François Ozon’s Frantz is an exquisitely sad film, its crisp black and white cinematography shot through with mourning. The French director, in a work where the main language is German, engages with the aftermath of World War One, and the moment when the returning rhythms of life only emphasise what has been lost. The eponymous hero of his film is one of its casualties – we see Frantz only in flashbacks – and his death has left a gaping, if largely unarticulated wound. His erstwhile fiancée Anna (Paula Beer, a revelation) has become effectively his widow, living with Frantz’s parents. That Read more ...

Enlightenment is a wonderful idea, and the members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment who played Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall last night brought the wisdom of today’s period instrument movement to bear on music that most would see as belonging to the age of the pre-Enlightenment. Present-day enlightenment lies not just in historical accuracy, however, but also – from an audience point of view – in catching the spirit of its original creators.The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment do that extremely well. The expertise of their techniques is Read more ...

How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced sterilisation of the disabled in several countries, starting in America in the 1920s and continung in Sweden into the 1970s; its legacy is today’s screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome.One way is to focus on eugenics’ nadir in Nazi Germany, when mentally and physically disabled children and adults were deemed "lives unworthy of life". Unwin, a Read more ...

This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen by Sidney Bernstein and involved commissioning or gathering footage from army cameraman (American, British and Soviet) present at the liberation of the concentration camps, as well as from newsreel cameramen.The assembled film, shot in over 14 locations including Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, did not spare viewers’ sensitivities. Forty-three cameramen Read more ...

“I never saw anything like it,” declares Billy Pilgrim in wonderment. “It’s the Land of Oz.” He has just seen Dresden’s splendour from the train carriage into which he and other American prisoners of war are crammed en route to the city. They’ve been told it will be easier there than the prison camp they’ve left: they will experience less hardship at their new quarters. Dresden is not the Land of Oz, though. The new camp is named Slaughterhouse-Five and fire from above is about to slaughter the city’s residents. Soon, Billy and his fellow prisoners are stacking corpses.February 1945's bombing Read more ...

No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti. Much of it has to do with what Henry James termed a "divided consciousness": as a nobleman who became a communist in World War Two and was relatively open about his homosexuality, Visconti was able to depict the warped opulence surrounding Ludwig II of Bavaria with a meticulous eye for detail and composition, while analysing the causes of his dramatic decline as a despised outsider (and no, Ludwig was not mad; Visconti was among the first to say so).There's little of the hysteria and excessive Read more ...

In the end, SS-GB promised more than it could deliver, but it still left us with some memorable images (not least in the cleverly-crafted opening titles) and several excellent performances. The ending even dangled the faintest hint of a sequel, though presumably not one written by the author of the original book, Len Deighton.What this dramatisation did best was to plant chilling glimpses of what it might have been like to be occupied by the Third Reich, and it did so without resorting too much to the familiar cliches of the way Nazism is usually portrayed. Beatings and torture were used more Read more ...

Recent British-based productions have taken Wagner's paean to creativity, the reconciliation of tradition and the individual talent, at face value. Graham Vick's long-serving Covent Garden colourfest, with its brilliant staging of the night brawl; David McVicar's sunny Biedermeier celebration at Glyndebourne; best of all, Richard Jones, making Wagner's immaculate all-about-art proposals crystal clear first for Welsh and then for English National Operas: all three have had their share of joy and lightness. Not so Kasper Holten's semi-mess of a show, which is nothing to laugh about at any point Read more ...

“What if the Germans had won the war?” has been a recurring theme in fiction, from Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. There was even a predictive pre-war “future history” version, in the form of Katherine Burdekin’s 1937 novel, Swastika Night.In SS-GB, tellified from Len Deighton’s novel by writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who’ve written all the recent Bond movies), it’s November 1941. The RAF’s famous “Few” having failed to stem the Nazi onslaught – the blackly-ironic opening sequence showed us a Spitfire flown by Read more ...

From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and Line of Duty, to name merely three recent examples.It gradually emerged again, like a monster from the deep, as the dominant theme of this second series of Unforgotten (★★★★) and writer Chris Lang had been skilful enough to thread it through the very different lives of his protagonists and deliver a finale that lived up to all that had Read more ...

Only four flutes were on stage at the start of Jakub Hrůša’s latest concert with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the reins of which he took over from Jonathan Nott last September. Charles Ives would have been amazed to hear his “Voices of Druids” on the strings sounding, along with the solo trumpet, from the distance. I suddenly realised why Hrůša smiled enigmatically when I had asked him in interview the previous day whether he would segue straight from The Unanswered Question into Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude (impossible without strings on the platform, of course). The idea was, in fact Read more ...

There aren't many films that at (nearly) three hours in length leave you wanting more. But such is the hypnotic grip cast by Maren Ade's Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann that its final image seems as much the prelude to something as a closing note on what has come before. A dark comedy about a father who risks destroying the daughter he also clearly loves, the movie rides multiple shifts in tone with remarkable ease. You can only imagine the cringe-making American remake that with luck does not await. The title character is in fact the forbidding-looking alias of Winfried Conradi (Peter Read more ...