thu 05/12/2024

Afghanistan

Hollywoodgate review - on tour with the Taliban

Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Nash’at is either very brave or slightly unhinged. His debut full-length documentary is an account of a year he spent in Afghanistan with the Taliban, after they’d taken control of the country at the end of August 2021,...

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The Boy with Two Hearts, National Theatre review - poignant yet humorous story of family forced to flee Afghanistan

It’s particularly poignant to watch this story in the knowledge that a little over a year after US-led troops withdrew from Afghanistan, women and girls are enduring a renewed repression of their rights under the Taliban. The real-life story of The...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2022 reviews: Afghanistan Is Not Funny / Yippee Ki Yay / Eh Up, Me Old Flowers!

Afghanistan Is Not Funny, Gilded Balloon ★★★★ Henry Naylor’s Arabian Nightmares trilogy - about the West’s misadventures in Syria and Iraq and how we have learned nothing - were hits at previous festivals; now he presents this new show,...

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Flee review - award-winning documentary portrays the refugee experience

It’s good timing for the release of Flee in UK cinemas. The Danish movie has just made Oscar history by being nominated in three categories – Animated Feature, Documentary, and International Feature and is bound to win in at least one of them. ...

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Invasion, Apple TV+ review - sci-fi epic or a pile of space junk?

Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be...

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First Person: ethnomusicologist Shumaila Hemani on global musical traditions and Concert for Afghanistan

In early 2020, the year that soon saw  COVID-19 lockdown, I served on the music faculty for Semester at Sea, Spring 2020 voyage, where I taught self-designed courses on global music cultures as well as a course called Soundscapes. This course...

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The Old Guard review - serious silliness

It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare...

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Our Girl, Series 5, BBC One review - where soap and warfare collide

Some things never change in Our Girl. At the beginning of 2018’s Series 4, military heroine Georgie Lane (Michelle Keegan) had been traumatised by the death of her fiance Elvis Harte, killed in Afghanistan at the end of Series 3. At the start of...

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The Unreturning, Theatre Royal Stratford East review - hymn to home

Nadia Fall is a good thing. Her appointment as the artistic director of this venue, with her first season having begun in September last year, has been widely seen as part of a new wave of cultural leaders who are expected to shake up the country's...

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DVD/Blu-ray: The Breadwinner

Animation fans have rarely had it so good, though it’s nothing short of criminal that the mean-spirited, infantile Peter Rabbit took more money than the sublime Paddington 2, and that Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner wasn’t a popular success when...

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The Jungle, Playhouse Theatre review - new territory

"I am dead," declares Okot before recounting the horrors he survived to reach Calais. Each time, he says, "I died." How many times can you die before you are truly dead? What is it that finally kills you? These are the questions at the heart of...

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Ismaili a Go-Go: How the Aga Khan funded a music renaissance

Many of us recognise that rather striking modernist building in Cromwell Gardens near South Kensington tube, having seen it on the way to the V&A or perhaps a Prom at the Albert Hall but not been sure what it is exactly. I hadn't actually been...

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