Reviews
Avengers: Endgame review - Marvel save the biggest and best for lastThursday, 25 April 2019
The Earth’s mightiest defenders are back in a triumphant climax, 11 years in the making. Despite a three hour runtime and an overstuffed preceding chapter, the Russo Brothers pull off the near-impossible by creating a wholly satisfying final chapter... Read more... |
Ain't Misbehavin', Southwark Playhouse review - a jazz-hot musical revueThursday, 25 April 2019
The joint is jumpin’ at Southwark Playhouse, now hosting an irresistible Fats Waller-inspired, Manhattan-set musical revue (a co-production with Colchester’s Mercury Theatre, where it opened last month). Though originating in the Seventies,... Read more... |
Eighth Grade review - a dazzlingly real portrait of a teenage girlThursday, 25 April 2019
“Hey guys, it’s Kayla, back with another video. So, the topic of today’s video is being yourself.” Kayla Day (the wonderful Elsie Fisher, nominated for a Golden Globe and also heard as the voice of Agnes in Despicable Me) is in her last week of... Read more... |
Mitten wir im Leben sind, De Keersmaeker, Queyras, Rosas, Sadler's Wells review - Bach-worthy geniusThursday, 25 April 2019
All Bach is dance, a teacher once told me. The justifiable exaggeration switched on a light; leaping to the Brandenburg Concertos followed. This great work of kinetic art is of a different order. Choreographer and performer Anne Teresa De... Read more... |
Nouvelle Vague, Islington Assembly Hall review - the dreamy bossa nova collective returnThursday, 25 April 2019
When you’re off to Islington’s beautiful Assembly Hall for an evening of slinky French bossa nova, it’s something of a surprise to find the Gallic groovers preceded by a droll Brummie singer who brings to mind a cross between Billy Bragg and Richard... Read more... |
Rodrigo y Gabriela, Roundhouse - sound and (new) noiseThursday, 25 April 2019
It was in the early 2000s in a tiny, gritty bar that I first saw Rodrigo y Gabriela live. Camden was less pretty then – a look was close to a glare and there were more spikes and kohl – the nineties were that much closer. I was right at... Read more... |
Mark Thomas, BAC review - impassioned polemic about the NHSThursday, 25 April 2019
Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70 at Battersea Arts Centre – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it... Read more... |
Billy Budd, Royal Opera review - Britten's drama of good and evil too much at seaWednesday, 24 April 2019
On one level, it's about Biblically informed good and evil at sea, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. On another, the love that dared not speak its name when Britten and E M Forster adapted Hermann Melville's novella is either repressed... Read more... |
Suede, Brighton Dome review - Brett Anderson gives it full frontman chutzpahWednesday, 24 April 2019
Suede finish “Sabotage”. It’s a mid-paced, elegant number set off by swirling, circling central guitar. Frontman Brett Anderson hangs from his microphone stand on the left apron of the stage to deliver it, with the lights down low. Afterwards he... Read more... |
Run for Your Life, ITV review - giving the nation's youth a sporting chanceWednesday, 24 April 2019
With the knife crime epidemic seemingly raging out of control, and the government at its clueless worst as it stumbles around hoping for a quick fix, here was a look at a possible solution. Via her Track Academy charity, former triple-jumper and... Read more... |
All My Sons, Old Vic review - starry but disappointingly unevenWednesday, 24 April 2019
Superstar Sally Field has come to town. With two academy awards and countless other accolades, the actor who played Forrest Gump's mother and dozens of other roles, from Frog to Mrs Lincoln, in Hollywood blockbusters and on television now returns to... Read more... |
Looking for Rembrandt, BBC Four review - painter's biog is a mini-masterpieceWednesday, 24 April 2019
This final episode of BBC Four's Looking for Rembrandt, exploring the life and work of the Netherlands’ greatest painter, was a mini-masterpiece in itself. We rejoined the story in the mid-1650s, when Rembrandt found that his days of popular acclaim... Read more... |
