Reviews
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What a strange little film, uncertain if it’s a Hitchcockian thriller or a comedic poke at the shibboleths of psychoanalysis, A Private Life is definitively a vehicle for Jodie Foster, comèdienne. The American pulls off an impeccable accent in her first French-speaking role, playing Dr Lillian Steiner, an expat psychiatrist who treats patients from her elegant Parisian home. Unmoored by the suicide of Paula, a patient whose husband blames Steiner for prescribing the fatal pills, the doctor becomes convinced that in fact murder was the cause of death.A Private Life looks lovely, Paris Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature is a punkish, gothic, genre-dancing, feminist riot, whose verve, imagination and serious intent don’t really need the enforcement of an exclamation mark. If an extremely enjoyable film suffers from anything, it might be a tendency to overegg.This is a rare and atypically fulsome outing for The Bride herself, a macabre mate for the lonely monster, who was literally never completed in Mary Shelley’s novel, and was a mere cameo in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Here, as manifested by the astronomically ascendant Jessie Buckley, she’s front Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A brand new sign in a contemporary font (Centra No.2 I am told) signals my arrival at the wooded grounds of Goodwood Art Foundation. This contrast, between cool, clean design and the timeless but perhaps parochial charms of the English countryside makes for a fascinating morning at this recently renamed and revamped sculpture park in rural West Sussex. Beyond the art world, Goodwood has long been known for horse racing and motor racing. Now, thanks to a progressive landscape gardener, a modernist architect, an outreach programme and media support from Bloomberg Connects, it offers an art Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
CMAT knows how to make an entrance. The opening of this show, in common with the rest of her tour, featured her band assembling onstage before a spotlight was suddenly shone on the back of the room – and there was Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, in a vivid green outfit and snazzy spectacles, standing on a raised section usually home to seats.It was a fitting entrance that could have nestled on the silver screen alongside the varied tunes from films played over the PA before the gig started. Thompson is an undoubted star these days, a charismatic and energetic mega watt performer. This gig, part of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The indomitable Nicolas Kent has devised a new theatre piece to prick our consciences and refocus our minds, after his sterling work on the ugly underbelly of the Afghan wars and the Grenfell inquiry, inter alia. This one is less polished though not lacking in grit.Originally a project much like Kent’s The Great Game, a loose assemblage of full-length plays from leading writers about invasions of Afghanistan over the centuries, this has emerged as five much shorter plays about different aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The series has a chronological sweep, starting with Jonathan Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason follows up Godland with an equally striking film, this one about a moribund marriage. It’s a living album of impressions and memories, small incidents and fragmented snapshots, with no conventional narrative shape. Yet there’s a coherence and weight lent to all these disparate elements by the teasing affection of the director’s lens.The family preparing for the break-up are parents Anna (Saga Gartharsdóttir), an artist, and Magnus, known as Maggi (Sverrir Guthnason), a trawlerman, with their young family: two boys (Thorgils and Grímur Hlynsson, Pálmason’ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
My walk through Hyde Park was an absolute joy. Spring is in the air, the weeping willow is in leaf (pictured below right: photo by S.K), the narcissi are in bloom and the sun was shining, yet the Serpentine Gallery is plunged into darkness.The lights are dimmed to enable you to see David Hockney’s frieze of iPad paintings which wrap around the gallery walls in a continuous strip. Of the 200 or so pictures he made in the course of a year following the changing seasons in Normandy, where he has a studio, roughly 100 are on show (main picture: detail). But even when your eyes have adjusted to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My last St John Passion arrived during the Proms in the vast hanger of the Royal Albert Hall, where the impeccable, discreet musicianship of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan sometimes struggled with the chilly open spaces all around. At St Martin-in-the-Fields yesterday evening, no such problems: the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with Peter Whelan directing, balanced intimacy and grandeur in a reading whose visceral impact and involving immediacy wholly filled the church, while never overwhelming it. Vocally and instrumentally, the Monteverdi singers and EBS Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Martin Hayes play the Irish fiddle is like watching a man possessed by his music. As his bow flickers across the strings the infectious energy of it spills into the air, through his limbs, and eventually out into the whistling, whooping crowd. Through the course of his career, Hayes – most famous for founding the Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming – has joined forces with musicians ranging from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma, and played everywhere from small pubs to Obama’s Whitehouse. At Koko last night, with his ensemble The Common Ground, his virtuoso repertoire of Irish Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Middle East is on fire – again. So Ryan Craig’s brilliantly provocative play, The Holy Rosenbergs, is more relevant than ever. Near the start, a rabbi says, “Everyone feels strongly about what’s happening out there”, and since he’s referring to tensions between pro-Israel and anti-Israel Jews, he’s definitely touching a nerve, both in the play and in the audience. Yes, this revival of Craig’s family drama, originally staged at the National Theatre in 2011, and now with a cast that includes Adrian Lukis, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Nicholas Woodeson, retains all of its power to disturb.Set in Read more ...