Reviews
Adam Sweeting
In Superman's DC Comics universe, Bizarro World is a cube-shaped planet where everything on earth is echoed in back-to-front form. A smidgen of Bizarro thinking has surely infiltrated the bewildering environment of Fringe, where a special team of FBI agents struggle with incredible paranormal phenomena, impossible inversions of the natural order, and above all the concept of parallel universes, currently the hot topic at the start of series two.In last week's opening episode, Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) made a startling entry by crashing through the windshield of her car, on her way Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Over the past few years, Haitink’s London performances - and last night's was no different - have slowly but consistently chipped away at the conventional wisdom that conductors mature with age and reach an apex of musical understanding some two hours before they die. Some conductors, obviously, just go mouldy, like milk.
But Haitink goads not only one's understanding of conventional wisdom but also one’s moral fibre. It's hard to go against one's instinctive deference to one’s elders and betters. If any other 80-year-old had jumped on stage last night and provided the performance of Read more ...
graham.rickson
To a bewitching, shimmering prelude, a back-projected astronaut plants a Czech flag on the lunar surface. So begins one of those evenings where you skip out of the theatre grinning and promising yourself that you will buy tickets for all your opera-disdaining friends.First performed in Prague in 1920, Brouček is the Cinderella among Janáček’s mature operas. Based on stories by the popular nationalist writer Svatopluk Čech about a drunken everyman, the opera had a troubled composition history. Janáček began writing the work in 1908, eventually finishing it in 1918, collaborating with several Read more ...
Russ Coffey
With her impish looks and translucent, near-perfect voice Cara Dillon does well to avoid the “coffee table” epithet. As a "product" she looks prime for mass marketing into the suburban dinner party circuit. But as an artist she is much better than that.She’s much too good, for instance, to have become better known simply as folk star Seth Lakeman’s sister-in-law. It's true that she has faultless musical connections but her musical pedigree is also impeccable. Dillon grew up in Derry immersed in whistles and fiddles and at the age of 20 replaced Kate Rusby in the folk super-group, Read more ...
mark.hudson
Anyone who has had their sensibilities battered by Tate Modern’s Pop Life show is likely to be equally taken aback if they wander along the Thames to this year’s Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain – but for completely different reasons. If Pop Life leaves you feeling that art can only progress through ever greater acts of outrage – that if you’re not actually having sex on camera you hardly count as creative – the tone over at Tate Britain is measured, cool, even academic. Do these exhibitions even reflect the same world, let alone the same art world?While Tate has been happy to harness Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I have a certain resistance to the Second Viennese School (a pretentious title in itself) of Schoenberg and his pupils Webern and Berg. Not that I'm averse to a spot of avant-gardening. I have sat through the squeakiest of squeaky-gate music with the best of them. But, apart from anything else, there's something chilling with their bullying rhetoric about purification and decadence.Here’s Schoenberg at the beginning of the First World War laying into Bizet, Stravinsky and Ravel: “Now comes the reckoning! Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You won’t read this in Steve Jobs’ autobiography, but in the early Eighties Britain led the world in personal computing. Acorn made the BBC Micro, which sold 1.5 million units. Sinclair Research shifted shed-loads of its ZX81, despite its rickety construction and coal-fired levels of performance. A generation of apprentice nerds produced their first bloops and squiggles on these devices. Today, no doubt they’re all writing apps for that iPhone you're reading this on.But judging by the portrayal of the central characters in BBC Four’s Micro Men, Clive Sinclair and his employee-turned-rival Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s a let-down when a new production of an opera that spends two acts feeling dazzlingly invigorating and clever collapses in a careless mess in the third. My guess is that a key scene for the concept of English National Opera’s Turandot is when Ping, Pang and Pong - three very grand court officials - turn out to be Chinese cooks sneaking smokes up the fire escape at the Emperor Palace restaurant. It's a sharp idea, generating a sensationally visual production, but that fire escape's got to lead somewhere, and in the end it's nowhere.The production is a debutants’ ball, with first-time ENO Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Two people are in the car, one black (the driver, inevitably), one white. But this is not Driving Miss Daisy, nor Collateral; its two occupants aren't played by Oscar-hungry stars, and the ride does not end up at the expected - or, indeed, desired - destination. Instead, Goodbye Solo is a modest, apparently artless film shot through with troubling ambivalence.The first scene - a long single two-shot of the two main characters, much as they are seen in the above still - plunges us straight into their curious relationship. The passenger, William, is a man in his seventies with a shock of still- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night was Sun night at the Royal Opera House, when the opening night of the ballet season was supposedly entirely attended by winners of The Sun’s ballet-ballot. Sadly the production, Mayerling, came into the ballot too late to get the full Sun promotional treatment in the riproaringly tautological style accorded to The Sun's opera experience, Carmen - “Carmen is such a slapper she makes Jordan look positively saintly.” Surprisingly, considering the possibility of a totally accurate "Royal in sex and drugs death pact" synopsis for Mayerling, The Sun wimped out with a hotel offer.However Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Animators often give their heroes superlative physical powers just because they can. Mr Fredricksen, the grumpy septuagenarian at the centre of Up, has by contrast a hearing aid, false teeth, a walker and a stairlift that's on the blink. It's a struggle for him to heave himself out of his armchair. He could betoken a bold break with movie stereotypes or simply be a sign that Hollywood, so long obsessed with the youth demographic, is finally wising up to the power of the grey dollar.Up arrives in Britain on the wings of ecstatic reviews from American critics. It is an immaculately polished Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This review cannot start without a confession. More of a disclaimer, in fact. What you are about to read will not by any reasonable definition pass as a balanced critical response. I began my time at Oxford University in exactly the same week as Boris Johnson and indeed Toby Young, one of the makers of When Boris Met Dave. As a student, I knew or met half the talking heads who took part. As a journalist I know or have met most of the others. They all, to a man (and woman), sound like Prince Charles. So was it any good, this playful account of the birth of the modern Tory party in the cauldron Read more ...