Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
Nitram, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s deeply disturbing film about the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, seems especially topical after the Uvalde school shootings, one among several other shootings in the US in May.Martin Bryant, aged 28, killed 35 people and wounded 23 in the historic site of Port Arthur (he’s now serving concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole). At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in history. No longer, of course. And at the end the film reveals that although Australia acted fast to change its gun laws, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rowan Atkinson’s strange little comedy (written by Will Davies) is the story of Trevor Bingley, a rather pitiable late-middle-aged man who finds a new job as a house-sitter for a disdainful and ridiculously wealthy couple, Nina and Christian Kolstad-Bergenbatten (Jing Lusi and Julian Rhind-Tutt, pictured below). They live in a high-tech superhome in countless acres of lush green countryside.Little bits of back story filter into the narrative as the show ambles through its nine cartoon-like, slapsticky, 10-minute episodes. We learn that Trevor is a doting father to his daughter Maddy (India Read more ...
David Nice
Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, a stunning Elsa in this Royal Opera season's revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was the lure to sit through Jan Philipp Gloger's Mozart Così again (the title, by the way – "All Women Do It" – belies the complexity applied to a schematic plot). As it turned out, the mixed-up couples were all love’s young dream, which made it all the more of a shame that this production remains determined to squash their hopes and even their new matches.Gloger has shown us that Mozart's Dorabella, the flightier of two sisters under siege, doesn't take too long to see through barely Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. A few days ago, the borough’s aptly named Windrush Square hosted events which celebrated the contribution of the Windrush Generation and their descendants.With Windrush Day being 22 June, last week was originally going to be the opening night of Roy Williams’s new Hampstead Theatre play, The Fellowship, until plans had to be changed because Lucy Vandi, who was to play the main character, fell sick and performances were postponed. Cherrelle Skeete bravely takes on this major role and her dynamic stage presence, partly with script in hand on press night, is one Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It takes some confidence for a first-time feature director to interrupt her essentially realistic first feature with a splash of psychedelic abstraction, but Jacqueline Lentzou doesn’t lack for visual or aural daring. Two-thirds of the way through Moon, 66 Questions, a semi-autobiographical drama written and directed by the Greek filmmaker, an astronomer’s view of a night sky appears. Myriad stars glitter in delicate colours, the image morphing into a silver and gold vortex as low-mixed spectral music plays and a staticky snatch of a telephone call is heard.If a literal interpretation Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring poet and novelist based in the eastern Donbas region: when, however, its main city and surrounding area fell under the control of pro-Russian militants, he began to document the alternative reality of life in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).Now collected and translated into English by Lidia Wolandskyji, his dispatches (written for the Mirror Weekly newspaper under the pen name Stanislav Vasin) provide a fascinating insight into the culture war at the heart of the fight Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Director Alice Diop read an article by Pierre Bergounioux in which he described how he began writing to draw attention to his overlooked neck of the woods – Correze, in central France. It was a lightbulb moment for her: “My approach as a film-maker suddenly became clear to me, I realised I’d been making films about the suburbs in an obsessive way for the past 15 years… to conserve the existence of ordinary lives, which would have disappeared without trace if I hadn’t filmed them.”We is a celebration of some of those ordinary lives – people who live alongside the RER railway line to and from Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A few spots of rain greeted the arrival of the Rolling Stones on BST Hyde Park’s stage on Saturday night, and after “Street Fighting Man”, as Mick Jagger dedicated the show to the much-loved and lamented drummer Charlie Watts, a rainbow appeared over the stage. Then the band powered into the daylight half of their set, heavy on the Sixties pop end of their catalogue – a singalong revival of “Out of Time”, an angular, muscular, heart-racing “19th Nervous Breakdown”, and a delicate “She’s a Rainbow” giving way to a warm, oozy “Tumbling Dice” and the mournful guitars and horns of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For sheer extremes of family dysfunction Theresa Rebeck’s Mad House must be aiming to set new records in American drama. The latest in a line that stretches back to Eugene O’Neill, the plentiful other contenders that have appeared over the decades mean that it’s become a crowded field but, on the cantankerous patriarch front at least, Bill Pullman’s performance as Daniel, Rebeck’s cussed paterfamilias, trumps most of its predecessors for sheer malevolence.And Pullman surely knows it, the wicked glint in his eye that he directs out at the audience as the curtain goes up confirming that, and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a sharp observation, delivered in Alan Bennett’s soft tones, that sums up the reputation of the painter Eric Ravilious: “Because his paintings are so accessible, I don’t think he’s thought to be a great artist. It’s because of his charm. He’s so easy to like and things have to be hard, if they’re not hard, then they’re not great." Veteran arts documentary director Margy Kinmonth makes an excellent argument for elevating the status of watercolourist and etcher Eric Ravilious in this lovingly crafted biographical film. Her account begins with Ravilious’ dramatic end; an official war Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1965, Bob Crewe was living alongside Central Park in New York’s Dakota building. At various times, the block’s other residents included Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. For work, Crewe’s 6th-floor offices on West 60th Street were in a complex overlooking Columbia Circle and South Central Park. Atlantic Records was also based there, as was Roulette Records. He was flying high.At this time, Crewe’s highest-profile bread-and-butter association was with The Four Seasons, whose popularity was never undercut by the arrival in America of The Beatles and what came in their Read more ...
David Nice
Semi-standing ovation at a lunchtime concert in a London church? Predictable, perhaps, from the first recital I heard George Xiaoyuan Fu give at the Two Moors Festival, an avian programme which made me long to hear him play Messiaen’s complete Catalogue d’oiseaux. Yesterday’s “Chopin Revisited” sequence heightened the sense of originality in planning and confidence in presentation. This is one of the most exciting young pianists of our time, no question.It's often said that Chopin's supreme originality is to be heard in his Mazurkas. Not exclusively so, of course, but Fu's selection certainly Read more ...