sun 27/07/2025

Reviews

Creed III review - boxing clever

This third Creed film outgrows Rocky, leaving Stallone’s bridging presence behind for a wholly renewed series. Starring again as Adonis Creed, the illegitimate son of Rocky’s late rival Apollo, Michael B. Williams’ directorial debut builds a richly...

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Daisy Jones & The 6, Amazon Prime review - hit rock'n'roll novel doesn't make great TV

Based on the bestselling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six is the rags-to-riches-to-wreckage story of the titular Seventies rock band, supposedly somewhat based on Fleetwood Mac. Their journey from their fashion-defying...

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Woolf Works, Royal Ballet review - Wayne McGregor's modern classic impresses all over again

The more Wayne McGregor’s superb Woolf Works is staged, the richer it seems to become. It has started a third run at Covent Garden since its premiere there in 2015, which, considering the house lost over a year of performances, is some achievement....

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The Magic Flute, Welsh National Opera review - Mozart remodelled and remuddled

So why not rewrite The Magic Flute with a new text and a heavily reconstructed plot? After all, the original was just a pantomime, albeit one that embodied one or two big issues of the day (1791), but essentially popular theatre with a text by a...

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Album: Fever Ray - Radical Romantics

According to the press release for Karin Dreijer’s third album as Fever Ray, its completion was preceded by many hours of therapy with the result new things are known. Amongst them that Dreijer “can be struck by despair but also by the big feeling...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Jon Savage's 1980-1982 - The Art Of Things To Come

Jon Savage's 1980-1982 - The Art Of Things To Come continues a series which began in 2015 with 1966 - The Year The Decade Exploded, a compilation springing off from Savage’s book of the same name. A follow-up looked at 1965, but after that the...

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In The Realms of Sorrow, London Handel Festival, Stone Nest review - disappointed love has all the best tunes

Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival,  an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the...

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The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's Globe review - clever concept never quite catches fire

As course after course of Noma-style creations are served up to Leontes and his guests – curious mouthfuls with their accompanying spoons, edible branches as though straight from the tree, elaborate miniatures ritually revealed from beneath a cloche...

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Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have been

You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted RENDANG in 2020), is a brief but telling prelude, an...

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I'm Fine (Thanks for Asking) review - quietly impressive debut film

I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is an object lesson in how it was possible to make a feature on a tiny budget despite the restrictions of the pandemic lockdown. The film-makers stuck to the classical unities (time, place, action), cast themselves...

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Suzanne Vega, Royal Festival Hall review - the years melt away

It’s almost 40 years, but I still vividly remember the excitement of hearing Suzanne Vega for the first time. Singer-songwriters had always mattered to me, even though I grew up in the vacuous era of glamrock and insipid teen idols such as David and...

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Album: slowthai - UGLY

The years since slowthai’s Mercury Prize nominated debut have been patchy. There was the public reckoning after his oafish behaviour at the NME awards, but then he scored his first number one album a year later. He’s become a father but also...

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