Features
joe.muggs
After a double set of live studio guests in our last show, it's just Joe and Peter this time, and thus a lot more music and discussion. Our intrepid explorers ponder whether there's anything new under the sun, looking at new-sounding folk and old-sounding electronica, angry British hip hop, Swedish jazz-punk, Mexican boutique hotels, murder blues and Crowley-referencing ambient music. There's an exclusive live recording of an acid folk band covering an acid house classic, a broad selection of sound due to come out in the next month or two, and a donkey joke from Peter that's not to be Read more ...
Philip Hoare
Volcano was written in 1956 when Noël Coward was suffering the dubious status of having become Britain’s first celebrity tax exile. The play – unperformed in his lifetime - is the product of his laidback life in Jamaica, and of a period during which he was regarded as a crumbling colonial relic outmoded by a post-war Labour government and the rowdy commotions of the Angry Young Men back home.Coward’s reputation had taken a battering in the post-war years. The British public were no longer satisfied with reruns of Brief Encounter, and critics such as Beverley Baxter posed the question, " Read more ...
bella.todd
As finales go, you can’t get much better than a pterodactyl flying from the torso of an iron giant and wheeling out over Brighton beach. Last night, as the 2012 Brighton Festival prepared to move into its final day, thousands gathered near the seafront for Waterlitz, the latest free, camera-phone defying outdoor spectacle from bonkers French company Générik Vapeur. A 30-ton figure made from eight metal shipping containers, the structure could apparently be seen from neighbouring Rottingdean, looking like a cross between the Wicker Man and the Angel of the North.It turned out to be more of a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Other towns may choose national heroes as their emblems – posing generals, politicians or sword-wielding officers on horseback, glaring sternly down from their plinths – but not Göttingen. It is entirely in keeping with the unassuming, unobtrusive loveliness of this small town in Lower Saxony that its symbol should be not a grandee but a goose-girl.The delicate art nouveau statue of the young girl and her feathery charges that tops the fountain in the market square (pictured below) is the heart of the town, kissed in ritual celebration by every graduating doctoral student. But while students Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Sightseers is the third film by the young British director Ben Wheatley and the first that might be deemed a comedy; that said, as befits the man who made Down Terrace and Kill List, it is a decidedly twisted one.Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) are a new couple embarking on their first holiday together, a caravan trek around the country to visit his favourite sites. The Critch Tramway Museum and the Keswick Pencil Museum may give some cause to yawn, but this is a big deal for Tina, who is desperate to escape the clutches of her monstrous mum.Unfortunately, she has merely exchanged Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s quite a coincidence when two of the competition films in Cannes take place almost entirely within a stretch limousine. Then again, considering that the movie stars here travel the most ridiculously short distances in such vehicles, it’s entirely appropriate. Following on from Holy Motors, in which the limo doubled as a changing room for an actor-for-hire as he’s driven between assignments, in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis it serves as office, doctor’s surgery and love nest for a Wall Street billionaire on a 24-hour self-destruct.Adapted from Don DeLillo’s novel, this features Robert Read more ...
Benedict Andrews
"How light power would be and easy to dismantle no doubt, if all it did was to observe, spy, detect, prohibit, and punish; but it incites, provokes, produces. It is not simply eye and ear: it makes people act and speak." Michel Foucault, PowerCaligula is a portrait of a tremendous soul in terrible crisis. In Albert Camus’s Caligula, Detlev Glanert has found a gargantuan character – a man whose dreams become his society’s nightmares. After the death of Drusilla, his sister and lover, Caligula’s world loses meaning. Life becomes absolutely unsatisfactory. In Camus’s words, "he becomes obsessed Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The last time that actor Brad Pitt and New Zealand director Andrew Dominik teamed up it was for the epic and elegiac western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their new one, in competition in Cannes, couldn’t be more different.Killing Them Softly is a short, sharp, entertaining crime thriller, with a built-in commentary on America in the shadow of the economic crisis – a situation, of course, created by crooks by another name. Brad Pitt plays a freelance enforcer, Jackie Cogan, called to Louisiana to discover who robbed an illegal card game, a deed that has resulted Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Haneke likes to challenge and provoke us, whether it’s with intellectual puzzles (Hidden), bleak character studies (The Piano Teacher) or a brand of horror that makes us feel uneasily complicit (Funny Games). He’s a brilliant director, and a tough one. So while Love may not be a sudden ray of sunshine, it still feels like a departure for the Austrian, a softening of the provocateur, in which he eschews his customary ironic distance for an intimate and essentially positive account of love in adversity. It is as immaculately made as ever, but also touching and terribly sad, with two Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s cold, grey and damp. Welcome to Leeds. The city centre has grown more homogenous, less distinctive since I arrived here in the 1980s, but there are still delights to be found.There’s an art gallery with a very decent collection of 20th-century British art, adjoining the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute. At the other end of the city centre, on a site once occupied by an enormous utopian housing development, sits the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The building looks more like a large branch of Tesco than a theatre, but it’s thriving, and does attract a broad audience. The lovely old City Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A Salford lad who used to work as a bolt-cutter by day and sing in working men's clubs at night, Russell Watson started out in showbiz by singing popular hits by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond or Simon & Garfunkel alongside a few belters from famous musicals. One night the patron of the Wigan Road Working Men's Club suggested he should have a go at Puccini's "Nessun Dorma"."It was the first operatic piece I ever sang, and that was really where it all started for me," Watson recalled. It lit the fuse on a chain of events that led to Watson signing a deal with Decca and winning himself global Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a normal day in Cannes, which means that I’ve just chatted to Mexican heart-throb Gael García Bernal on the beach, while a mini sand storm battered the doors of our marquee. Bernal is in town with his new film, No, about the events leading to the fall of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But he took a moment to reminisce about his first year here, in 2000, when Amores Perros took Cannes by the scruff of the neck. The film that helped to ignite the Mexican New Wave was not even in the official competition that year, but it was the title on everyone’s lips.As the first week of this Read more ...