history
Tom Birchenough
Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains. It’s a subject that has been tackled by many of the continent’s filmmakers, prime among them perhaps Pablo Larrain in Chile, for whom such explorations have themselves become part of the slow process of moving on from that past.The Clan has Argentina's Pablo Trapero dramatising a real-life story from the 1980s that is as chilling as they come, while the manner in which he approaches it only underlines Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El Dorado to be stripped of its riches. In most jungle movies, including The Mission and The Emerald Forest, the indigenous population is romanced or demonised, or a mixture of both. Werner Herzog, with Aguirre, God of Wrath and Fitzcarraldo, managed to temper the exoticism that tends to colour the outsider’s view of nature untouched and cultures Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
From the schoolroom straight to the throne: it was a rapid rise for 18-year-old Victoria, and managing as monarch wasn’t helped when everyone around you had their own agenda and was raring to act on your behalf. Moving nicely from TARDIS to palace – and mercifully from Alexandrina (even worse as the shorter 'Drina) to Victoria – Jenna Coleman in the title role combined wide-eyed innocence with an independence and hints at a steelier impetuosity that delivered well in this opening episode (of eight) of what has already been dubbed the new Downton.And not only because of its primetime Sunday Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as vigilante. For him radical intervention was the only way of responding to the social breakup of the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse brought his society to a profound low point, both psychologically and economically, while those nominally in power were conspicuous by their inaction, or worse. He's been doing it ever since.Mokhnenko’s charisma is at the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Much like Margaret Thatcher’s tearful tumble from Downing Street, the haggard, hoarse Tony Blair who materialised after Chilcot must have given even his enemies pause. The glib, youthful Nineties spin-master now recalled Scrooge’s reproachful future ghost, a man mutely begging to be shriven. The last person he’d choose for such confession, though, would surely be George Galloway, whose presence as presenter may handicap this film’s reception. If any politician is even more toxic than Blair, it’s Gorgeous George. Still, this crowd-funded documentary is a lively, well-researched investigation Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…The title song (Now and Forever by M83) became increasingly haunting as the weeks and wigs (often with heads still attached) rolled by. The series lost interest in sex as more and more bricks were laid, the palace took shape and glory shone Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Flames of Paris, in Alexei Ratmansky's 2008 reworking, is a ballet of contrasts. Between the first and second acts, so different in pace and quality, between the naturalistic intimacy of certain pas de deux and the stylised posturing of the crowd scenes, between the tedious masque in Act I and the fireworks show-off variations in Act II, between the liquid velvet blood-red curtains and the flat black-and-white line drawing sets.But it works, and that's down in large part to the choreographer's clever transformaton of the Stalin-pleasing Soviet ballet by Vasily Vainonen into something much Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The American northwest is gorgeous: endless lakes, limitless ocean, mountains, forests, overwhelming blue skies in deepest summer, mists and of course rain, in one of the wettest places on earth – 4 metres of rain annually. Here were hundreds of islands too, archipelagos in a land almost infinitely rich in resources, from the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia south to Washington State.We were on an extended visit, on foot, canoe, kayak, speedboat and car, guided by the enthusiastically knowledgable Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum. The landscape was punctuated by visiting Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the middle of the last century the worst thing that could be said about a working-class housewife was that she had “run off with a black man”. Well, the Queen of France, no better than she ought to be, has had it off with a black man (in fact her pet dwarf). Last week’s opening episode of Versailles ended with Louis XIV (George Blagden) setting eyes on the resulting black baby for the first time.The second episode immediately picks up the baby and runs with it – all the way to a blind wet nurse from whose breast the sinister henchman Marchal (Tygh Runyan) plucks it before attempting Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Cornelia Parker invited over 60 fellow artists to join her in exhibiting at the Foundling Museum in London. Titled Found, the show spills out from the basement gallery to infiltrate every room in the building and remind us that, when the Foundling Hospital was set up as a charity for destitute children in 1739, artists made an important contribution. William Hogarth invited friends to exhibit at and donate work to the hospital while Handel ensured the charity's place in the social calendar by giving benefit concerts there every year. The museum contains some moving exhibits; when Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allegedly one of the worst plays Shakespeare wrote (which he may have done in cahoots with Thomas Nashe), the first part of Henry VI emerged victorious from this TV adaptation. Whereas one might think twice about chopping and rejigging Hamlet or King Lear, director and co-adapter Dominic Cooke had applied some muscular compressing and reshaping which meant that the piece gathered pace steadily, and was thundering ahead at full steam by the time it hit the final credits.Mind you, it wasn't strictly Henry VI Part 1, since some of the later scenes (most notably the harrowing denunciation and Read more ...