Reviews
Jessica Duchen
From a distance, the pianist Christian Blackshaw bears an uncanny resemblance to Franz Liszt, silver hair swept back à la 19th century. At the piano, though, you could scarcely find two more different musicians. There seems not to be a flamboyant bone in Blackshaw’s body. His playing of the Mozart piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall over the past few years has been matchlessly gorgeous, pure as the driven snow, and in yesterday’s short but intense programme of Mozart and Schubert, the solitary pianist’s performance spoke direct to his locked-down listeners, screen to screen, with playing Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I suspect that the work of James Baldwin is not all that familiar to readers in Britain, perhaps not even to black readers in Britain – just as, for a time at least, it seemed that Martin Luther King, a much more visible figure in black history whose words are routinely quoted, became obscured by rather blingier modern-day figures.Yet, as a number of commentators have noted, Baldwin is the figure we need to turn to in the age of Trump, the man who long ago told us that “It is certain… that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." Amen to that. The film Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A darkened stage; a pool of light; a solitary figure. And then, flooding the whole thing with meaning, music – even it’s just a soft chord on a piano. It’s no secret to any opera goer that even the barest outlines of a staging can magnify the dramatic potential of a piece of music to a point when it can seem like a completely new work. And if – like English Touring Opera’s director James Conway – you’ve spent much of the 21st century creating large-scale drama in small venues with minimal resources; well, it all starts to look deceptively easy. Conway makes a pairing of two song cycles by Read more ...
David Nice
Finally, it seems, the time is right for a major British TV drama about how the AIDS crisis hit the early 1980s London gay scene. We’ve come a long way even since the audacious launch of Russell T Davies’s triumphant Queer As Folk, also on Channel 4, in 1989: RuPaul’s Drag Race would have been inconceivable on mainstream television then, but here’s the second and much more creative UK series on BBC Two. It’s A Sin has much to celebrate, too, but also much to warn about and mourn, and in the midst of a different kind of virus ravaging the world, it offers unexpected resonances.Davies rose to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying Destiny Street Complete lays it out. There are, indeed, three versions of his and his band The Voidoids’s July 1982 album Destiny Street on this double-CD set. It seems excessive.Reviews of Destiny Street at the time of its release were positive. Creem said “Hell himself has hit on a style – part Nuggets-era basement rock 'n roll, part speed-balling protest (not in content, but in attitude) rock, part confrontational CBGB psychodrama – that gives the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced in Belarus, it’s a Holocaust drama based on a novella by the veteran East German screenwriter/director Wolfgang Kohlhaase but made by the Ukrainian director Vadim Perelman. Perelman had quite a success in 2003 with House of Sand and Fog, but since then seems to have mainly worked in television.Persian Lessons tells the far-fetched story of a young Jewish man from Belgium, who when captured in France in 1942, manages to survive by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Jasmila Žbanić’s latest film, once again about the people of her native Bosnia and Herzegovina, is hardly an easy watch. Focusing on Aida, a passionate and highly capable interpreter for the UN forces in former Yugoslavia, she unflinchingly tells the story of the 1995 massacre of well over 6000 Muslim Bosnian men and boys in the town of Srebrenica. In what was supposedly a safe area under UN guarantee. The town tragically succombed to a genocide for which Radovan Karadžić the prime minister of the Serbian Republic and General Ratko Mladić were directly responsible and later condemned. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has taken three years for the second series of Back to reach our screens (a combination of the creator being busy, a star being unwell and Covid), but it was worth the wait. To recap for those who didn't see the first series of Simon Blackwell's very dark comedy (now on All4), it concerns Andrew (Robert Webb), who suddenly came back into the life of Stephen (David Mitchell), who is, he says, his long-lost foster brother.Blackwell worked on Peep Show, and one could argue that Mitchell and Webb are playing cleverly constructed versions of who their characters on that show, Mark and Jez Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (Netflix) will be the final outing for this caustically addictive saga of actors and their agents. The show’s unique trademark has been its success in attracting an impressive roster of A-list French actors and getting them to behave in outlandish and ridiculous ways, but maybe they’re just running out of suitably recognisable names.Episode 5 of this new batch shows what could have been a possible way ahead by reaching across the Atlantic to pluck Sigourney Weaver (pictured below) out of La-La Land and plonk her in the fabulously expensive Read more ...
Owen Richards
Romcoms. We all know the tried and tested formula: immature guy, uptight girl, they meet, they like each other, hate each other, and end up in love. It’s as reliable as it is unrealistic, and sometimes it takes a film like Baby Done to remind you there is a better way. One that is funnier, more believable, and yes, even more romantic.Stand-up comic Rose Matafeo and Harry Potter alum Matthew Lewis star as Zoe and Tim, the last couple standing in the marriage and baby stakes. Everyone else is boring and settling down, but these two (and Zoe’s new-age friend Molly) are quite happy as things are Read more ...
Tom Baily
It is probable that no other document gets closer to the direct experience of frontline workers and victims of Covid-19 than the documentary 76 Days. It is also true that the film is not very enjoyable. Nor, sadly, does it feel especially unique. Worn by news fatigue, most viewers might feel that they are watching an extended news feature, rather than a feature film. Yet it does contain a strange power that is hard to pin down.That 76 Days was made in the first place is something of an achievement. New York-based director Hao Wu had planned to film in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic but Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What a television programme gets called is not always the choice of the people making it, but it certainly is the choice of its broadcaster. In the case of Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, the relevant people at the BBC may come to regret giving an otherwise decent documentary that title. Over an hour, Cerrie Burnell, an actor born with the lower part of her right arm missing, explored in detail the history and present day discriminations against people with physical disabilities in the UK. She interviewed disabled people and several wheelchair-using campaigners, who Read more ...