directors
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet review - is the end nigh?Thursday, 08 October 2020
At 93-years-old and with a career that spans nearly 60 years, David Attenborough has spent a lifetime transporting audiences from the comfort of their sofas to the dazzling, often bewildering, majesty of the natural world. Now, he offers what he... Read more... |
Tenet review - a heady delightWednesday, 26 August 2020
Go back over Christopher Nolan’s films and count the clocks. He has an obsession that would give a horologist a run for his money. Time is a continual motif of his body of work and it finds its zenith in his latest work Tenet. Beneath the... Read more... |
The Old Guard review - serious sillinessThursday, 09 July 2020
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... Read more... |
Family Romance, LLC review - the chameleon bluesFriday, 03 July 2020
Werner Herzog’s appearance in The Mandalorian paid for this deadpan, documentary-like slice of extreme Japanese life, suggesting how the director’s amusingly doomy Teutonic persona now dominates his own cinema.Family Romance is a real company which... Read more... |
Women Make Film: Part Two review - two steps forward, one step backFriday, 22 May 2020
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and... Read more... |
Women Make Film: Part One review - a mesmerising journey of neglected filmThursday, 21 May 2020
Equally ambitious in scope as his 900min ode to cinema The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins’ latest work, Women Make Film, is a fourteen-hour exploration of the work of female film directors down the decades.Cousins’... Read more... |
After Life series 2, Netflix review - Ricky Gervais's study of bereavement continuesSaturday, 25 April 2020
It's interesting to note that this Netflix series – the second of Ricky Gervais's study of bereavement, which he writes, directs and stars in – is broadcast during lockdown. We've quickly become used to a different pace of life – slower, less rooted... Read more... |
The Taming of the Shrew, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - a confused and toothless messSaturday, 08 February 2020
Say what you will about The Taming of the Shrew (and you’ll be in good company), but it is one of Shakespeare’s clearest plays. Asked to summarise the action of, say, Richard II or Love’s Labours Lost and you might lose your way somewhere between... Read more... |
Midnight Movie, Royal Court review - sleepless and digitalWednesday, 04 December 2019
Eve Leigh is an experimental playwright who has tackled difficult issues for more than a decade. Yet most members of the public will know her, and her actor husband Tom Penn, as the neighbours who recorded an altercation between Boris Johnson and... Read more... |
The Wind of Heaven, Finborough Theatre review - a welcome, if strange, Emlyn Williams rediscoverySaturday, 30 November 2019
This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.If it's a truism that neglected plays may well have... Read more... |
Edinburgh International Festival 2019 review: Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial SalvationWednesday, 14 August 2019
It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least according to Miles, scientist turned messiah, who lost his son in an accident at a frozen lake, and who experienced visions of an impending apocalypse in his subsequent coma.He’s established a colony... Read more... |
First Person: Damian Cruden on reinvigorating the Bard away from London with Shakespeare's RoseTuesday, 02 July 2019
How we deliver culture in the modern day is complex. There are many misconceptions about where and who is capable of leading the nation’s cultural charge. The accepted conceit is that if culture doesn’t emanate from certain places, like London or... Read more... |
