Greece
David Nice
It's official, like it or not: director Katie Mitchell is the high priestess appointed to make plain the ways of ancient family sacrifice to modern man. She had the high ground of collaborating with composer James MacMillan on his stunning new opera The Sacrifice, based on a Mabinogion revenge saga; but the jury's still out over whether her National Theatre retelling of ancient Greek bloodgrudge wasn't rather too doggedly echoed in her production of Handel's Jephtha. Besides, when that came to ENO, there were basic problems of blocking and operatic stagecraft. They loomed large again in this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A father keeps his three adult children in a state of retarded development. They are deprived of books, education, television, indeed denied any access to the world beyond the electronic gates marking the perimeter edge of their known territory. In the place of knowledge is disinformation, disseminated on tapes. The sea is a leather chair, a zombie is a yellow flower, a vagina is a keyboard. And so on. In all this the mother is quiescent, complicit. The father is an absolute patriarch, the source of all morality and law. Dogtooth, a film by Giorgos Lanthimos set in contemporary Greece and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Amazing untold stories remain waiting for cinema. Alejandro Amenábar has found one in the female philosopher Hypatia's quest for knowledge during the religious turmoil that gripped 4th-century Alexandria as the Roman Empire fell into the Dark Ages. Somehow he has managed to parlay the freedom given by his 2004 Foreign Language Oscar for The Sea Inside into a cosmic, 50-million-Euro epic of ideas which leaves Hollywood's narrow narrative parameters far behind.The Spanish director's follow-up to The Sea Inside (starring Javier Bardem as a paraplegic determined to die) apparently took shape Read more ...