London
Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated livesSunday, 23 September 2018
Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Chas and DaveSunday, 23 September 2018
Chas Hodges has died at the age of 74, bringing to an end a career that reaches back to the very beginnings of British pop music. He was best known as one half of Chas and Dave. The duo he formed with Dave Peacock were the poster boys of rockney, a... Read more... |
Jansen, LSO, Rattle, Barbican review - nature's splendours and a fond farewellThursday, 20 September 2018
The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle have been launching their new season with a mini-festival, if not so-called, mixing and matching some delectable repertoire. This was their third concert in four days – and its programme was wonderfully shaped, bringing... Read more... |
Classic Albums: Amy Winehouse - Back to Black, BBC Four review - suffering turned into songSaturday, 15 September 2018
Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form. But Classic Albums at least... Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, British Youth Opera review - perfect poise in slippery StravinskyFriday, 07 September 2018
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards... Read more... |
Vanity Fair, ITV review - seductions of social climbingMonday, 03 September 2018
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground... Read more... |
Yardie review - Idris Elba shoots straight in his directorial debutFriday, 31 August 2018
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it... Read more... |
Pericles, National Theatre review - a fizzingly energetic productionMonday, 27 August 2018
A break-dancing mini Michael Jackson, a transvestite Neptune, and a hero who wears his hubris as proudly as his gold-tipped trainers, are unconventional even by Shakespeare’s standards, but they all play a key part in this joyful act of subversion.... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: It Happened HereTuesday, 21 August 2018
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-... Read more... |
Box office poison? Joan Crawford at BFI SouthbankMonday, 30 July 2018
What’s that? Joan Crawford had no sense of humour? Well, take a look at It's A Great Feeling. It’s a pretty bizarre (and pretty bad) 1949 musical with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan playing themselves running round the Warner Brothers lot... Read more... |
Prom 12, Weilerstein, BBCSO, Canellakis review - energetic 20th century classicsTuesday, 24 July 2018
Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto combines the composer’s usual angst and nerviness with a sardonic humour, right from the opening bars, where the cello and orchestra seem to be playing in contradictory keys. At last night’s Prom, cellist Alisa... Read more... |
Mission: Impossible - Fallout review - brilliant summer blockbusterMonday, 23 July 2018
This is the second Mission: Impossible movie written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first time any director has been called back for an encore on the series. He did a smart job on 2015’s Rogue Nation, but this time he has pulled out... Read more... |
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