Reviews
Dolly Alderton: Ghosts review - a love story beyond romanceTuesday, 13 October 2020
There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely feminism lite, a palimpsest for young women in London who are into yoga and small plates. But that is not to detract from the fact... Read more... |
Richard J Evans: The Hitler Conspiracies review – Nazi myths debunkedMonday, 12 October 2020
In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile times – not least because it unpicks twisted ways of thinking that... Read more... |
Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, Barbican Art Gallery review - mould-breaker, ground-shakerMonday, 12 October 2020
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment... Read more... |
Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson, BBC Two review - ambitious history of the slave trade falls shortMonday, 12 October 2020
Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the... Read more... |
Quarter Life Crisis, Bridge Theatre review – slender and superficialMonday, 12 October 2020
Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre’s pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare’s Beat the Devil and Fuel’s production of Inua Ellams’s An Evening with an Immigrant, with both having their runs... Read more... |
LFF 2020: One Night in Miami review - Kemp Powers's play makes the leap to the big screenSunday, 11 October 2020
Set on February 25 1964, Kemp Powers’s 2013 play One Night in Miami put newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay in a motel room with soul singer Sam Cooke, superstar NFL footballer Jim Brown and spokesman for the Nation of Islam,... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Crass - The Crassical CollectionSunday, 11 October 2020
The cultural imprint Crass were leaving was apparent while they were active. As well as their own music, their label Crass Records released records by Flux Of Pink Indians, the pre-Sugarcubes outfit Kukl and The Damned’s Captain Sensible – Crass... Read more... |
Brave New World, Sky 1 review - Aldous Huxley's novel doesn't look very happy on TVSaturday, 10 October 2020
Famous dystopian novels are reliably popular with TV adapters, so it’s strange that this is the first time Aldous Huxley’s treatise on a society controlled by technology and psychological manipulation has been turned into a TV series. Of course,... Read more... |
Louise Alder, Roger Vignoles, Wigmore Hall review - German Romanticism meets French eroticismSaturday, 10 October 2020
We may have started out among the wholesome pleasures of nature, but we ended up in the bedroom – once, that is, we had recovered from the flying breasts… Soprano Louise Alder’s recital – the last in the Wigmore Hall’s month-long lunchtime series –... Read more... |
The Lie review - icily intriguing until it isn'tSaturday, 10 October 2020
Moral reckonings don't come much more serious than the one that propels The Lie, in which a family must deal with a murder perpetrated by their daughter. Will Jay (a weary-looking Peter Sarsgaard) and Rebecca (the wonderful Mireille Enos) hand... Read more... |
LFF 2020: Mangrove review – rousing, resonant blast from the pastFriday, 09 October 2020
Hats off to the BFI London Film Festival for producing an edition – slimmed down but lip-smacking – in this most terrible, uncertain of years. And it couldn’t have opened with a better film than this blisteringly powerful, viscerally topical drama... Read more... |
Sin, National Gallery review - great subject, modest showFriday, 09 October 2020
Sin, what a wonderful theme for a show – so wonderful, in fact, that it merits a major exhibition. The National Gallery’s modest gathering of 14 pictures, mainly from the collection, can’t possibly do it justice; yet it’s worth a visit if only to... Read more... |
