Features
mark.hudson
There’s movement towards a walk after lunch, but by the time everyone’s hummed and hawed about where they might go, rubbed their bellies after one too many forcemeat balls and argued about who put the Guardian Quiz where, it’s already dark and there’s only you and one other still up for it. They cry off – a mercy – and you’re alone, heading out across the garden, along the path towards the headland. As you crest the dark bank you’re hit by freezing wind and the radiance of the moon’s path across the icy sea. Instantly you’re outside the cosy fug of gleaming baubles, leftover turkey and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jan Gossaert’s The Adoration of the Kings, painted in 1510-15, is a sumptuous, richly detailed and even, to us today, slightly hilarious painting. It’s the large central panel of a Flemish altarpiece which includes practically every motif of the subject possible in a heady mix of ingredients.With its meticulous attention to detail, its exquisite rendering of texture and material, it’s a Northern Renaissance painting par excellence. The central figure is the Virgin, unusually all in blue – ultramarine being among the most expensive pigments of the time – with one of those little old babies, so Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The term “snow day” may have been coined with the most recent spate of cold winters in mind, encapsulating the modern-day, not to mention British, consequences of winter weather, but Hendrick Avercamp’s Seventeenth-century “snow day”, painted in around 1615, is a hearty reminder that nothing changes. And just as today we tend to fall into two camps, those determined to enjoy the weather and those irritated by the disruption, Avercamp’s scene on a frozen Dutch river depicts all types, ages and temperaments.Amongst gleeful figures equipped with skates and sledges, tradesmen determined to Read more ...
Andy Plaice
There’s a wonderful moment in Bruce Reynolds’s autobiography when he describes what became of his mate, a fellow train robber who had fled to Canada but was hunted down by the enigmatic Tommy Butler. Four and a half years after the Great Train Robbery in which crooks made off with £2.6million, Detective Chief Superintendent Butler had come to arrest Charlie Wilson and was knocking on his door."You look well, Charlie," said Butler. To which the fugitive replied: "And you, Guv. Cup of tea?" The detective was determined to find his man and, 50 years later, it’s a feeling shared by writer Chris Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
White noise saturates the air. At mind-melting volume, it shifts through the aural spectrum to settle on the bass end. A voice begins yelling angry-sounding gobbets. The words are unintelligible. The stage is in darkness. Gradually, it becomes possible to make out the source of this impassioned diatribe. It’s a non-descript, white, bespectacled young man in a T-shirt. This nerdy fellow stops for a moment. So does the accompanying noise. Then his guitar-toting accomplice piles on slab after slab of noise. The experience is akin to the melding of an industrial garbage compactor, a concrete Read more ...
Iestyn Davies
“A cold coming we had of it,” grumble the three kings in T S Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” later set by Britten as his Canticle IV. “Just the worst time of year for a journey,” they complain, carried onwards by the ungulate bass notes of the piano. Barely 48 hours after having stepped foot on the harsh, wintry Russian soil my two travelling companions (Ian Bostridge and Peter Coleman-Wright) and I lined up on the stage of the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and delivered Britten’s five Canticles, weary eyed and journey worn. One could say this was life imitating art, save for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Perhaps 20 people in thick puffa jackets and clumpy boots crouched behind a wooden sea wall on a shingle beach in Whitstable. Or Islington-on-Sea, to give it its modern name. The north coast of Kent glittered in the sun. Across the Medway you could see the contours of Essex in stark outline. The shelled-out husk of a matinee idol, silver mane flying wildly in the bitter wind, hobbled to his mark on the other side of the sea-wall. He was on crutches after breaking a hip in a Christmas tumble. When the first AD called “Action!”, Peter O’Toole began to play out his last scene on the last day of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, in his symbolic walk to freedom as he emerged on foot from captivity in 1990, his astute performance at the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and then finally in death, announced just as an epic new film of his life was being premiered in London, the seat of the old colonial power.Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, which opens in early January, is by no means the first film to feature Mandela. Hollywood has co-opted him, as has television in South Africa, Britain, America and, first of all Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty was the deserved big winner at the European Film Awards, with Best Film, Director, Actor and Editor. The bigger question the European Film Academy needs to confront is how few of its winners seemed to really care. A crisis in European film is often declared from this ceremony’s stage. But the most virtuously idealistic of the major awards shows, intended to embody the dreams of the post-war European project, has a crisis of its own.The Awards were visibly strapped for cash this year, with fewer guests packed into an intimate theatre venue, the Haus der Read more ...
theartsdesk
OK, R Kelly is gross. We knew that. The number of deeply creepy and abusive acts he's been accused of beggars belief (just Google if you want grotty details, it's all on Wikipedia). The fact that he continues happily along his way with wealth and public adoration fully intact must make him feel invincibleEven so, he still maintains an ability to shock and gross out. A lot of people are probably taking this sleeve as a très hilaire arch joke, just as they did with Kelly's preposterous and (go on, you can admit it) deepy rubbish Trapped in the Closet films. But look: it's a bunch Read more ...
jillian.edelstein
In 1997 I was in South Africa working on Truth and Lies, my book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when the New York Times Magazine said that they were doing a major feature on Mandela. He’d been in office for three years. The photographs were taken in the presidential house, the former seat of the oppressors. It felt very surreal for me because even the décor was Cape Dutch furniture. It was not what you might imagine for a black president.I had already been told that I was not allowed any flash because his retinas had been damaged by his work on the limestone quarry, chiselling Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Turin, December 2013. Berlusconi has finally been kicked out of the Italian parliament. The country is disaffected, fed up with its politicians, broke. Youngsters, including university students, have no hope for the future. It’s a perfect time for them to become acquainted with New Hollywood cinema.One of the most appealing aspects of the Turin Film Festival is the quality of its retrospectives, which are astutely chosen, intelligently curated and extensive. A Nicholas Ray retrospective in 2009 was revelatory, and helped point the way to the rediscovery (and full restoration) of his long-lost Read more ...