Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
When Hollywood characters revisit their youth it tends to be through the school reunion, with generally trite results; how typical of a French filmmaker, and of the cerebral, cinephile Olivier Assayas in particular, that his character should be an actress, who is pushed towards midlife crisis by a role.Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is an international film star, 40 years old, who is simultaneously dealing with a difficult divorce and the sudden death of the reclusive playwright, Wilhem Melchior, who discovered her as a 20-year-old, when he cast her in his play and subsequent film, Maloja Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The big vinyl storm in the US media over the last month has been a kerfuffle about VNYL, the service that hoped to do for vinyl what Lovefilm used to do for DVDs. The idea, backed by a hefty and successful Kickstarter campaign, was VNYL would send members three records, based on their stated tastes and chosen by connoisseurs. These could be listened to and returned, to be replaced with others. Sounds like a dreadful idea. Vinyl is delicate and surely one of its pleasures is ownership? If there are scratches, they've been earned at your own parties and late nights. Unlike MP3s and CDs, vinyl Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lucky old us. We are now living “in a techno-sexual era”. So claimed this documentary about dating apps which radar-guide you to the nearest available groin. If groins are your thing, that is, and they are by no means everyone’s. We heard about a man who wanted to paint a woman green and “spank you like a big fat avocado”. Another woman was considerably aroused by the sight of a man putting his motor into reverse. We met a puppy fetishist who trusses himself up in leather straps and yaps a lot. This is not to be confused with dogging.The Secret World of Tinder wasn’t really about secrecy at Read more ...
fisun.guner
We’ve not been short of memorable London productions of Arthur Miller’s best known works. Ivo van Hove’s triple Olivier award-winning A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre from the Young Vic earlier this year, and the Old Vic’s The Crucible, directed last year by Yaël Farber, were two exceptional productions. And now we have the seminal play of the 20th century. The RSC’s Death of a Salesman arrives from its short run at Stratford garlanded with plaudits, but it’s even better in this West End transfer.The smaller stage and more intimate auditorium of the Noël Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The author of such inimitably evocative melancholia as “If All The Cornflakes” and the many episodes of “Life In A Scotch Sitting Room”, Scottish poet and songwriter Ivor Cutler had a stellar cult following for many decades until his death in 2006. This wonderfully fluid ensemble show, making its English debut at the Brighton Festival, was devised by Scottish group Vanishing Point in association with The National Theatre of Scotland. It recreates episodes from Cutler’s life, and fragments of his music in a mesmerising, dynamic collage of bleak-tinged fun. Cutler, who always claimed that his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A master of visceral cinema, Samuel Fuller (1912-97) directed 23 features during his exemplary career, writing 21 of them and an unquantifiable number of others. Clips from many appear in A Fuller Life, an affectionate documentary conceived, co-produced, directed, and introduced by Samantha Fuller, his proud daughter, and culled, word for word, from Fuller’s posthumous autobiography, which was co-authored by his wife Christa Lang Fuller (the documentary’s executive producer) and Jerome Henry Rudes. Oddly, those clips weren’t really needed.They illustrate, of course, Fuller’s frazzling tabloid Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler once wrote that his symphonies were edifices built from the same stones, gathered in childhood. In each of the four recitals I’ve heard from Yevgeny Sudbin, he’s moved several of his repertoire cornerstones around to different effect in the piano-programme equivalents of a very large symphony orchestra playing a Mahler symphony: massive sonorities, total structural grasp, huge intelligence.Take the placing of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre as filtered through the virtuosic imaginations of Liszt, Horowitz and Sudbin himself. It looked last night as if it was going to be an official encore Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The ongoing penchant for all things royal reaches a momentary impasse with A Royal Night Out, an eye-rollingly silly imagining of what the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth might have got up to on VE Day. Its release timed to coincide with the pro-monarchy rush of feeling that the latest royal birth has only intensified, Julian Jarrold's film will please those who want to feel as if they're vaguely au fait with the House of Windsor while getting to glimpse some rather grand houses in the process. If as much attention had been paid to the script as was lavished on the decor, the results Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Genre mixing is a perilous business. Successful hybrids use duelling forms to re-contextualise or revolutionise; others wind up fatally diluting their disparate elements. Ayckbourn’s 1994 sci-fi comedy thriller – featuring, at its nadir, a farcical defenestration mistaken for a lesbian sex romp – falls into the latter camp.Dying magnate Reece (Robert Portal) suffers an attack of conscience after discovering the murderous methods of business partner Julian (David Bamber) for securing their financial success, and urges dominatrix for hire Poopay (Rachel Tucker, pictured below with Imogen Stubbs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Already a couple of Golden Globes to the good after debuting in the States last year, The Affair effortlessly hit its stride as it landed in Blighty. This opening double episode began generating a subtle miasma of intrigue and vague menace from the off, as teacher and aspiring novelist Noah Solloway (Dominic West) gathered his untidy family together for a summer holiday trip to the in-laws in Montauk, in the Hamptons.A holiday romance might take many forms, but with any luck will turn out to be just a fleeting by-product of too much sun and alcohol. However, the one getting ready to crash up Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
After the disappointment of Wayne McGregor’s latest piece for the Royal Ballet, which opened on Monday, I thought last night’s trip to Sadler’s Wells for a new Rambert programme might cheer me up about the state of contemporary dance and composition. Two new pieces were on offer, by rising choreographer Alexander Whitley and Rambert director Mark Baldwin with original scores by Icelander Daniel Bjarnason and Brit Gavin Higgins respectively, alongside a revival of Lucinda Childs’s Four Elements, and there was no sign of the fawning hype that preceded the McGregor opening. Were we in for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In The Tribe, his feature debut, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy has created something totally unexpected, and viscerally powerful to boot. This dark tale of life among inmates of a Kyiv institution for the deaf avoids spoken language completely, leaving viewers to assemble the narrative for themselves: communication is only in sign language, heralded consciously in an opening screen-title as presented without translation, subtitles or voiceover.Clearly Slaboshpytskiy’s predominantly teenage, non-professional cast know what they’re getting up to, but we’re left guessing until Read more ...