Reviews
Matt Wolf
This is, by my reckoning at least, the third major London production over the years of Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's dazzling curiosity of a show first seen on Broadway in 1976 and reappraised ever since in stagings both large and small both sides of the Atlantic.London first encountered the piece at ENO, of all places, in 1987, and, in 2003, it was done with contrastingly intimacy at the Donmar Warehouse. And whatever else one may say about the new Menier Chocolate Factory revival, Matthew White's production boasts one of the most ravishing sets I've yet come Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Gogol Bordello’s gig in Birmingham this week took place on the evening of Shane MacGowan’s funeral and inevitably turned into something of a celebration of that great poet and songwriter’s life. But then, with the raucous folk music on offer, it was hardly going to be any different.Support band, Peat and Diesel played an energetic take on “Dirty Old Town”, which received plenty of audience participation from the front of the stage to the back of the hall. While during the final encore, Eugene Hütz gave a fine eulogy for “the greatest songwriter for two generations” before busking through the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Water glassily reflects in a bridal train, the sun moves between trees, giving way to metal book-leaves, and inside a warehouse so vast he cycles through it, stored cliffs of Anselm Kiefer’s work loom over him. Wim Wenders’ 3D cameras bring you inside the artist’s monumental, mythic world, which he is uniquely equipped to comprehend.The two men met and talked for weeks in 1991, losing regular touch when Kiefer moved to the French studio in rural Barjac where Anselm begins. Two further years of conversation and observation went into this film, which portrays its artist by shifting Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Let’s start with what we know: the climate emergency is the single most burning question facing the planet. Our life on earth depends on tackling it. Right? Well, maybe not, argues theatre-maker Chris Thorpe in his new one-man show, Talking About the Fire, currently enjoying a short run at the Royal Court theatre.Instead, he proposes the proliferation of nuclear weapons as the single most dangerous issue threatening our lives today. And he has a point: there are very few humans who have lived in a world before the creation of the Bomb – it has been there all of our lives. But what can we do Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Nobody likes a Messiah…”, deadpanned Robert Hollingworth, with the timing of a practised stand-up. After a pause, “…more than I do.” At St Martin-in-the-Fields on Friday evening, however, the seasonal blockbuster did not, just for once, feature on the festive menu. Instead, Hollingworth’s ever-enterprising ensemble I Fagiolini served up a savoury and well-spiced alternative to Handel’s ubiquitous staple.Over little more than an hour, the versatile group – fortified by a posse of agile string players from Brecon Baroque – spanned the late-16th to mid-18th centuries in half-a-dozen stylishly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 21 June 1977, listeners to John Peel’s radio show heard a song titled “Pretty Vacant.” It wasn’t a preview of the forthcoming Sex Pistols single of the same name, which would be in shops on 2 July, but a different song. The band lifting the title was Chelsea, a UK punk outfit whose first single, “Right to Work,” had been released on 3 June.It was bizarre. Punk fans and scene insiders alike knew “Pretty Vacant” was a Sex Pistols staple. Demos of the song were in circulation before the single was out, as were live recordings. Chelsea’s selection of the title was equivalent to a psych-era Read more ...
Justine Elias
Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)In Treasure of Foggy Mountain, Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall (all in their mid-to-late twenties) portray bro-buddies housemates who embark on a lighthearted and lightly-plotted quest for buried loot. When they lose their map, tensions flare.Marshall, gangly and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier, and how his magical chocolate factory came into being. This Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is more elfin than goblin, a lovable chap with looks to set teenage girls swooning. It has a love story of a kind in it, but not the type that sets young teeth a-grinding. It’s essentially a comedy, with Britain’s sitcom finest popping up like wack-a Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject for our dark times. Unfortunately the intervening century hasn’t put an end to ethnic cleansing or to the plight of refugees.Grigoris Karantinakis’s 2021 costume drama, originally released in Greece as Smyrna My Beloved, seems to be aware of uncomfortable historical parallels. It begins in 2015, Titanic-like, with a nonagenarian survivor rescuing something from the deep. In this case, Filio Williams (Jane Lapotaire), whose grandmother fled to Read more ...
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.If Disney led the tradition of smooth-as-you-like animated artwork, Europeans often fancied the jerkier joys of stop-motion mannequins leaping around. The Polish-language The Peasants adopts a new form Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
"Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief", wrote Amy Levy, "it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new". In Mathias Énard’s sprawling, massy, magisterial tales of death and life, and love, this sense of endless decay and rebirth assumes many faces, only some of them cruel.The novel begins conventionally enough. We are introduced to the rather petulant, yet self-mocking voice of our protagonist and hapless anthropologist, David Mazon, via the form of his " Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and bewilderment of their parents. The myth taps into parental anxieties that rear up when their offspring doesn’t resemble them. Harsh rejection of this seemingly alien being, who has usurped the place of a beloved child and threatens family harmony, is traumatic. We don’t see the moment when Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) told one of her two sons that she can no longer be their mother. That denunciation happened long before the film begins, when Monica ( Read more ...