Germany
David Nice
No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti. Much of it has to do with what Henry James termed a "divided consciousness": as a nobleman who became a communist in World War Two and was relatively open about his homosexuality, Visconti was able to depict the warped opulence surrounding Ludwig II of Bavaria with a meticulous eye for detail and composition, while analysing the causes of his dramatic decline as a despised outsider (and no, Ludwig was not mad; Visconti was among the first to say so).There's little of the hysteria and excessive Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the end, SS-GB promised more than it could deliver, but it still left us with some memorable images (not least in the cleverly-crafted opening titles) and several excellent performances. The ending even dangled the faintest hint of a sequel, though presumably not one written by the author of the original book, Len Deighton.What this dramatisation did best was to plant chilling glimpses of what it might have been like to be occupied by the Third Reich, and it did so without resorting too much to the familiar cliches of the way Nazism is usually portrayed. Beatings and torture were used more Read more ...
David Nice
Recent British-based productions have taken Wagner's paean to creativity, the reconciliation of tradition and the individual talent, at face value. Graham Vick's long-serving Covent Garden colourfest, with its brilliant staging of the night brawl; David McVicar's sunny Biedermeier celebration at Glyndebourne; best of all, Richard Jones, making Wagner's immaculate all-about-art proposals crystal clear first for Welsh and then for English National Operas: all three have had their share of joy and lightness. Not so Kasper Holten's semi-mess of a show, which is nothing to laugh about at any point Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“What if the Germans had won the war?” has been a recurring theme in fiction, from Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. There was even a predictive pre-war “future history” version, in the form of Katherine Burdekin’s 1937 novel, Swastika Night.In SS-GB, tellified from Len Deighton’s novel by writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who’ve written all the recent Bond movies), it’s November 1941. The RAF’s famous “Few” having failed to stem the Nazi onslaught – the blackly-ironic opening sequence showed us a Spitfire flown by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and Line of Duty, to name merely three recent examples.It gradually emerged again, like a monster from the deep, as the dominant theme of this second series of Unforgotten (★★★★) and writer Chris Lang had been skilful enough to thread it through the very different lives of his protagonists and deliver a finale that lived up to all that had Read more ...
David Nice
Only four flutes were on stage at the start of Jakub Hrůša’s latest concert with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the reins of which he took over from Jonathan Nott last September. Charles Ives would have been amazed to hear his “Voices of Druids” on the strings sounding, along with the solo trumpet, from the distance. I suddenly realised why Hrůša smiled enigmatically when I had asked him in interview the previous day whether he would segue straight from The Unanswered Question into Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude (impossible without strings on the platform, of course). The idea was, in fact Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There aren't many films that at (nearly) three hours in length leave you wanting more. But such is the hypnotic grip cast by Maren Ade's Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann that its final image seems as much the prelude to something as a closing note on what has come before. A dark comedy about a father who risks destroying the daughter he also clearly loves, the movie rides multiple shifts in tone with remarkable ease. You can only imagine the cringe-making American remake that with luck does not await. The title character is in fact the forbidding-looking alias of Winfried Conradi (Peter Read more ...
David Nice
Add three natural trumpets, flawlessly wielded, to chorus and standard period-instrument orchestra, and the seasonal spirit will flow no matter the context. It's true that Bach's Magnificat is not that common a visitor at this time of year - according to the Lutheran church calendar, July is the time to celebrate the pregnant Mary's paean to the Lord, though this spectacular also featured at Christmas in Leipzig with four interpolations - but then its rarity may also be because it challenges all but the best. Which John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists still Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As modern kids, they turned their noses up at “pigs’ kidneys in mustard sauce”, “breaded brains with cauliflower” or “chicken gizzards in lightly spiced broth”. Now, our bland tubes of homogenised innards disguise their beastly origins: “Whatever used to grunt, moo, cackle, neigh, is turned into sausage.”You might say that Günter Grass passed the (almost) 70 years of his writing life in a struggle with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone hoping for a few laughs and a nice bit of catharsis after enduring the eight unstintingly miserable episodes of The Missing would have got none of the former and hardly any of the latter. Writers Jack and Harry Williams had sprung most of their biggest surprises in earlier episodes, such as the revelation that the real Alice Webster was still alive and being held captive in Adam Gettrick's Swiss Alpine cottage, and indeed that Gettrick was the abductor of the girls around whom the story has revolved.Some loose ends were at least tied up. We saw how Gettrick (Derek Riddell) had killed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last encountered Stephen Poliakoff on TV in 2013's Dancing on the Edge, which provoked mixed reactions (not least on theartsdesk). That was the story of a black jazz band in 1930s London, who played gigs at swanky hotels. Close to the Enemy (★) is set in London just after the end of World War Two, and happens to feature a jazz band with a black singer who perform in a once-swanky hotel somewhat gone to seed.Many have pondered over the way the BBC likes to shovel hefty chunks of the licence fee in Poliakoff's direction, and their doubts may not be assuaged by Close to the Enemy, on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has never been afraid of tackling weighty, often philosophical issues head on, and his latest film Francofonia is as pioneering – and, some might say, unnecessarily uncompromising – as ever. It’s nothing less than a meditation on civilisation, its potential for preservation or destruction, and history, seen through the prism of Paris's Louvre. Stretching, and evading, the conventions of both documentary and fiction, it’s perhaps best considered as an art project in itself.Sokurov’s cinematic fascination with the museum as a concept stretches back to his Read more ...