Reviews
emma.simmonds
Flanked by the wonderfully weird tagline, “If this picture doesn’t make your skin crawl…it’s on TOO TIGHT”, 1974’s Black Christmas is amongst the first fully formed slasher pics. Based on a series of murders that took place in Quebec, this Canadian contribution to the festive canon is dripping with seasonal cynicism. From director Bob Clark, Black Christmas sees a psychotic prank caller offing the residents of a sorority house during the Christmas period, and is most famous for the chilling line, “The call is coming from inside the house”.Black Christmas boasts a seriously impressive cast: Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Philip Glass is sufficiently famous that his 75th Birthday celebrations have been going on all year (he was actually 75 in January) and the year saw two of the absolute highlights of his career presented at the Barbican. His first opera Einstein On The Beach and last night, the soundtrack to his first film score Koyaanisqatsi, performed alongside the film itself, with Glass on keyboards. More of his “greatest hits” will be performed at the Union Chapel in Islington tonight.There will be those who remain implacably opposed to what they see as his facile repetitive argeggios and are inclined to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Here’s a rancid little hors d’oeuvre for the holiday season. The deliciously loathsome Gothic horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 50 years old and back in cinemas, never ceases to amaze as director Robert Aldrich’s strychnine-laced missive to Hollywood – his second, following 1955’s The Big Knife – and as a psychodrama of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s unfeigned hatred for each other.The movie opens in 1917. The junior vaudeville star Baby Jane Hudson simpers through her vomitous song-and-dance numbers onstage and, enabled by her unctuous accompanist father, rules her family with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Scandinavian countries can duke it out amongst themselves as to which of them Santa Claus is from, but this Finnish claim for being the whiskery fellow’s true home neither makes you want to enter his grotto or sit on his knee. A bizarre and wonderful fantasy, Rare Exports nods to old northern Europe’s Saint Nicholas, the mythical figure meting out punishment to children rather than doling out presents. This is a Santa Claus to be avoided at all costs. And unlike the traditional Saint Nicholas, he’s after all children not just the naughty ones.Set in the far north-east of Finland in Read more ...
Heather Neill
’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season to dust off the stories of the Grimms and Perrault and present them as drama, sometimes transmogrified into panto. There are sometimes attempts to go back to source and eschew the tawdry delights of transvestite dames, sparkly leotards and lame rhyming couplets. The source, of course, is often really quite frightening.At the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell directs a sort of half-way house by Lucy Kirkwood “developed at the NT studio”. In this Hansel and Gretel There is no cartoonish dame with a suffocating bosom, but – the cast being small - Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Dreading a Christmas of teenaged tantrums and drunken debates? Keep the hell-brood occupied with one of the best five releases of the year, listed in ascending order of preference.5. SLEEPING DOGSIf you’ve ever dreamed of roundhouse-kicking your way through the streets of Hong Kong like a souped-up Bruce Lee, and dropping freeflow martial arts moves even Jackie Chan couldn’t choreograph, then this is the game for you. The massively detailed open world, combined with cinematic – if a little over-extended – cut scenes give you the sense you are embroiled in an interactive John Woo movie. In a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Once upon a time... for a child there is always an attic, with a rocking-horse, a wardrobe, an old clock and granny’s huge chair. And there's always a story to be found there about being monstrously bad and naughty, and being forgiven. This is the delight of the irresistible staging of The Wind in the Willows at the Royal Opera House’s subterranean Linbury Studio Theatre.Out of the cupboard drawer you can drag a stripey river, from the wonky rafters you can pull down green willow fronds, and inside a rolled-up old carpet there sleeps a myopic, shy Mole. Now 10 years old, the production with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of The Hour aired last year, there was a lot of excitable talk about how it was the "British Mad Men". Having sat through series two, I've concluded that in fact it's the British version of Pan Am, that bizarrely idiotic airline series where all the air hostesses were covert operatives for the CIA, and visits to exotic international locations were achieved using plywood props and big photographs of famous landmarks.Despite its superficial attention to 1950s detail (suits, hats, frocks, cars), the more The Hour tries to feel authentic, the less convincing it becomes. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you’ve ever wondered what a bad day at the office looked like for Handel then look no further than Belshazzar – an oratorio that positively demands heavenly intervention and possibly a bit of smiting. With a first act that worried even the composer with its length, a confused magpie plot and a libretto whose worst excrescences outdo even those of Congreve’s Semele, it’s one of those neglected works that gain little by being dragged out into the light, even by such distinguished champions as William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.Which is a shame, because it’s a rare delight these days Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"There is a town in north Ontario," sang Neil Young in 1970's "Helpless", and in this third collaboration between Young and film-maker Jonathan Demme, we get to go there. It's the little rural outpost of Omemee, where, as Young tells the camera, he used to catch turtles and fish and look after his chickens. Young's casual asides and remembered fragments as he drives from Omemee to Toronto, to play a concert at Massey Hall, form the somewhat flimsy spine of Demme's film.Back in the Eighties, Young sparked outrage when he loudly announced his support for Ronald Reagan's flag-waving Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With a hollered “hello Glasgow” and immediate launch into “Magpie”, the emotionally ragged song that opens this year’s Sugaring Season, it was as if Beth Orton had never been away. On this last date of her UK tour, the night before her 42nd birthday, Orton’s notoriously husky singing voice was unsurprisingly even throatier, more tremulous than usual. It had the effect of lending even more intimacy to cuts from a new album that, after a six-year gap and particularly tumultuous personal circumstances, emerged bathed in the quiet glow of domestic bliss. After setting the scene with only an Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s A Wonderful Life disappointed studio bosses at the box office. Five Oscar chances came to nothing. Gongs and money, however, don’t guarantee a classic and that is what It’s a Wonderful Life is - a film that can restore one's sense of joy within minutes. Set at Christmas (but filmed in the boiling summer of California), this is the film to which audiences return again and again for relief from the woes of life.George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, fresh from the World War Two) wants to travel but gets sucked up into family and money worries, so much so he thinks the world would be a better place Read more ...