Italy
La Strada, Sadler's Wells review - a long and bumpy roadThursday, 01 February 2024Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Frightened WomanTuesday, 30 January 2024Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme... Read more... |
Ferrari review - a steady, slow-lane biopicWednesday, 27 December 2023Just as Napoleon may be Ridley Scott’s most autobiographical subject, so motor-racing potentate Enzo Ferrari’s mastery of streamlined speed seems made for Michael Mann. But where his best films’ cool control accelerates into calibrated mayhem,... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Ravenna - Riccardo Muti passes on a lifetime's operatic wisdomTuesday, 26 December 2023Does “the practice of opera singing in Italy” need help from UNESCO, which has newly inscribed it on the “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”? Italian opera is surely immensely popular worldwide. But when it comes to... Read more... |
The Dante Project, Royal Ballet review - brave but flawed take on the Divine Comedy returnsMonday, 27 November 2023Singular in its variousness, this is a three-act ballet that need some unpicking. No wonder those hooked on first acquaintance in 2021, like theartsdesk’s dance critic Jenny Gilbert, have been back to see it more than once.So long as you accept that... Read more... |
Un ballo in maschera, Chelsea Opera Group, Cadogan Hall review - Italianate vitality, if not much finesseMonday, 23 October 2023Eighteenth century Sweden is the nominal setting for A Masked Ball, but its essence is a unique mixture of Italian testosterone and French opéra-comique elegance. If this concert performance brought it closer to the indiscriminate vitality of early... Read more... |
Album: Melanie De Biasio - Il ViaggioWednesday, 11 October 2023Il Viaggio is a form of soundtrack. Its lyrics, music and soundscapes are created in response to the journey referenced in the title. Though born and raised in Belgium, Melanie De Biasio’s paternal grandfather was Italian. After the Europalia arts... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Driver's SeatTuesday, 01 August 2023Liz Taylor’s blowsy late-period persona is finessed to its finest point in this 1974 Muriel Spark adaptation, boldly plugging into the mains of her fragile talent.Lise (Taylor) travels from Hamburg to Rome after a mental breakdown, sporting black... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival - invisible cities and possible dreamsMonday, 17 July 2023Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Le Mépris (Contempt)Tuesday, 27 June 2023It’s an odalisque to arouse envy in Titian, Boucher, Ingres, or Manet.Filtered amber, white, and blue lights successively bathe Brigitte Bardot, crowned by that golden cloud, as she asks Michel Piccoli, her co-star and screen husband in Jean-Luc... Read more... |
Amanda review - too-intense Gen Z-er seeks a friend, boyfriend, anythingSaturday, 03 June 2023Needy, truculent, and aggressive, an in-your-face stick of intensity and guilt-inducing melancholy, privileged young Amanda in Carolina Cavalli’s downbeat comedy is the girl no one wants to end up talking to in the kitchen at parties. So... Read more... |
Operation Mincemeat, Fortune Theatre review - high-octane musical comedy hits the big timeThursday, 11 May 2023It’s back yet again, Operation Mincemeat, a gift of a story that goes on giving. It surfaced as the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, based on a 1953 book by Ewen Montagu, one of the MI5 types who came up with the 1943 plan of that name. Its latest... Read more... |
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