seventies and Sixties bubblegum garage pop all at once. Los Angeles’s most peculiar art rocker doesn’t seem to be playing it Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Offbeat in more than just their rhythms, jazz musicians have always had an affinity to the extraordinary, living lives syncopated against the regular tread of society. Maybe it was the informality of their training, or the influence of brothels, bars and back streets that were their concert halls, but the likes of Buddy Bolden and Django Reinhardt have left a legacy of autobiography every bit as bold and unusual as their music. It is in this legacy that Alessandro Baricco’s fictional pianist Novecento claims his share, in a 90-minute monologue that riffs on the unlikely melody of his life to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I realise actors must be prepared to suffer for their art, but it was truly heroic of Francesca Annis to allow herself to be made up to resemble Cherie Blair after a bout of electro-convulsive therapy compounded by a facelift by Dr Mengele. In The Little House, Annis plays Elizabeth, the cold and controlling mother of Patrick (Rupert Evans, formerly King Richard IV in the hilarious royal soap The Palace).Patrick quite likes the idea of having children with his emotionally fragile wife Ruth (Lucy Griffiths), but his mum has no doubts. She has decided that Ruth is going to have her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The last time I saw bouncers standing at the foot of the stage at a comedy venue was at a Roy "Chubby" Brown gig. Back then, I remarked how nicely behaved his fans were, as indeed were Frankie Boyle’s last night; however, another quality the two comics share is that they both score pretty highly on the offensiveness scale. So is it that Glaswegian Boyle, whose latest show is entitled I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face and who frequently addresses his audiences as cunts and fuckers, can talk the talk but would run away squealing were one of his audience to mount the stage and Read more ...
anne.billson
By the standards of contemporary horror movies, Let Me In has several things going for it. It isn't about somebody being tortured to death, its leading characters aren't played by the usual vapid twentysomething actors pretending to be high-school students, and, by and large, it eschews some of the more tedious horror fads of our time, such as herky-jerky editing, or big "Boo!" musical cues designed to make you jump. Unfortunately, the Swedish film of which it's a remake - Let the Right One In - is one of the finest horror movies of the past 30 years, maybe even one of the best vampire movies Read more ...