Reviews
Ismene Brown
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s bottle? A teacher munching a testicle off his pupil? Well, lor' love a duck.Daniel Kramer’s florid, lurid production of Pictures from an Exhibition, a collaboration with the Young Vic last year, made it to its partner theatre, Sadler’s Wells, this weekend, a creation where theatre, music and dance elaborately combine in a lustily gory trip into Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn has already displayed unsettling form as a filmmaker intimately acquainted with violence. His Pusher trilogy probed into the black heart of Denmark's criminal underworld, while Bronson surfed a monster wave of ultraviolence in its account of psychotic jailbird Charlie Bronson. With Valhalla Rising, Refn has thrown his gears into reverse and screeched backwards to Pagan-era Scotland, though the director may be intending his location to evoke an all-purpose Nordic wilderness. Mads Mikkelsen plays a mute, expressionless fighting slave, kept in a wooden Read more ...
paul.mcgee
One of the recurring themes in BBC4's recent documentary, Krautrock: The Rebirth Of Germany, was the importance placed by so many of its participants upon transcending Germany's then-recent past. Move on several decades, and you now have a country with a rich, varied and unique musical culture that not only has a global reach and influence, but which can also afford the luxury of being able to look back at itself and even have a little fun at its own expense.The Berlin Sounds evening at this year's Ether festival highlighted all this and more, bringing together both veteran and modern Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Several contributors alluded to this quality – he loved stories, was caught up in the drama of pirates and swashbuckling heroes (as Adam Ant used to his advantage when he hired Malcolm “for a thousand guineas” as an advisor. Malcolm then went off with his backing band and renamed them Bow Wow Wow). His partner Young Kim spoke touchingly of how he would often talk in his sleep, regressing to being a child, and she would talk to him while he was asleep, as though he was a five-year-old. The programme managed to show his mischievousness, a certain naivety, but also his “creating anti- Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all know what you get when you find yourself snowed in with your family up a mountain: thunderous carpets, corridors of blood, redrum and a head in the snow. Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers isn't quite as murderously single-minded as Kubrick's The Shining, but it is dominated by a single terrorising nut job.A gemütlich Austrian inn is the setting. The opening scene sees an incontinent flurry of activity as kith and kin await the descent for breakfast of the great poet Gregor Mittenhofer (Stephen Page). Mittenhofer is your strip-cartoon Romantic: an ungovernable poet-vulture, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It's not the bobbies on the beat that are getting younger, it's the bands. Bombay Bicycle Club formed while at school in north London's Crouch End and were already making a name for themselves when they left full-time education in 2008. Rock and roll domination is on the curriculum instead, thanks to the success of last year's debut album, I Had the Blues but I Shook Them Loose.Their critical acclaim, being voted Best New Band at the NME Awards earlier this year, for instance, is not entirely a bolt from the blue. Particularly for anyone who believes that talent is genetic. Guitarist Jamie Read more ...
fisun.guner
This superb exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings, featuring 100 works and chosen from the outstanding graphic collections of the Uffizi and the British Museum, explores the evolution of the preparatory sketch in the 15th century. We learn how artists began to experiment with the medium in order to create finished paintings that were far more compositionally and stylistically ambitious, far more dramatic and full of movement, than anything that had come before. And though the drawings themselves were never meant to be seen outside the artist’s studio, we learn that by the early part of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Whether there is still a phantom in the bowels of the Paris Opera or not, even more diverting is the fact that there is a beekeeper haunting its roof. This wonderful discovery makes a delightful scene in Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse, one of the rare top-notch films about dance aimed at a wider public than ballet fans.The last great dance film (vastly more fun than anything from modern Hollywood) was Ballets Russes five years ago, a celebration of old dancers’ nostalgia for golden days in the Thirties and Forties, ripe with gossip, fantastical individuals, tall stories, embellished glories and Read more ...
sheila.johnston
One evening in 1970, Princess Anne ventured forth from her manor to attend a screening of Bronco Bullfrog at the Mile End ABC. Three decades later, the same cinema, now called the Genesis, hosted a screening of Barney Platts-Mills' debut feature last night in equally ceremonious circumstances: the launch of the East End Film Festival. Rarely seen, indeed almost lost (the original 35-mm negative was salvaged from a rubbish bin at the film lab), Bronco Bullfrog, which will be released nationally on 11 June, emerges as a minor revelation.Bronco Bullfrog might have been made in 1969, but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You always know where you are with Griff. You may be up a mountain or on a river or visiting any of the various topographical options the various TV companies deem it essential to send him. You may be doing up his house with him in Wales, where he freely admits he doesn’t really come from, or nosing round London, Paris or New York, as he did in the last series of Greatest Cities of the World. You may, as with the new series, be in Rome. But in the end, you never leave the Land of Griff.In the Land of Griff, all is bafflement, muddlement and of course chortlement. The lingua franca understood Read more ...
David Nice
Telling the truth about women in a war zone usually hits hardest through one of two means: clear reportage that presents the facts, or the devastating narrative of a survivor. Making a drama out of atrocity gets harder, though it's an age-old tradition, which is maybe why directors usually prefer to draw parallels through updating Euripides or Shakespeare. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, fired by interviews with women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and premiered last year in New York, has two powerful assets which make it well worth seeing. It tries to show us how an attempt Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's difficult to reach a rational verdict in the midst of the blog-barrage, Twitter-frenzy and crass party point-scoring that surround our new national pastime, but as the party leaders neared the 90-minute time limit, it was at least obvious that this second debate had brought feistier and more committed performances from all three of them. David Cameron and Gordon Brown wasted no time in demonstrating how well they'd learned Nick Clegg's trick of looking straight into the camera and addressing us viewers, though frankly you'd have thought that should always have been pretty bleeding Read more ...