Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Is there only one Taylor Sheridan? His output is so prolific you’d think there must be half a dozen of them. Although little acknowledged in the UK, over the last decade Sheridan has been amassing an extraordinary string of credits that has made him one of the most significant players in Hollywood.He warmed up on the big screen, writing screenplays for Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River, which he described as his “modern American frontier” trilogy. It was a theme he would ring variations on through a string of hit TV series. Yellowstone and its spin-offs 1883 and 1923 have been giant Read more ...
David Nice
James Joyce’s Misses Morkan have gone up in the world for their Christmas gathering this year, from the upper part of a “dark, gaunt house” on the Liffey to the splendour of No. 86 St Stephen’s Green, now home to the Museum of Literature Ireland. Those of us with an "invitation" felt we were more in the grand house of the Ekdahls in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, but we “got” the Irish conviviality and just about every nuance of the masterly short story, with more besides.Site-specific theatre, in this case specially adapted by director Louise Lowe and scenographer Owen Boss, has never been Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, which follows three women trying to make a living in modern Mumbai. It’s a deserving winner, both exquisitely delicate and formally bold.Two of the women are nurses, colleagues at a specialist maternity unit, the third an older cook at their clinic, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the only one who has had a child. Anu (Divya Prabha, pictured below, with Kani Kusruti), the youngest, is a lively young woman on the verge of a sexual liaison with a young tousle-headed Muslim Read more ...
India Lewis
The writer, performer, and lecturer Jeff Young’s latest, Wild Twin, tells – ostensibly – the story of his barefoot, Beat-imitative journey through northern Europe in the 1980s. However, it is, at heart, a greater tale of his return, to family and to himself. Indeed, his account is perhaps more in tune with the work of Joseph Cornell, that strange artist of travel and nostalgia who never really left New York. Cornell would gather detritus, scraps, and ephemera from his native city and organise his findings into curious boxed collages, telling an oblique tale of inner journeying. Young makes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A sycamore tree is described to an appaloosa horse before it is mounted to ride off to visit a friend. The thread used for sewing evokes a map where each street has a doorway which, once opened, reveals memories of those who are missed.Midwinter Swimmers is the musical analogue of Monet’s Nymphéas (Water Lilies) series of paintings, where the familiar is depicted in a way which brings new meaning. Imagery where detail which might be missed brings a fresh understanding of a recognisable setting, and where connections are made between the everyday and the imagined. Or, as The Innocence Mission’ Read more ...
Justine Elias
From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.British filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, who admits a childhood fascination with TV's “good witches”, like Bewitched's Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery), recently found a deeper, more disturbing kinship with such figures. After the birth of her son, now three years old, Sankey suffered depression so severe that she spent months in a mother-baby Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Jazz music crosses, mixes and unites generations, and the 10 concerts I’ve seen at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival (out of more than 300 in total) have really brought that home. The oldest musician I heard is a completely lovable miracle. Matt Pannell’s picture (above) shows the empathy and enthusiasm of the great Kirk Lightsey. The pianist was born in Detroit in 1937, the same year as Alice Coltrane, and they shared the same piano teacher. His magical solo piano album "I Will Never Stop Loving You" from 2021, incidentally, is required listening.Lightsey defies the seasons. On Read more ...
Tim Cumming
November can be a month to hunker down for the onset of winter and its weather, and where better to do that than in one of the myriad venues across the capital hosting the annual London Jazz Festival and its hundreds of concerts, from cosy clubs like Ronnie Scott’s and Pizza Express Dean Street to the big stages of the Barbican and South Bank.This review focuses on a trio of outliers from across the jazz cosmos – new band No Noise from Korea; the return of the propulsive, cinematic, muscular and sinuous grooves of Neil Cowley Trio, with a new album, Entity, after seven years away, and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.So too is the play of the same name, a soi disant "problem play", Shakespeare at his more mean-spirited, sometimes giving the impression of indulging in a bit Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There were points when this concert felt like the musical equivalent of watching the atom split – as well as notes there were animal shrieks, sinister rattles, sibilant serpentine sussurations, and primal throaty rumbles. Indian-American composer Shruthi Rajasekar, South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe (pictured below), and the never less than subversive Hermes Experiment unveiled a fascinating laboratory of noise in a lunchtime session that was as exhilarating as it was enjoyably unexpected.The programme opened with Selaocoe, one of the most charismatic and radically experimental Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For most of Canada’s listening public, their country-man Stefan Gnyś – pronounced G'neesh – wasn’t a concern. The 300 copies of his 1969 single didn’t make it to shops. There was little promotion and limited radio play. Gnyś had paid RCA Limited Recording Services to press the seven-incher. Beyond this transaction, there was no record company involvement.“Horizoning” and its B-side “Evangeline” were recorded on 21 April 1969 at St. Catherine, Ontario’s Heidebrecht Recording Services, a facility usually dedicated to recording radio jingles. Eight other tracks were recorded that day. John Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later with the words, "to be continued" flashed up on the screen. Will filmgoers mourn that they have to wait an entire year to see the second part of this supercharged screen adaptation of the stage musical blockbuster that London and New York audiences can currently absorb in a single sitting? (Not for nothing has the show taken up seemingly permanent residency at Broadway's largest theatre, the Gershwin.)Wicked does nothing by halves except, it would seem, make Read more ...