England
Joseph Walsh
The first series of the BBC and HBO’s fantasy adventure His Dark Materials felt even more timely than when author Phillip Pullman first published Northern Lights twenty-five-years ago. The second season builds on the heady mix of philosophy and theology, and more than a touch of environmentalism, all delivered as a thrilling adventure yarn in the mould of C S Lewis but with a very different attitude towards religion. The main thrust remains sure-footed in teaching young and old that speaking truth to power is no bad thing when the power is authoritarian in nature. At the centre of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There's something deeply uncanny about Adrian Shergold's Cordelia. When the film's poster was released on social media, many mistook it for a kinky period drama with the power dynamics reversed. It definitely isn't a costume drama, but there's some kink. It's unlikely the filmmakers intend this as a stunt, but it serves well enough to forewarn audiences that not all is as it seems with this film. Cordelia is a strange psychological chamber piece that's reminiscent of Adrian Lyne's masterful, and genuinely terrifying Jacob's Ladder, with elements of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider was a film of rare honesty and beauty. Who would have thought she’d be able to top the power of that majestic docudrama? But with Nomadland she has.To call it a loose adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, isn’t quite right. That book profiled many eccentric characters who have rejected capitalist America and hit the road to live a freer and perhaps more noble way of life. Free from the constraints of modern living they’ve adopted something that echoes the spirit of the first pioneers. In the film, Zhao mixes fact with Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had watching Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a mature couple pootling around the UK in their humble camper van. They bicker about the satnav voice, argue the merits of the shipping forecast, and both give such convincing performances that you’d think they’d been together for decades. While this might all sound as comfy as an old sweater, director/writer Harry Macqueen’s (Hinterland) sophomore feature is anything but, being a tender, heartfelt drama concerning love and loss, and tackling the tough subject of dementia. Tucci is Tusker, a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. As a literary artefact, Lee's exhaustive chronicle is a lot of words, and it's tempting to see her achievement as the non-fiction equivalent of, say, The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's grandly conceived, three-part epic about political and intellectual life in 19th-century Russia.The difference here is that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stillness works like a stealth bomb in Nights in the Garden of Spain, in which Tamsin Greig further confirms her status as one of this country's finest actresses. Kicking off the final pairing in an indispensable series of Alan Bennett double bills at the Bridge Theatre that will be greatly missed once they depart our midst at the end of this month, Greig reprises the role of the softly spoken Rosemary that she first performed on the BBC this summer; her stage successor on this occasion is Maxine Peake's boisterous Miss Fozzard. But such was the mesmeric effect of Greig, hands clasped Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Getting dark," or so comments Irene Ruddock (a pitch-perfect Imelda Staunton) in passing midway through A Lady of Letters, and, boy, ain't that the truth? Both this monologue, and the one that precedes it (Playing Sandwiches, featuring the mighty Lucian Msamati), find Alan Bennett in fearlessly penetrating, ever-darkening mode. The Bridge Theatre's invaluable series of Talking Heads double bills enters its final phase of openings this week (the closing pair with Tamsin Greig and Maxine Peake has its press night this evening), and no praise is too high for the astonishing array of actors Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s no secret that Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation lays claim to more appearances on screen than any other fictional character. Over the past several decades, we’ve seen Sherlock as a pugilist action-hero, a modern-day sleuth, and in a painfully unfunny slapstick guise. Now there’s a feminist spin in which "The World's First Consulting Detective" is pushed aside in favour of his younger sister Enola, played by Millie Bobby Brown, in a peppy adventure yarn.Based on the young adult novels by Nancy Springer and adapted by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), we are thrust Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most painterly and ominous sequence in Nocturnal naturally occurs at night. Until recently strangers, 33-year-old Pete (Cosmo Jarvis) and 17-year-old Laurie (Lauren Coe) gaze across a body of seawater to a miniature chemistry set – a tract of illuminated industrial buildings and smoke-belching cooling towers. Initially these bright satanic mills occupy the foot of the frame, the rest of it a vast black void; then they glide disarmingly close to Pete and Laurie as he drives among them.Perhaps the film’s director Nathalie Biancheri and its inspired cinematographer Michal Dymek intended Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In what would have been the year her father, the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar turned 100, sitarist and composer Anoushka Shankar pays tribute to him and builds on his legacy in this online Prom. The pre-recorded first half saw Shankar collaborate with electronic producer, composer and performer Gold Panda for a half hour long continuous piece, Variations. Written in response to her experiences of her father as a teacher, recordings of Ravi Shankar’s instructions on how to perform ragas were sampled, with Anoushka’s playing demonstrating his insights. The piece soon evolved into a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
William Nicholson’s Shadowlands screenplay was his most devastating expression of English repression. His second film as director goes to the source, in this fictionalised account of his parents’ divorce, which he waited till they were dead to make. Grace (Annette Bening) and Edward (Bill Nighy) are the couple who finish when he walks out one Sunday morning, Jamie (Josh O’Connor) the torn son. The Sussex coastal backwater of Seaford is the picturesque backdrop, filmed with more feeling than the script.Grace is an unreasonable woman, Edward an over-reasonable man. The clockwork which let these Read more ...