Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
This first feature from Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund arrives heavy with awards, the seasoned and decorated product of film festivals across Europe. Brutal, quirky and elegantly self-conscious, it does little to challenge the trends that have recently made Swedish cinema (Let The Right One In, The Millennium Trilogy) such hot property. The title serves as agent provocateur for the action that follows: a fractured and wilful deconstruction of group dynamics, of the pressures and “victims” of the social collective.Two barely teenage girls (Linnea Cart-Lamy, Sara Eriksson) pose and pout Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The mistake was probably that I hadn’t tanked up beforehand. Clues were there. Soho Theatre is over a pub. 9.45pm start. Who’s going to turn up in those circumstances completely sober? Who would be mad enough to turn up in Soho at 9.45pm stone-cold sober? And a four-star Edinburgh Fringe show had not necessarily been assessed by altogether un-punchdrunk viewers, lurching as they do (and I have done) between five shows a night.Well, something had to account for The Boy With Tape On His Face being, sigh, not that funny. Sometimes, as Penelope Keith moaned in The Good Life, I feel that I’m not a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“It’s not often you get a global superstar down at the Elephant and Castle,” marvelled a local who spent the evening dancing like a dervish to the infectious music of Manu Chao, who had breezed into London for a rare show last night off the back of a short tour of Japan and the West Coast of America. The first person I saw as an usher was Colombian philosopher Oscar Guardiola-Rivera whose book What if Latin America Ruled the World? suggests - among many other things - that the US is becoming the next Latin American country. Like the others he was wearing a Colombiage T-shirt - the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s taken 20 years for Ken Follett’s doorstopping saga to storm the little screen in the corner of the room. According to Rufus Sewell, playing a stonemason who knows about these things, it takes only 15 to knock up a spanking new Gothic cathedral complete with the latest in flying buttresses. Not that it would be fair to compare The Pillars of the Earth with the pillars of any of the great churches erected in England in the period under observation here. You don’t get lifeless gargoyles of this quality in the Middle Ages.In the restless pursuit of authenticity, a British cast has been hired Read more ...
David Nice
Eighty years ago yesterday, the 41-year-old Adrian Boult launched the distinguished history of what was then a 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture in Portland Place. Three months later ice-and-fire Ernest Ansermet was over to conduct Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a programme which included the composer at the piano. Both works were indispensible to last night's celebrations: crispbread and butter wrapped around an equally representative contemporary filling that spread its wow factor relatively thin.Not that the live-wire soloists weren't hugely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Don’t you hate it when you have weeks like the ones poor Sean Walker, played by mini-Tom Cruise Jason Ritter, has been having? You go on a relaxing Caribbean cruise with your bride-to-be Leila (Sarah Roemer), you get friendly with another couple, then find out they're part of a huge conspiracy and have just kidnapped your fiancée. Then you discover that any trace of your presence on the cruise ship has been erased.Meanwhile, your future mother-in-law has been murdered. Your oh-so-nearly father-in-law has been coerced into crashing a plane into the building in Miami where the President of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
RED has an interesting backstory: rather than being an adaptation of a novel, or the umpteenth reworking of a Hollywood formula, it has been adapted from the graphic novel of the same title by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Cully Hamner and published by the DC Comics stable. And its origins show in its slick editing, sly humour and original take on what is, let’s face it, hardly a fresh format. But where else can you see an action movie in which the youngest participant is well into his fifties?Bruce Willis is Frank Moses, a former black-ops specialist with the CIA, who is now retired and Read more ...
David Nice
Their oaky, cultured and selectively scary-wild playing seemed to cast long autumn shadows over a sparse but intent audience. This is the kind of rare programme top violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his cellist sister Tanja and friends like to work on when they get time to play together. There was Haydn for starters, but not the kind of jolly curtainraiser we're usually given; Dvořák, but not the blithe American; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae, the only great quartet of the 20th century yet to be widely acclaimed as such, with strange, authentic ideas in every bar and a slow movement to match any Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Greg Davies is a comedian who laughs along to his own material. A conspiratorial look glints in his eye, a hint of fruity mischief plays on his lips. The adage that you should never be amused by your own punchlines is, of course, a tall tower of rubbish – different jokes for different blokes – but Davies’s enjoyment of his own routine begs a couple of questions. Is it as funny as he thinks it is? Or is it funny because he thinks it is? And then there is the greatest existential quandary of all, which has knitted the brows of philosophers since time immemorial. Exactly how hilarious is Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Thomas Lawrence was a child prodigy; from the age of 11 he supported his family by making pastel drawings of the fashionable elite who spent the season in Bath. The next step for an aspiring young artist was to learn how to paint in oils and Lawrence taught himself by doing self-portraits. He learned fast. The first painting in this exhibition of sumptuous portraits shows a diffident 19-year-old sitting sideways and glancing nervously towards us, as though fearful that his efforts will be laughed at.Thirty-seven years on, we see him again (main picture). What a difference! He may have lost Read more ...
howard.male
Paradoxically, the greater the number of established artists you find yourself comparing a new talent to, the more original you are eventually forced to conclude this new talent is. So let’s get those comparisons out of the way: this Kansas City gal sounds a bit like Cassandra Wilson, Joan Armatrading, Me’Shell NdegéOcello, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Sly Stone, Bob Dylan, Bill Withers… and the list could go on. But more importantly Krystle Warren already seems to exude the same kind of gravitas as all of this illustrious roll call.I have to confess it was not what I was expecting. A Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“Rudolf thought, what you wanted out of life you had to get straightaway, because if you thought about it too long, you might be dead,” said the ballerina Patricia Ruanne, the first Juliet in Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Romeo and Juliet. Coming a dozen years after Kenneth MacMillan’s landmark Royal Ballet version, Nureyev’s - for London Festival Ballet - is regrettably eclipsed, for what a powerful piece of theatre it is, and this autumn the chance to see both versions side by side has underscored that even if Nureyev was not the greatest choreographer, this was a story about individuals Read more ...