Imprints, Summerhall ★★★★Keep your wits about you for this appropriately tricksy, sometimes elusive but beautifully put together show from young company the Palimpsest Project. For a work that’s ultimately about memory, Imprints is just as unreliable, misleading and red herring-filled as its subject matter, and it takes something of a clear head to work your way through its maze of figures, objects and incidents from a barely recalled teenage encounter at a Christian summer camp.Charlie’s back home from art school, which means awkward conversations with former schoolmates from whom she’s Read more ...

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...

Tate Britain is currently offering two exhibitions for the price of one. Other than being on the same bill, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun having nothing in common other than being born a year apart and being oddballs – in very different ways. And since both reward focused attention, this makes for a rather exhausting outing – I’m reviewing them separately – so gird your loins.I’ve always been intrigued by Scylla (méditerranée) 1938 (pictured below right) a painting by Ithell Colquhoun that Tate Modern has shown with Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. It’s a double image that, like a “ Read more ...

“I can’t move my arms or legs, but apart from that I’m good to go.” Moth (Jason Isaacs) has to be pulled out of the tent in his sleeping bag by his wife Ray (Gillian Anderson). And this is only the second day of their 630-mile walk, split into two summers, along the south-west coastal path from Minehead to South Haven Point.Raynor Winn’s moving, witty account of their trek, which they embarked on after being made homeless, was a bestseller in 2018. Perhaps inevitably, the eponymous film, in spite of having Tony-award winning theatre director Marianne Elliott at the helm (War Horse, Angels in Read more ...

Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens. But tonally it’s exasperating, undecided whether it wants to be a #MeToo drama, a Tennessee Williams-infused tragedy, a fable, or comedy, with one moment that is literally trousers-round-your ankles farce. And its message is depressingly Read more ...

A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the decimation of the Amazon rain forests or the melting of the polar ice caps, Morris decided to spend a year filming the barley field that surrounds the 4,000-year-old Boscawen-Rôs East menhir, or standing stone, four miles north-east of Land’s End in Cornwall. According to the late earth mysteries writer John Michell, the so-called Longstone and Read more ...

Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray. His output was, however, too early for the folk micro-boom engendered by Mumford & Sons, and his songs weren’t whiney enough for mass 21st century tastes in singer-songwriters. He’s consistently been making music, though, and his latest proves the fires are far from out.Seven years ago, Joseph focused his attention on a new project, William The Conqueror, Read more ...

In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.In this follow-up to his debut, Bait, a ship sunk in 1897's flotsam bobs into 1973, premonitory of a new sinking, remembered on a crackling radio report from now. The otherwise Read more ...

Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against brown bracken. And the flowers around which this abstract plot revolves don’t look real either. Such elongated stems and waxy white petals look like they come from outer space, not a windy Cornish coastline.Jenkin says the film, though not a direct homage to low-budget horror films of the 1970s, was created using a similar production process, and Read more ...

In 10 series stretching over the last 18 years, ITV's Doc Martin unobtrusively became an enduringly popular household name, but it finally reached the end of the road with this Christmas one-off. Unless, of course, there’s a prequel, a sequel, an origin story or a transformed internationalised version from Netflix.But barring all that, this was the last we’ll see of Martin Clunes’s doggedly grumpy and stone-faced Doctor Martin Ellingham. He’s a bit like a medical Blackadder. Series creator Dominic Minghella based Ellingham on Dr Martin Bamford from the 2000 movie Saving Grace, also played by Read more ...

A decade or so ago, I imagine if I’d run in to Fisherman’s Friends while enjoying a beer and a nice fat crab sandwich in a Port Isaac pub I’d have passed a happy evening and possibly returned the next night.Sea shanties – indeed, any good close-harmony singing – is very appealing, our reaction to it physiological, an endorphin boost. The sound is irresistible, no matter if you’re drunk or sober. A great part of Fisherman’s Friends' appeal would be their authenticity – a bunch of nice guys with decent voices getting together to have fun and make music.A decade or so of marketing has Read more ...

In later life Gustav Metzger appeared a marginal, eccentric figure. The diminutive, white-bearded artist, was often to be seen round London’s galleries in the early to mid-2010s, dropping off piles of hand-produced fliers urging his fellow artists to “remember nature”.I’ve got one somewhere, a rudimentary dog-eared photocopy, announcing that “Gustav Metzger is calling on all creative professionals and students to create a worldwide movement across the arts to ward off extinction.” Anyone not in on the story of the seminal 1965 Auto-Destructive Art symposium, when Metzger immolated his own Read more ...