Brazil
Kieron Tyler
Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio Original SoundtrackMore than the soundtrack to one of last year's most impactful films, the release of the music for Berberian Sound Studio is a tribute to the memory of Trish Keenan. With her Broadcast partner James Cargill, Keenan had begun working on Peter Strickland’s film before her death in January 2011. Cargill found sound files of her voice on her computer and began from there – a task that must have been both eerie and poignant.Broadcast had long drawn inspiration from Italian soundtrack music and their 2009 album collaboration with The Focus Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We got to the beach around the 10-minute mark. Or “semi-naked suburbia”, as Michael Palin called it. And started patrolling the sands for rounded Brazilian rumps (female). Apparently only adolescent boys do this sort of thing, and television cameramen. A local scholar explained the terms deployed to describe the various body types. The melon, the guitar, the ... you don’t want to know. Palin certainly didn’t look as if he did.You sort of know where you are with Brazil. It’s one of those countries you can feel you’ve visited without ever having actually got round to going. Indeed, until he was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may be the power of suggestion, but there was distinctly laid-back vibe at the packed Royal Albert Hall last night. Clapping between movements (and this was an audience never knowingly under-clapped) wasn’t greeted by the any of the usual hisses, and when a latecomer clattered down the entire length of stalls steps before the Largo of Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 she drew only the most indulgent of laughter. The Brazilians had arrived, bringing with them a warmth that extended well beyond the stage.It seems extraordinary that this should be the first visit of the São Paulo Symphony – one of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end only Robert Altman really knew how to do it: to take a spread of characters and somehow knit their stories together into a satisfactory whole. When filmmakers have attempted it in recent years they’ve tended to self-importance – Paul Haggis in Crash, Alejandro González Iñárritu in Babel – or risibility – Richard Curtis in Love, Actually. And now here comes 360, which riffs on La Ronde to daisy-chain the lives of several characters across the planet. Bring your passport.You’ve got to hand it to director Fernando Meirelles and writer Peter Morgan: they’ve aimed high with a story Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Before the blonde, there was Bergman. In the second half of the 1940s, Hitchcock cast Ingrid Bergman three times, and on each occasion asked her to incarnate a different kind of leading lady. In the film noir Spellbound (1945) she was a psychoanalyst defrosted by Gregory Peck, and she played the loyal sister of a convict in 19th-century Australia in Hitchcock's first colour film, the costumed period piece Under Capricorn (1949). In Notorious (1946), she takes the role of Alicia Huberman, a good-time girl whom we find drowning her sorrows after her father is convicted as a Nazi spook.She is Read more ...
howard.male
The fact of the matter is that this young, supremely talented Brazilian singer-songwriter is no great performer. But is this an issue when the music she makes is so immersive and seductive in its own right? On record, her songs are like ragged collages held together by scraps of tape. They sound like they might dissipate or disintegrate at any moment were it not for the calm authority of her voice holding everything together. This is music that exudes sophistication. But not the easily faked sophistication of smooth-as-cream bossa nova. It’s a post-modern sophistication that credits the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How far would you go, if you were utterly in love? Till death you do part? Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 ballet Romeo and Juliet remains a magnet for audiences and for performers all playing that ritual game with their own feelings. Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares are a married couple, and brought to their single performance (unaccountably) in this new run of Covent Garden’s timeless attraction an infusion of pounding blood and sensual compatibility. Nothing was studied about the pleasure with which Nuñez nuzzled Soares’ neck briefly in their first snatched duet at the Capulet ball, nothing Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two.As you walk around them, the threads visually overlap to produce shimmering moiré patterns. The structure is extremely simple, but rather than diminishing its impact, figuring out how it is done only enhances its mesmeric effect. The installation is titled Web and weaving threads of light through Read more ...
joe.muggs
I know nothing about Brazil, I have come to realise. A Sergio Mendes album here, a Gilles Peterson compilation there, a blurred memory of catching City of God on Film4 once – these do not add up to even the beginnings of insight into a country big and diverse enough to be more like a continent in its own right. As one person I meet early on in Brasilia says, asking someone to tell you what's happening in another of Brazil's regions or cultures “could be like asking someone in Athens to tell you about the scene in Helsinki”.That said, Brasilia itself does bring together a strange blend from Read more ...
howard.male
I first heard Bahia-born Lucas Santtana on the best compilation of contemporary Brazilian music of the past couple of years, Oi! A nova musica Brasileira. His track “Hold Me In”, an acoustic slice of bossa nova, was a quiet interlude amonst all the dance, electronica and rock tracks. But it didn’t really give much indication of what an adventurous musical talent he might be.One curiously satisfying thing about this album is that one hardly notices which songs are sung in Portuguese and which in English (the divide is about 50/50), as focus is constantly being drawn to the sonically Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is ferocious popular cinema. The original Elite Squad (2007) was an iconic hit in Brazil, detailing the training, private lives and bloody ghetto raids of BOPE, the black-suited elite Rio police force led by charismatic Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura). Director José Padilha resisted offers to convert the film’s commercial clout into a TV franchise, instead expanding this sequel into a total indictment of Brazilian society. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is the most politically and socially engaged, best action film this year.Sweaty energy and ruthless narrative momentum grip from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Notwithstanding legends of earlier generations such as Fangio or Jim Clark, it's Ayrton Senna whose name commands the most mystique in the annals of Formula One motor racing. Nor is his reputation limited merely to so-called "petrolheads". Away from the track, he became a kind of deity in his native Brazil, both for his racing feats and his charitable endeavours now continued by the Instituto Ayrton Senna.But he was a complex character, spiritual, deeply religious, yet brutally pragmatic. While he's viewed as a supernatural phenomenon by many, there was a dark and ruthless side to his Read more ...