Reviews
Jasper Rees
The rule doesn’t always hold good, but in a television drama a fairly reliable kitemark of quality is when the opening credits list the cast and you’ve heard of them. The title sequence of Unforgotten promised Trevor Eve, Nicola Walker, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Tom Courtenay, Gemma Jones, Ruth Sheen, Peter Egan, Hannah Gordon, Bernard Hill, Cherie Lunghi and Tom Cobbleigh. OK not Uncle Tom, but you get the picture. A sizeable chunk from the senior end of Spotlight don’t turn out for any old half-baked crime drama.The premise of Chris Lang’s script – yet another body unearthed after many years, Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
How many tuba concertos are there? How many pieces are there where the guys from the heavy battalion can really shine as soloists? Well, possibly, here is one: this was the world première of Robin Holloway’s Europa and the Bull, billed as a concertante for tuba and orchestra. It is a joint commission between the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. But Liverpool won the toss to perform it for the first time in Philharmonia Hall.The main thing to bear in mind is that the tuba is a lyrical instrument, capable of all sorts, not just the bass notes in Wagner music-dramas Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The three-toed sloth moves at a maximum – that’s maximum – of 10 feet per minute. It’s thought to be the slowest animal in the world. While on a train hugging the north Kent coast however, I reckon I could give it a, figurative, run for its money. I’m on my way to a tiny venue in Ramsgate to see understated US rock band Sebadoh, whose album count is in double figures, on a tour that will see them joining Lemonheads in London for a high-profile gig. Well, at least that’s the plan.Jump forward about three hours and I’m in the back of a cab speeding towards home with a massive grin on my face Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"I just wanna know what I'm getting into," states FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), not unreasonably, as she heads blindly down the rabbit hole. She emerges into a lawless land where bad guys rule, police fearfully follow and her own side's principles have become unrecognisably warped, with their tactics questionable and objectives increasingly hard to grasp. Sicario is a nail-bitingly tense, precision-crafted and ferociously critical look at the US war on drugs from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, Prisoners).After a disastrous raid on a cartel horror house in Chandler, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Revenge dramas are such a guilty pleasure - there's a vicarious thrill in watching a baddie being taken down in a way that we might wish to, but never would, in real life. And boy, but did Gemma take down cheating husband Simon in the closing episode of Mike Bartlett's Doctor Foster. Senior GP Gemma and hip property developer Simon's perfect life, with their perfect house and their perfect son was, of course, anything but - and finally it all came crashing down.Waiting for Gemma to exact her revenge on Simon over his relationship with their friends Susie and Chris's daughter, Kate (a Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
His style is probably too subtle to be described as causing anything as noisily obtrusive as a splash, but Barney Norris’s debut play Visitors certainly created significant ripples last year. This follow-up drama is also, on the surface at least, low-key: a gentle, melancholy rumination on love and loss, in which the more drastic events happen offstage and time ticks by, ungraspable, inexorable.Set in a Hampshire village, it’s in part an elegy for a rural way of life, fading away in the face of consumerist modernity; it’s also a lament for the lonely, and a hymn to the redemptive power of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“It’s good to be back in fucking Birmingham, but come a bit closer and let’s pretend it’s a rock ‘n’ roll gig,” called frontman Jim Jones from the stage of the Rainbow, before bursting into the swampy blues of “Aldecide”. The audience needed no other invitations and pushed towards the stage to drink up the Righteous Mind’s primal groove.Jim Jones is a brave man. Every few years he pulls the plug on his band, gets together a new like-minded group and starts from scratch. Having called an end to the mighty Jim Jones Revue in 2014, he’s back with new combo The Righteous Mind and a set of all new Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Wayne McGregor wasn't anyone's idea of a ballet man when he was appointed choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet in 2007. Before then, and since, his work has been abstract, spiky, verging on dysmorphic. His interest lay not in human stories but in the snap of synapses and the speed with which the brain can relay messages to a hyper-flexible body. Then, two years ago, perhaps sighting the end of that particular road, he made a surprising swerve into narrative with Raven Girl, which last night received its first revival at the Opera House.Raven Girl is a fairytale which pays Read more ...
fisun.guner
The brute nature of man in times of war, religious persecution and hypocrisy, and the destructive power of superstition. Francisco de Goya’s fame today largely rests on such themes, and they go a long way to explain just why he’s often considered the first modern artist. But Goya was also a remarkable portraitist, an official painter to the Spanish court, and one of art's great sensualists. And though we don’t have the famous nude and clothed Maja, which hang side-by-side in the Prado, the National Gallery’s thrillingly seductive exhibition attests to his renown as a master of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades.Red Army makes clear how, in a world in which sport was an extension of the superpower struggle, Fetisov and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul, Jan and Louis, three young men living in a gritty part of south London, are bored and broke and, for them, there are two kinds of Britain – one with money and power, and the one they live in, with no money and little to look forward to. No, it's not a play set in 2015, but Barrie Keeffe's Barbarians, set in the mid-1970s when youth unemployment was at an all-time high and the pound was at an all-time low.The parallels to today, with a burgeoning underclass and a widening gulf between the haves and have-nots in the UK, are obvious – which perhaps explains why this co-production Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dementia is an increasingly common theme in theatre, television and film. But although there are plenty of stories about old people suffering from Alzheimer’s, what does it feel like to experience this condition? French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller’s Molière Award-winning play – transferring to the West End after highly praised runs at the Tricycle Theatre in north London and the Theatre Royal Bath – attempts an answer by using a sophisticated structure and a deliberately ambiguous method of storytelling.Eighty-year-old André lives in a posh flat in Paris. He is suffering from loss Read more ...