Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Nice to find Bryan Cranston taking the lead in a TV series again (this is his first since Breaking Bad ended in 2013), and the role of New Orleans judge Michael Desiato fits him like a well-tailored suit. Our first glimpses of him at work in his courtroom guide us succinctly to the conclusion that this is a decent man with a conscience, since he has taken the trouble to personally visit the home of a woman accused of drug-dealing, and what he saw has persuaded him that the police officer delivering evidence against her is telling a pack of lies.A judge prepared to risk antagonising the local Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pioneering is an attractive adjective in this context, alerting the spectator to what has been, over the past half century, an extraordinary body of contemporary ceramics produced by women. Underlying the notion of a gender-defined exhibition is a question: are there feminine characteristics to be looked for in an art form, if so what are they? Pots and bowls don’t sound very glamorous, alluring or exciting, rather prosaic, dull and quotidian. This is so in spite of the exalted sphere oriental ceramics have historically inhabited, or the recent flurry of interest surrounding artists such as Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives; she joined the men on risky forays into other communities “that had never seen a white person before, but she never recorded any animosity from them”. Later, in 1936, she relocated to the remote interior of New Guinea. There she lived among the “remarkably inscrutable” Anga people, fabled for their ritualised violence, in a region feared and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata’s performance with Jess Gillam at Chetham’s School of Music was filmed in private on 9 January (and the sound was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the 19th), but to see it in its full visual glory we had to wait until a one-off streaming on Friday. No harm in that: good things are worth the wait, and it was all well filmed (credit to Apple and Biscuit Recordings) and very well presented by Linton Stephens. His interviews with the Camerata’s new leader Caroline Pether and principal cello Hannah Roberts, and later with Jess Gillam and Pekka Kuusisto, were intelligently presented Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-and-radio-play model is long gone, and Eilish’s high-speed ride was boosted by a deal with Apple Music, releases of individual tracks on SoundCloud and YouTube and hefty promotional support from Spotify. The pitch had been rolled for the arrival of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in 2019, which became a monster seller and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 31 December 1966, the Daily Mail's Virginia Ironside got to grips with a new trend in pop music. Under the heading “The bleeps take over”, Jimmy Hendrix (sic) The Move and The Pink Floyd were gathered together as purveyors of something The Who had started with “feedback, violence, ripping strings from their guitars.” “New groups,” it was said “are taking it farther and farther out. Tra-la-la has been ousted by bleep, squeak pee-oing and whee.” Ironside acknowledged that her article’s hyperbolic description of The Pink Floyd came across as “trendy psychedelic nonsense.” But whatever the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The clever programming of the “Unwrapped” series has been transformational for the reputation of Kings Place. Ever since the Bach series in 2013 these year-long sequences of concerts and other events have succeeded in silencing the crustier commentators, and in putting the London arts venue properly on the map. This 13th series, “London Unwrapped”, got under way last night under restrictions, but it was so well done: the best of possible starts, it bodes well for a series that will go right through to New Year’s Eve.It wasn’t just the thinking behind the concert programme which was so smart Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Flock ends with “Solarised”, a glorious five-plus minutes excursion into retro-futurist pop with the artistic smarts of Saint Etienne and Stereolab. Snappy, toe-tapping drums and bubbly, funky bass guitar move it along. “Stages of Phases” is another winner. Built around a stomping glam-rock chassis, it's sense of otherness is shared by “Solarised”.Jane Weaver’s sixth album proper (there are also collaborations, soundtracks and live/remix sets) and the follow-up to 2017’s Modern Kosmology isn’t a full-on lunge towards conventionality, but it’s her first brush with dance-pop – albeit on the art Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everyone (well, almost everyone) can tell a joke. But being a comic – holding an audience rapt, getting a roomful of strangers to like you and laugh at your material – takes real talent. So this is an interesting wheeze, in aid of Stand Up to Cancer, where five comedians mentored five celebrity beginners for two weeks so they could perform five minutes of material before a live audience.The producers delivered the first laugh as they paired up the celebrities and comics – famously anarchic comic Nick Helm was mentor to Tory Baroness Sayeeda Warsi (pictured below), while agnostic David Baddiel Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the events of last year made clear, the police have a problem with race on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, BAME people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody while being forcibly restrained than people from other social groups. Written by award-winning actor and writer Ryan Calais Cameron, Typical is a powerful and inspiring example of how theatre tackles institutional racism. First performed in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the play then transferred to the Soho Theatre for a sell-out run. Now, during the pandemic, this piece has been filmed on location at Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution of Fernand Iveton, the only Algerian-born European (or “pied-noir”) to have been subject to the death penalty during the conflict. It remains one of the most ignominious episodes of the Algerian War of Independence. Ignominious but largely forgotten. Iveton’s case received attention from the likes of Simone Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, a “pied Read more ...