Spain
Concerto 1700, L’Apothéose, St John's Smith Square review - rare Spanish treasuresMonday, 15 May 2023
Escapees from Eurovision in Westminster on Saturday night might have discovered that a continent-wide enthusiasm for crowd-pleasing international styles arose long before the age of glitzy pop. Two accomplished Spanish groups performed at St John’s... Read more... |
Life is a Dream, Cheek by Jowl, Barbican Theatre review - savouring the Spanish of a singular masterpieceSaturday, 15 April 2023
Dream versus reality, fate and free will, love and death, nature versus nurture: they’re all here in Calderón de la Barca’ s ever-startling baroque panopticon, a play so precociously meta that every theatrical game from Pirandello onwards deserves... Read more... |
The Beasts review - a countryside idyll loses its charmTuesday, 21 March 2023
The Beasts (As Bestas) is all of two hours and 17 minutes long, and yet to look away is never an option. Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reels the viewer in masterfully as he builds tension and suspense.A well-educated French couple are... Read more... |
Ainadamar, Scottish Opera/Opera Ventures review - worlds collide in fiery fusionFriday, 04 November 2022
Ainadamar - meaning "fountain of tears" in Arabic – is the name given to a natural spring high in the hills above the Andalucian city of Granada, the site where the poet and playwright Federico Garica Lorca was executed in 1936 during the... Read more... |
Official Competition review - satire served coldFriday, 26 August 2022
There are four main protagonists in Official Competition and they all have one thing in common: an overriding ambition to spend more time with their egos.The first of this quartet is Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gómez). He is an 80-year-old... Read more... |
Phoebe Power: Book of Days review - the clack of walking poles, the clink of scallop shellTuesday, 26 July 2022
The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a... Read more... |
The Good Boss review - Javier Bardem at his creepy bestWednesday, 20 July 2022
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Parallel MothersTuesday, 24 May 2022
Parallel Mothers unfolds at a daringly slow pace, and there are moments in the first half of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 drama when you wish that things would speed up. And then you’re wrong-footed by the unexpected shifts in tone and direction, and... Read more... |
Operation Mincemeat review - Colin Firth and co practise the fine art of deceptionFriday, 15 April 2022
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. That version took a few... Read more... |
Parallel Mothers review - letting the dead speakFriday, 04 February 2022
Almodóvar has rarely returned to the petrified Spain of his youth, flinging off Franco’s oppression by ignoring it in his early films of freewheeling provocation, where anarchic, hot freedom was all of the law. In this sober tale of secrets and lies... Read more... |
Off the Rails review - go for the scenery, not the scriptSaturday, 24 July 2021
Mamma Mia! hovers unhelpfully over every frame of Off the Rails, a road movie of sorts in which three women make a music-fueled pilgrimage to Mallorca to honour the wishes of a fourth friend, who has died before time of cancer.The difference here is... Read more... |
Memories of My Father review - the richness of childhood, the cruelty of historySaturday, 27 March 2021
Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Memories of My Father adapts the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 family memoir, which was published in English as Oblivion: the Spanish-language title of both book and film, El Olvido Que Seremos (“... Read more... |
