Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
There’s quite an appealing mini-genre that concerns genius, usually involving mathematics and an outsider who struggles to cope for reasons that include social adaptation (Good Will Hunting), sexuality (The Imitation Game) and mental health (A Beautiful Mind). The clever trick of Gifted is that the genius in question is too young to have any idea of the problems she may face.The result is a family drama that in its broad strokes is like so many family dramas, as an orphan is fought over by relatives with very different ideas of what’s best for her. The added spice is that a girl as Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991. Tate Modern's exhibition opens with a portrait of her grandmother painted by Zeid when she was only 14, which with its delicate touch and finely observed detail, reveals a precocious talent.She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women but, when she was 19, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He may often be voted Greatest Briton in the History of Everything, but are we approaching peak Winston? Scroll down Churchill’s IMDb entry and you’ll find that he’s been played by every Tom, Dick and Harry in all manner of cockamamie entertainments. The key pillars of his filmography are (apart from Young Winston) as follows: The Gathering Storm (Albert Finley) and Into the Storm (Brendan Gleeson), both scripted by Hugh Whitemore; The King’s Speech (Timothy Spall); The Crown (John Lithgow). Then on stage there’s been The Audience (various actors) and Three Days in May (Warren Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
W Somerset Maugham, who knew a thing or two about the dark side, summed up the Riviera as “a sunny place for shady people”. On the evidence of this first episode, Riviera is a funny place for shitty people.The first few minutes flung us between London, Monaco and New York. Bright lights, big titties. The connection between money and sex was made straight away – and in the case of Christos Clios (Dimitri Leonidas, pictured below) in doggy style. Talking about money in Canary Wharf – “there is nothing more rigorous” – turns him on. According to him, the unregulated international art Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We see them returning to the slave labour and death camps, driving through the countryside and contemplating their former home towns and villages where they were rounded up for deportation.Their interviews are intercut with family photographs, ciné film and archive footage. Unlike a history programme made for television, there is no voiceover, no maps Read more ...
David Nice
Tears were likely to flow freely on this most beautiful and terrible of June evenings, especially given a programme – dedicated by Vladimir Ashkenazy to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire – already prone to the elegiac. It could hardly be otherwise with the music of Elgar and Sibelius, two Europeans with a penchant for introspection whose works Ashkenazy knows well. What ended up nearly breaking us, though, was an encore – none I've heard has ever been more astonishing – by that ever unpredictable violinist Pekka Kuusisto.He told us he'd planned to play a "jolly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.But, as Nick Broomfield’s new documentary reveals, none of this could protect her from a grasping family, parasitic hangers-on, and an unfaithful husband who aided and abetted her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Why is dust so fascinating yet, at the same time, so repellent? Maybe the fear of choking to death in a dust storm or being buried alive in fine sand provokes a visceral response to it. My current obsession with dust comes from having builders in my home over the last seven months. Despite everything being shrouded in dust sheets, a film of corrosive particles has infiltrated every nook and cranny and silently blanketed my world; so I couldn’t resist a Whitechapel Gallery exhibition devoted to this pervasive nuisance. The show begins with a photograph by Man Ray taken in Marcel Duchamp’s Read more ...
Alison Cole
As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just! – it closes on 25 June) duly attempts to rise to the challenge, with the publicity promising a “dramatic retelling of the life and creative journey of the original celebrity artist” and a film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Emma Banville is almost too good to be true: a human rights lawyer who houses Syrian refugees, wins the most hopeless cases of wrongful conviction, won’t be bullied by anyone – coppers, prison wardens, the system. OK she smokes, presumably for the stress, and pints of lager don’t sit quite right in her hand. And she’s trying to adopt a child with, somewhat implausibly, John Bishop. But she’s played by Helen McCrory, who can do no wrong, and her heart is in the very epicentre of the right place.Fearless (ITV) began as a bog-standard drama about a cold case. Banville was called in to help Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Der Rosenkavalier, you might think, is one of those operas that belong in a specific place and time and no other. “In Vienna,” says Strauss's score, “in the first years of Maria Theresia’s reign” (i.e. the 1740s). But this, of course, is a provocation. For the Welsh National Opera, Olivia Fuchs updates it to, roughly, the date of composition (1910-11), or perhaps even a few years later, to judge from the flickering gunfire, and the heavy emphasis on militarism in the programme. And she supplies the Marschallin with a Doppelgänger in the person of an old lady dressed 1930s/40s, who haunts the Read more ...
David Nice
Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of Denmark rushes to the surface a little too quickly in Brett Dean's bold new take on the most challenging of all the tragedies. This is an impressive labour of love from all concerned at a level which only Glyndebourne at its best can manage, led with supreme authority by conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Neil Armfield. Yet the score worries Read more ...