Reviews
Beyond CluelessSaturday, 24 January 2015
Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, a Kickstarter-funded film essay about the deeper meaning of post-1990 coming-of-age movies, aspires to be one of those Arena programs that takes a fresh look at a seemingly trivial or minor pop form to reveal deeper... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Henry Mancini, Georg Breinschmid, BeethovenSaturday, 24 January 2015
Henry Mancini: The Classic Soundtrack Collection (Sony)You get a good sense of any composer's strengths and limitations when you consume their music in box set-sized quantities. With the Juilliard-trained Henry Mancini, you marvel at the... Read more... |
PJ Harvey: Recording in Progress, Artangel at Somerset HouseSaturday, 24 January 2015
Artangel continues to instigate extraordinary events in extraordinary places. Over the past two decades and more, directors Michael Morris and James Lingwood have helped generate major and ground-breaking work by Rachel Whiteread, Brian Eno, Laurie... Read more... |
Ex MachinaFriday, 23 January 2015
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of... Read more... |
Bear WinterFriday, 23 January 2015
As a genre, the "Match 3" puzzle game seems like a sort of evolutionary dead end. You can gussy it up with dramatic sound effects and sparkling animations all you want but ultimately it is still Candy Crush under there. Bear Winter takes a slightly... Read more... |
Surviving the Holocaust - Freddie Knoller's War, BBC TwoFriday, 23 January 2015
First-hand testimonial is surely the building block of history. Whether it’s in the form of written diaries or the television memory, it allows us to go back to the very basics as we, the reader-viewer, effectively re-experience the life of the... Read more... |
Cucumber, Channel 4Thursday, 22 January 2015
It doesn’t take many cucumbers smacked into cupped male palms to realise this isn’t, surprisingly, a show about salad. Russell T Davies has written three new series (Banana shows on E4, and Tofu online), exploring LGBT sexuality today. Queer As Folk... Read more... |
Leiferkus, LPO, Jurowski, RFHThursday, 22 January 2015
To pair Rachmaninov’s brooding and little-performed The Miserly Knight with Wagner's brooding but much-performed Das Rheingold is an audacious piece of programming. The operas share an interest in the mortal power of money, and Rachmaninov’s score... Read more... |
James Dillon's Stabat Mater, London Sinfonietta, Volkov, QEHThursday, 22 January 2015
James Dillon calls this major work, premered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last November, a “Cubist Stabat Mater”. He sets the hymn, but adds in more recent words, texts on related themes by Picasso, Kristeva and Rilke, among... Read more... |
Andrea Chénier, Royal OperaWednesday, 21 January 2015
What kind of regime, asks Gérard, talks of justice while killing poets? It’s a question the answer to which suggests itself all too swiftly this week, briefly turning a revolutionary romp of an opera into something rather more chilling. Playing... Read more... |
A Most Violent YearWednesday, 21 January 2015
JC Chandor is rapidly turning into one of the most fascinating (and gifted) filmmakers out there, as A Most Violent Year proves in almost every way. Shamefully overlooked in this year's Oscar line-up, which neglected the film altogether, this... Read more... |
The Changeling, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 21 January 2015
Ever been stuck in a claustrophobic space with a group of really unpleasant people? Add mayhem, murder and the kind of razor-sharp wit to be found in only a very few of the nastiest individuals, and you have Dominic Dromgoole’s candlelit production... Read more... |
