Reviews
Saskia Baron
As 10-year-old Satsuki observes as she arrives in the countryside with her little sister Mei, “We’re not in Tokyo anymore” – and they’re not in Kansas either, but there is a tang of Oz in the air. The 1988 Studio Ghibli film, My Neighbour Totoro has the classic status of The Wizard of Oz for a generation of youngsters brought up on whimsical Japanese animé. It’s a brave British theatre that transposes Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastical creatures from the screen to the stage. In the main, the RSC has pulled it off with style, charm and huge panache. From the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Good conductors should surely be seen as well as heard. Positioned behind Emanuel Ax’s piano in Brahms’s first piano concerto, with the two flanks of the London Philharmonic’s strings spread wide on either side across the stage, Karin Canellakis sometimes looked from the stalls of the Royal Festival Hall as if she were directing the chamber ensemble of horns and woodwind just in front of her. Thankfully, the sounds she spun from the LPO and her much-loved veteran soloist told a much more comprehensive story. Ax embraced the work like the old friend it is to him, perhaps holding back Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Although PowerPoint has been around since 1987, and several comics have incorporated it into their shows, it's Dave Gorman who remains king of the form. And here he is again in PowerPoint to the People, an amiable evening in which he, as ever, delves into the nooks and crannies of modern life that the rest of us might overlook, and charts a delicious long-form joke for the audience to enjoy long after they have seen the show.He starts by telling about his lockdown which, two years on, could seem lazy; but not with Gorman, who constructs wonderfully elaborate stories that are never hack and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Folk music? It’s all old blokes in shapeless clothes wailing on about ploughmen and fishermen, isn’t it?Not in the hands of the Bonfire Radicals it isn’t. In fact, their sophomore album launch at the Hare and Hounds not only challenged this somewhat outdated and clichéd view of Europe’s traditional roots music, but completely blew it out of the water. For south Birmingham’s self-proclaimed un-traditional folk band brought out reels, jigs, a murder ballad and plenty of global grooves – which had their audience bouncing around from the first notes to the final fade out at the unveiling of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix can’t get enough of Ryan Murphy, whose list of productions with the super-streamer includes Halston, Ratched and recent hit Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Now here he is again with The Watcher, a teasing little mystery based on a true story about a couple moving into their dream home in New Jersey only to be confronted with anonymous threats and hair-raising goings-on.Murphy’s seven-episode version is a mix of haunted-house chiller, Polanski-style horror and domestic drama, as well as (strangely) a kind of essay on obsessive, nimby-ish property ownership. Dean and Nora Brannock ( Read more ...
David Nice
A 150th birthday cornucopia was anticipated: vintage chamber and vocal Vaughan Williams in a big Wigmore Hall three-parter alongside music by other great Brits. It turned out, instead, to be a handsome if overlarge horn sounding several cracked notes.None of those had to do with the performances, which were first-class throughout: could it be otherwise with players from the Nash Ensemble, baritone Roderick Williams and 14 other remarkable British-based singers? Let’s get the moans out of the way first. This was proof that VW’s Five Mystical Songs and Serenade to Music, typical of his taste in Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Rarely will the bar staff at the Glasgow Barrowland have had an easier night. The crowd for Beabadoobee was so youthful that the vibe felt more like a school disco at times, right down to clusters of parents at the back and on the sidelines alternating between keeping a wary eye on proceedings and burying themselves in their phones. Their offspring, meanwhile, were racing to the front eagerly, leaving the usually busy bar areas deserted.Given wild cheering greeted a roadie checking a guitar, it was no surprise that the actual appearance of Beatrice Laus brought on hysteria, both vocally and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out.Made by the veteran arts documentarian Phil Grabsky for the Exhibition on Screen series, the film features undated on-camera interviews with Hopper and his wife. How difficult would it have been to caption them with a date and a source? And despite following a conventional chronological structure – birth to death – we don’t get much sense of when Hopper Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of women’s growing empowerment outside and within cinema.The sense of voices being heard is even shared by the titles of two films made by and specifically about women, both of which must feature strongly in the upcoming awards season that leads to the Oscars. She Said concerns the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One programme works significantly better than the other. For her 80-minute documentary TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land (BBC Two, ★★★★), director Susanna White was significantly aided by the “buried treasure” element in the story of this famously elusive poem, long laboured over by critics and students. Sitting like a ticking time bomb in Princeton’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here.Four years after Michael Myers’ bloody Halloween return, Laurie Strode (Curtis) is healed enough to be bashing out a trite survivors’ memoir, and bonding with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Mabichak, filmed with Green’s customary lustrous devotion to youthful female beauty). A spectacular pre-credits sequence meanwhile introduces Corey (Rohan Campbell, pictured below with Mabichak), whose typically catastrophic spell Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Orkos was originally released in 1979 on cassette. The only album by Egyptian singer Maha seems to have been little known. The liner notes for its first-ever reissue say “it was not a success when it was originally released. While nobody remembers the exact numbers, sales must have been very limited and the project was quickly forgotten about and no follow up release was produced.”Elsewhere, the text recounts how a copy was found in 2019 in a “very dusty plastic box on a shelf” in a shop in Cairo’s Zamalek district.However, Maha hadn’t been a shadowy presence. She was in her brother's band Read more ...