Reviews
Dance 2000-9: From Ballet to Hip HopThursday, 31 December 2009
The Noughts were a bonanza time for builders, scientists and bureaucrats in the dance arena, throwing up numerous fine dance venues and bases, collaborating intellectually with modern choreographers, or targeting social minorities, but the blazing... Read more... |
Daniel Grimwood, Miroslav Kultyshev, Wigmore HallWednesday, 30 December 2009
It seemed as if the usually sober Wigmore Hall was trying to shower us with as many pianistic notes as possible before the midnight bell rings in the New Year. More could hardly have been accommodated In two recitals on Monday and Wednesday evenings... Read more... |
Art 2009: Best and WorstWednesday, 30 December 2009
2009 hasn’t been a vintage year for art, exactly - no queue-round-the-block showstoppers, if that’s your type of thing. Nonetheless the year was nicely topped and tailed by some memorable, and quietly seductive shows. My top five are Picasso, Mark... Read more... |
Day of the Triffids, BBC OneTuesday, 29 December 2009
Saving the planet from ecological disaster is all very laudable, but be careful what you wish for. In this two-part Anglo-Canadian production of John Wyndham's 1951 sci-fi novel, the voracious man-eating plants called triffids had been artificially... Read more... |
Did You Hear About the Morgans?Tuesday, 29 December 2009
The first movie in my experience to feature a Sarah Palin joke lends a glimmer of distinction to Did You Hear About the Morgans?, an otherwise excruciating romcom that finds Hugh Grant in tic-laden overdrive, his genuine charm jettisoned somewhere... Read more... |
Film 2009-10: Boo for HollywoodTuesday, 29 December 2009
In 2009 Hollywood sank deeper into the trough that it has busily been colonising over the last decade. The year's twin peaks, the most keenly analysed awards, each seen as a bellwether of international cinema, were firstly Danny Boyle's Britpic-... Read more... |
An Englishman in New York, ITV1Tuesday, 29 December 2009
There was something very postmodern about the resumption of Quentin Crisp’s story. To recap, in case you missed episode one back in 1975, The Naked Civil Servant has been turned into a successful television drama, and its subject into a celebrity.... Read more... |
The South Bank Show, ITV1Monday, 28 December 2009
The end of the South Bank Show? Surely some mistake. But there was Melvyn, looking into the camera with a resigned air, telling us that this film about the Royal Shakespeare Company (“possibly the greatest theatre company in the world”) was indeed... Read more... |
Peter and the Wolf, RFHMonday, 28 December 2009
Even for a narratorless animation of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf like Suzie Templeton's obsessively detailed gem of a film, you probably only need 14 words before you can get on with the business of screening and playing. Peter: strings; bird:... Read more... |
Comedy 2009-10: All About TasteMonday, 28 December 2009
It was all done in the worst possible taste, as the late, great Kenny Everett didn’t say: 2009 started with the fallout of the mother of a ruckus over a radio broadcast that probably three people actually heard when it went out, but more than 30,000... Read more... |
Christmas TV Comedy ReviewSunday, 27 December 2009
Time was when British families planned Christmas Day around The Queen in the afternoon and (depending which generation you fall into) Morecambe and Wise, Victoria Wood, French and Saunders or The Vicar of Dibley in the evening. But now it seems... Read more... |
Classical and Opera 2000-9: The Highs and LowsSunday, 27 December 2009
No great new movements or radically transformational figures emerged to dominate classical music in the Noughties (not even him up there). Just one small nagging question bedevilled us: will the art form survive? Well, it has. What appeared to... Read more... |
