Eugene Jarecki’s forensic investigation concludes that Julian Assange’s character flaws are dwarfed by the high crimes he exposed, and can’t justify the cruel and unusual punishment of his cramped Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary. This reverses what he sees as self-interested manipulation of the official narrative, which stoked personal condemnation as a smokescreen for state slaughter and surveillance.Character has dominated Assange’s evolving cinema persona, which began with fellow Australian Robert Connolly’s admiring Underground (2012), an account of young Julian the teen hacker in the barely Read more ...

There were moments during the starry, two-evening Beare’s Chamber Music Festival when the quality of the playing reached such heights, it was tempting to ask if a higher level of chamber music-making can or even could exist anywhere. So, although London already has an incredibly rich and vibrant chamber music scene, this event – in its second edition and planned to take place every two years -  is clearly additive to it. The two concerts were vociferously applauded, especially  the second, Wigmore Hall concert, in which there were standing ovations at the end of each half.The two Read more ...

JB Priestley’s glorious pot shot at marital complacency in pre-First World War Bradford proves to be a tonic at a time of year where, for better or for worse, many people are forced to play happy families. Written in 1938 – seven years before his markedly different An Inspector Calls – it was so successful that it went on to be the first play ever broadcast live on television. Though you couldn’t imagine it appealing to broadcasting bosses today, that doesn’t detract from Tim Sheader’s assured, mischievous production, which transports us to a confidently hideous drawing room with mustard Read more ...

In a warehouse, Tube trains rumbling below, Noah, his sister Tamara and his (Gentile) girlfriend Maud, live in a disused space, a North London simulacrum of a kibbutz, but with drug dealers at the door, unhinged co-tenants wandering in and out and a Christmas tree in the corner.Their father, Elliot, is visiting this kinda home for a kinda Christmas dinner which is also to be attended by Jack (now calling himself Aaron), Tamara’s kinda ex-bf, who moved to Tel Aviv for its skinny dipping and various other ‘Berlin of the East’ attractions. He brings a suitcase, but he and Tam have far more Read more ...

“My goal was to take the Messiah as if it had been written yesterday,” the conductor and eminent French harpsichordist Christophe Rousset told Tom Service on Radio 3 on Saturday. “[It would be] as if we had received the score for the first time… [and were thinking] wow, how amazing this piece is and how fresh it can be.”“Wow” was certainly a word that came to mind as the English Baroque Soloists launched into the Messiah’s French-style overture with nimble ebullience, emphasising the beats in bold stripes of tonal colour. It was as if Rousset, one of our most stylish and subversive Read more ...

With teasing timing, the latest revival of a Tom Stoppard play at the Hampstead Theatre arrived just hours after his funeral, a weird echo of his maxim, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” As at its debut in 1995, Indian Ink features a luminous Felicity Kendal, but this time not as perky young poet Flora but in the role of her older sister Eleanor, 65 years on,The plot follows a favourite Stoppard trajectory, of seeing the past as a puzzle demanding investigation. It’s a strategy he used to best effect in the earlier Arcadia (1993); the resolution of the puzzle here is less enigmatic, Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHManduria Bite Me (Wild Honey) Image The debut from Milan punkers Manduria is a six-tracker haemorrhaging rock’n’roll cheek and sass. They riff and fuzz and bang about without a care in the world, shouting and revelling in reverb mess, howling like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while cranking up the amps like The Cramps, the rhythm section indulging in a mono-stomp that penetrates the inner brain like Joe Pesci’s vice. There’s a track called “I Hate to Think” and you don’t need to. On “Buongiorno” they slow things down for a dip Read more ...

Bat away your lurgy, stop that coffin’ and get up to Finsbury Park for a laugh laden, ballad blitzing, sensational spoof starring the toothsome Transylvanian. If that sentence is boiling your blood with its rich vein of bad humour, you’ll be spitting bile in the house; if not, you’ll be so relaxed at the end of the evening, you shan’t be needing your statins before bedtime.Because there’s little we need more right now than laughter, the best medicine, natch and that’s what we get - liberally laced with groans, because no joke is too daddish for Dan Patterson and Jez Bond - with a smattering Read more ...

Wonder is a word that is used too often in theatre, somewhat emptied of meaning by marketing’s emasculating of language. It’s used even less honestly by critics - we’ve seen too much to really feel wonder. But, for the first time since seeing the RSC’s magnificent My Neighbour Totoro, I’m here to tell you I was as wide-eyed as the Sophies sitting transfixed in my row as this lovely show unfolded before us. The story, beautifully, and, one trusts, uncontroversially, adapted by Tom Wells, will be familiar to many (but was not to me) begins in an orphanage where Sophie and Kimberley bicker Read more ...

Towards the end of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's run-through of their old album Howl, bassist Robert Levon Been told the crowd the "pain was nearly over". By BRMC standards that's a wisecrack, referencing the gloomy, pared-back tone of that 2005 release, but some of the Glasgow audience seemed to have experienced it for real, having headed for either the bar or exits as the set progressed.That is partly on them, given the show was clearly advertised in advance as a 20th anniversary revisitation of Howl. However, it is unquestionably an album that was an odd pick to play in full, lacking many Read more ...

Chinese-American director Bing Liu’s first feature – his Minding the Gap, a wonderful documentary about himself and his skateboarding buddies in Illinois, was Oscar-nominated in 2019 – is based on Atticus Lish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2014 about an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and her relationship with an American soldier who’s done three consecutive tours in Iraq and has severe PTSD.The harsh reality of family abuse and violence in Minding the Gap might lead you to expect something as powerful here, especially as Liu has said that his mother’s immigrant experience mirrors Lish Read more ...

Heard now, 50 years after its release, Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon sounds like what it became: part of the musical template for Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 international breakthrough and also as an integral component of the records The Orb began attracting attention with in the early Nineties. Beyond the aesthetic ripples, a specific aspect of the May 1975 album was and is also significant.Rubycon was one of the first albums by a rock – in its loosest meaning – band to seamlessly incorporate the use of a sequencer. Those with the budget for the gear and the attendant technical know-how could Read more ...