Reviews
Tom Birchenough
Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains. It’s a subject that has been tackled by many of the continent’s filmmakers, prime among them perhaps Pablo Larrain in Chile, for whom such explorations have themselves become part of the slow process of moving on from that past.The Clan has Argentina's Pablo Trapero dramatising a real-life story from the 1980s that is as chilling as they come, while the manner in which he approaches it only underlines Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On the face of it a murder mystery, The Night Of develops steadily into a panoramic survey of the American justice and prison system and attitudes to race and class. Produced by BBC Drama and HBO, it's based on the BBC's 2008 series Criminal Justice (which starred Ben Whishaw). The good news is you can watch all eight episodes right away on Now TV.The story so far is that Naz Khan (Riz Ahmed), a shy and unworldly Pakistani-American college student from Queens, New York, has been acccused of murdering 22-year-old Andrea Cornish after he unwisely borrowed his father's taxi for a night out in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Primal fear of the forest plus new technology made The Blair Witch Project a micro-budget phenomenon in 1999. Its “found footage” premise, with student film-makers’ tapes showing their gradual unhinging by a witch-haunted Maryland forest, has been widely copied. This and a poorly received sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, stymied further attempts to franchise what seemed to be a freak hit. The news that one of horror’s most brilliant young talents, Adam Wingard, had directed a new sequel was hugely promising, making the disappointment of this puzzlingly conservative, unscary rehash all Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue.The year is 1610 and plague has driven the wealthy away from London to their country estates, leaving the city and their possessions in charge of the underclass – servants, clerks, whores and Read more ...
David Nice
They dreamed the impossible dream in 1970, turning aspects of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the musical Man of La Mancha. But Purcell, Eccles and the lively dramatist Thomas D'Urfey - anyone know his hit song "The Fart"? - got there first nearly 300 years earlier when the Knight of the Woeful Countenance trod the boards at Drury Lane's Theatre Royal in a seven-hour entertainment.Harry Bicket and The English Concert devised a clever programme of joyous early showbusiness homaging the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' death - in the same month as Shakespeare's, astonishingly - by interweaving the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In film and photography, zoos and on safari (we should be so lucky) we admire the great cats, kings of jungle and forest, top of the food chain, predators, and gorgeous to boot. But in spite of this admiration, some human populations hardly bear affection for the cheetah or lion because of their perceived threat to cattle, while human encroachment on their habitat is leaving many a feline population vulnerable and endangered.Following the Rio Olympics and huge political scandals in Brazil, this quiet and surprisingly emotional documentary on jaguars is curiously topical. For jaguars, powerful Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too.A young woman, Angel, has called a family meeting because she wants to discuss what happened to her when her mother swapped lovers, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you happened to catch the second part of the Bridget Jones story – Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004, directed by Beeban Kidron) - on terrestrial television recently, or have read the character's creator Helen Fielding's novel Mad About the Boy, you may be confused by the opening sequence of the third instalment in the film franchise, Bridget Jones's Baby. It begins with Bridget, single and childless at 43, sitting alone in her flat on her birthday, with a glass of wine and a cake with a single candle, singing along to “All By Myself”. Didn't Mark Darcy, the love of her life, propose Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC.In this monologue of an age, an era in thrall to the selfie and the narcissistic navel-gazing of the blogosphere, our ambitions and loves are turned inwards, but also our fears. It follows that a contemporary Faustus is fascinated Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sixty years of sitcoms in 60 minutes? That's a big ask, but the makers of this whizz-through of British sitcoms tried, with a mega session of clips and comedy experts opining about them in a one-off documentary charting the importance of sitcom in British broadcasting history.The set-up was to talk about firsts and breakthroughs: it started with Hancock's Half Hour, now regarded as the UK's first sitcom, and worked consecutively through many more, with a short clip and one or two people talking about each programme mentioned. It ended, for no apparent reason, with Gavin & Stacey, which Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You wait ages for a Norma, and then three come along at once. English National Opera saw something nasty in the woodshed back in February with their 19th-century American take on Bellini, while up at the Edinburgh Festival this summer the opera’s original Romans and Druids traded togas for Tricolores and relocated to Nazi-occupied Paris. Now, bringing things right up to date, the Royal Opera give us a contemporary clerical fantasy of a production courtesy of La Fura dels Baus’s Àlex Ollé.The “fearful wood” of Felice Romani’s libretto remains, but is here transfigured by designer Alfons Flores Read more ...
Alison Cole
Guiseppe Penone’s lyrical and tactile works, made from the simple elemental materials that typify the 1960s Italian Arte Povera movement (of which he is a key exponent), belong largely to the outside world of woods and gardens. But they also find an ideal setting in the serene light-filled spaces of Marian Goodman Gallery, where Penone’s perennial fascination with the relationship between man, nature and art is fruitfully explored in an exhibition entitled Fui, Sarò, Non Sono (I was, I will be, I am not).This is one of two complementary Goodman shows, staged simultaneously in London and Paris Read more ...