England
Graham Fuller
In John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962), draughtsman Vic (Alan Bates), still reeling from a drunken binge and a fight with his typist wife Ingrid (June Ritchie) and her mother (Thora Hird), staggers into the railway station of their grim Northern English town. To leave or not to leave? That is the question that also tests the mettle of another young Northerner (Tom Courtenay) in another Schlesinger film written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.Whereas getting on a train with sometime girlfriend Liz (Julie Christie) would prove the manhood of the hero of Billy Liar (1963), for Vic it Read more ...
Saskia Baron
If one was going to write the recipe for a classic British children’s film, it would probably include the following: adapt much-loved novel; hire fresh-faced young actors and well-worn comedians; budget for steam trains chugging over viaducts; ensure messing around in boats; add lashings of pop and sprinkle with a faint whiff of jeopardy. Swallows and Amazons has all of the above, and watching it is a bit like being transported back in time, not just to the 1930s when the story is set, but to a childhood Sunday evening when settling down to watch a BBC serial was a bittersweet pleasure, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Jazz,” said Keith Jarrett once, “is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple." For an audience, it produces a never-to-be repeated event: yes, you were there, and you didn’t miss it. One of the pleasures of seeing a group at the peak of contemporary jazz like The Impossible Gentlemen is to witness that joyous, open-minded and defiant spirit. In six years of existence, and now presenting their third album, the trust between the members of the group has visibly deepened. There is also a sense they are evolving, that they can and will go still further.The rhythmic Read more ...
bella.todd
Watching Cameron Mackintosh’s joyful revision of this Sixties musical, it’s possible to believe for a moment that all the world needs now is love sweet love and a shit-ton of banjos. With a new book by Downton Abbey behemoth Julian Fellowes, new numbers by the pair behind hit musical Mary Poppins, and design that delights at every turn of the multi-revolve, Half A Sixpence seems destined to follow a flush of previous Chichester Festival musicals into the West End. It also puts vintage stars around the previously unknown name of Charlie Stemp.Charlie Stemp. Isn’t that just the best name? It’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The last time but one that the Three Choirs Festival was in Gloucester the main offering was Elgar’s oratorio The Kingdom, and there’s a kind of inevitability about the same work turning up again, same place, same occasion, six years later. After all, the Three Choirs has not survived for almost 300 years by a fidgety policy of constant renewal. The festival may be a much more varied affair now than in its Barchester days, but the core image is still of a packed cathedral listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams or Mendelssohn – and all these composers figure this time, with the bold, slightly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone looking for some psychedelic pop to at least give the illusion that we might now actually be in the middle of summer could do much worse than try out the debut album by Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers. Their 21st century twist on the Monkees’ good grooves is just what the doctor ordered, and Barth Corbelet and Del Vargas’s sun-drenched harmonies and catchy, fuzzy guitars are guaranteed to generate big smiles and some serious rump-shaking from even the most unconfident of dancers.Post Exotic comes straight out of the traps with a bucket load of swagger and the knowing smirk of “Anvers”. “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Accustomed as we now are to superheroes who can change size and shape, fly at nuclear speeds, levitate ships and vibrate themselves through walls, a bloke wearing pedal-pushers and jumping out of trees might be considered a bit of an under-achiever. Nonetheless Tarzan is back yet again (more than 200 Tarzan movies have been made since 1918), and Warner Bros are doubtless hoping to kick off a new big-budget franchise.If so, it's not a promising start. One of several damaging mistakes was casting Alexander Skarsgård (son of Stellan) as the simian-friendly protagonist. It must have been hard Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are often times as adults, that we feel ill-prepared for dealing with situations that arise. There is no equivalent of a Brownie’s badge for “taking responsibility” “progressing the career ladder”, “finding your life partner” or “coping with grief”. But by age 30, somehow, inexplicably, we’re supposed to have it all under control. Rachel Tunnard’s debut feature film departs from this social norm, and takes a look at what happens when the dream is derailed.Anna is a sub-functional almost 30-year-old living in a shed at the foot of her mother’s garden. She dresses, acts and speaks like a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Harold Brighouse's time-honoured English comedy from a century ago survives, its virtues mostly intact especially once attention shifts away from the snarling patriarch of the title, Henry Horatio Hobson (a padded Martin Shaw), to the generation of women beneath him – his peppery, politically and socially progressive eldest daughter, Maggie (Naomi Frederick), chief among them.Director Jonathan Church, the former Chichester Festival Theatre chief here doubling as co-producer, does well to release the Lear-like underpinnings of a play, set in 1880 Lancashire, that charts its own portrait of an Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The accelerating glorification, in the West at least, of the handmade is a fascinating phenomenon, perhaps a subliminal fight back against overwhelming industrialisation and the age of the robots. And perhaps nowhere is the admiration and commercial possibility accruing to the handmade artefact more evident than in British companies who can label themselves as By Royal Appointment. Four such enterprises, ranging from a two-man band in a country manor to a full-scale factory, are the subject of this series, with the silver and goldsmithing of The House of Benny, Steinway pianos and John Lobb Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're disabled, it certainly helps to be as indecently rich as you are handsome while you make plans to end your life: that, in short, is the preposterous take-away message from Me Before You, the film version of the Jojo Moyes bestseller which Moyes herself has adapted for the screen. I haven't read the book and would imagine that the material's multiple irritations, both large-scale and small, might be somewhat more tolerable not blown up into celluloid dimensions.But as brought to the screen by OIivier Award-winning theatre director Thea Sharrock, who has spent her stage career Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s a foolish game to wonder who might fill the musical void left by Amy Winehouse’s passing. She was a one-off, after all. However, it’s natural to occasionally look about and ponder where there might be talent of a similar ilk. Not all the doomed druggy stuff, just a female singer who does it from the gut rather than X Factor-flavoured fluffing. Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Zara Larsson et al seem unlikely to even get their round in; of Winehouse’s immediate peers, Duffy’s disappeared and Adele’s become a theatrical torch singer (albeit a very likeable one), and all those Kate Bushy kooks, Read more ...