Afghanistan
Human Flow review - two hours of human miseryTuesday, 05 December 2017![]() Soaring over an expanse of blue sea, a white bird traverses the screen diagonally. Gliding unhindered through the air, it is the embodiment of freedom; by contrast, the movement of people down below is constrained by border crossings and passport... Read more... |
Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11, Imperial War Museum review - affecting but incoherentWednesday, 01 November 2017![]() The Imperial War Museum’s Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 brings together art made in response to the immediate events and long-term consequences of the events of 11 September. In the main the exhibition is more historical survey of conflict-related... Read more... |
War Child, Channel 4Monday, 13 March 2017![]() In the mindset of Nigel Farage and his biddable followers, the route from Asia into Europe throngs with undesirables. Their threatening faces can be plastered on a vote-winning poster. In this calamitous failure of empathy, young men – hordes of... Read more... |
The Kite Runner, Wyndhams TheatreWednesday, 11 January 2017![]() Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other... Read more... |
Paranoid, ITVFriday, 23 September 2016They keep on coming, these crime dramas, from every direction. The Viking invasion continues, the co-productions with France, the ongoing American global takeover. Meanwhile back in Blighty, Red Productions have been a reliable source of quality... Read more... |
DVD: A WarTuesday, 17 May 2016![]() The premise driving A War – lead character Claus Pedersen’s war – is the decision he makes as Company Commander while leading an army patrol in Afghanistan: whether or not to say he and his Danish unit are under attack from a specific house in a... Read more... |
The Silk Road, BBC FourMonday, 02 May 2016![]() Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a... Read more... |
CD: PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition ProjectSaturday, 09 April 2016![]() PJ Harvey's ninth album is one with a message. I know this because it marks the first time that my pre-release copy of an album has come with a lyric booklet, despite the fact that it is perhaps the least oblique thing that the Dorset-born... Read more... |
Pink Mist, Bush TheatreWednesday, 27 January 2016![]() The war in Afghanistan has not exactly been neglected by contemporary British theatre, and the plight of returned soldiers is a standard trope of new writing. These distant wars function in our culture like worse-case scenarios, an excoriating... Read more... |
A WarThursday, 07 January 2016![]() Tobias Lindholm is something of a specialist in exploring the fate of enclosed groups under stress, charting how the dynamics of behaviour between men develop in crisis. I say men, though the Danish director’s name may still be better known in some... Read more... |
Best of 2015: ArtMonday, 28 December 2015![]() From weaselly shyster to spineless drip, the biographies of Goya’s subjects are often superfluous: exactly what he thought of each of his subjects is jaw-droppingly evident in each and every portrait he painted. Quite how Goya got away with it is a... Read more... |
The Sweethearts, Finborough TheatreMonday, 28 September 2015![]() Entertaining our troops overseas has already proved a fruitful subject for drama, and not only for its show-within-a-show potential. Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade – revived in the West End three years ago – combined latrine-level... Read more... |
