old age
My Perfect Mind, Young Vic TheatreWednesday, 10 April 2013
"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to the lowest reaches of human experience.Unsurprisingly, it... Read more... |
DVD: AmourTuesday, 12 March 2013
For all the brilliance of its leads – Jean-Louis Trintignant back in the cinema after many years, Emmanuelle Riva cruelly pipped for an Oscar – it’s easily forgotten that Amour is a zeitgeist film. As the First World’s population ages, narratives of... Read more... |
QuartetTuesday, 01 January 2013
Assured, warm and comfy, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet is a tasteful farce of froths and strops. Hoffman’s always wanted to direct and it’s not like he hasn’t tried. Dead Poets Society slipped from his hands, both starring and directing... Read more... |
AmourMonday, 12 November 2012
In the 1960s the Kiwi cartoonist Kim Casali started the comic strip Love is… which mawkishly defined love in a series of statements like, “Love is…being able to say you are sorry” - messages still printed on Valentine’s cards to this day. In... Read more... |
Goodbye to All That, Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 28 February 2012
The Royal Court has been finding and developing young writers for four decades. Its Young Writers Festival has helped launch the careers of a variety of talents such as Simon Stephens (winner of the 2005 Olivier for Best Newcomer), Christopher Shinn... Read more... |
The Best Exotic Marigold HotelTuesday, 21 February 2012
Travel, health permitting, knows few age barriers (if it did, there would be no Elderhostel), nor does charm, so there are two reasons up front why The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fully deserves to win over the so-called "grey pound" market and much... Read more... |
CD: Leonard Cohen - Old IdeasSaturday, 28 January 2012
Elegantly riding an upswing that began with his return to touring in 2008, Leonard Cohen's first album in eight years finds him deep into his seventies and more than ever with mortality on his mind. Which makes it all the more delicious that the... Read more... |
Salt, Root and Roe, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 15 November 2011
Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau’s lives of “quiet desperation”. But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude – that it is therefore a mark of wisdom and the wise to avoid acts of desperation – has been taken... Read more... |
Salt of LifeMonday, 08 August 2011
Mid-August Lunch (2009) was the most purely enjoyable of the welcome new wave of Italian films. Watching its writer-director Gianni Di Gregorio, then 59, star as a failed Roman rogue with a lived-in face, swigging wine while failing to corral his... Read more... |
BeginnersTuesday, 19 July 2011
The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the... Read more... |
Pulp, Hyde ParkSunday, 03 July 2011
Well, it pains me to say it, but if there has to be a winner Morrissey edged it. Jarvis was Nadal to Mozza's Djokovic. Both match-fit after appearances at Glastonbury, both would have been invincible against anyone else. But Jarvis was still great,... Read more... |
MammuthThursday, 02 June 2011
In Mammuth the immense Gérard Depardieu hits the road, on both a practical quest and spiritual journey, his enormous form testing the metal of a motorcycle. He is flanked on his travels by the glorious French countryside, wind whipping through his... Read more... |
