Reviews
Nick Hasted
Mami Wata is the female West African water god still worshipped in Iyi, a fragile, matriarchal village redoubt against modernity. Writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third film makes Iyi a battleground for African identity, in a glistening black-and-white fable played out to the sea’s constant, low crash and wash.Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) is Mami Wata’s Intermediary, receiving the villagers’ tithe in return for divine protection. But when she can’t revive the drowned friend of her headstrong daughter Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh), the latter bitterly runs off with a vital totem, leaving her wiser Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
High Tide were one of many late Sixties and early Seventies British bands unearthed in the early Eighties by record collectors digging into what came after psychedelia. The bands didn’t have similar musical styles but were united by their obscurity and having sold barely any copies of their albums. All were largely forgotten until their rediscovery. Ben, Gracious!, Pussy, Red Dirt, T2, more. Who were these bands? Who were High Tide?As is the way, collector interest and the sharply rising prices of original pressings resulted in digging for information and reissues. High Tide had released two Read more ...
peter.quinn
This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.Commissioned by The Dock, a multidisciplinary arts centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, the song cycle sees Tobin working for the first time with both traditional Irish musicians and jazz improvisers. As Tobin noted, it was also possibly the first time ever that uilleann pipes have featured as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.The piper Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s much to admire here – May December features impressive performances from Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, and director Todd Haynes shows his mastery of classic Sirkian style. But disappointingly, this comes across as a movie that aims to critique media exploitation of a scandal while indulging in its own manipulation. May December is a riff on a real-life story from the ‘90s, when Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle teacher in her mid-thirties had sex with a 12-year old boy in her school. At the time, she was married with four children of her own. When Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Andrew Eldritch, vocalist and convent leader of the Sisters of Mercy, is a famously obtuse character. This may have made him seem somewhat mysterious over the years, but it has also meant that he has missed a few open goals too.The Sisters haven’t put out an album of original material in 30 years, but they still keep writing and performing new material. This means that their set now consists of about 50% familiar tunes and 50% of material that has never seen the inside of a recording studio. So, if you want to keep up with the new stuff, live recordings of varying sound quality on YouTube is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Ella Glendining has made an impressive documentary debut with the autobiographical essay, Is There Anybody Out There? Born without hip joints and very short thigh bones, we first encounter her as a perky, confident little girl walking in the woods near her home, in video footage filmed by her parents. They were aware from the first pregnancy scan that she was different and have done an exemplary job of ensuring that she had as happy a childhood as possible.As an adult Glendining’s confidence shines through and it informs her approach to the medical establishment throughout her Read more ...
David Nice
It was good of the EFG London Jazz Festival to support this concert and bring in a different audience from the one the LSO is used to. But how to define it? Jazz only briefly figured in works by Gary Carpenter, Bartók, Barber and Abel Selaocoe. The only category would seem to be All Things Vital and Dancing. Anyone who’d come just for the phenomenal South Africa-born cellist, singer and composer must have been riveted by the rest, too.Charismatic conductor Duncan Ward, as attractive in presenting the works as in sinuously conducting them, would seem to have played a major part in the Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The Comedian runs, bounces even, onto the stage. The audience immediately applauds. He seizes the mic and makes self-deprecatory gestures. Then he rubs the mic stand suggestively. We laugh. When he turns around we can see a laughing mouth printed on the back of his shirt. It’s Samuel Barnett – former history boy and star of stage and screen – and the audience instantly warms to him. He’s that kind of guy. Which is just as well because the Comedian who delivers Marcelo Dos Santos’s 65-minute monologue, now at the Bush Theatre after opening last year at the Edinburgh Fringe, is not Read more ...
James Saynor
This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.Saltburn describes the bad education of an awkward young man, played by the electric Irish actor Barry Keoghan, at an English stately home, and follows in the path of those other two films in not giving bisexuality an especially good name. At least in Brideshead it was allowed a subtle nod and presented as a rite of passage, but Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Combine four super-talents, masters of their instrument, and you might well expect a battle of egos or a clash of modi operandi. Not least, as in the case of Les Égarés, a quartet made up from two seasoned duos – the virtuoso jazzers Vincent Peirani (accordeon) and Émile Parisien (soprano sax) on the one hand, and the entrancing creative partnership of Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Vincent Ségal (cello) on the other. And yet…In a glorious show, part of the London Jazz Festival, these four engage in the most captivating conversation – sometimes with humour, at other times with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paul Sng’s documentary Tish is one of the best British films of 2023 – both a heartfelt tribute to the life and work of the late photographer Tish (born Patricia) Murtha and a timely reminder of the war waged on the nation’s industrial working-class by the Thatcher government and its successors. Murtha’s death in 2013 was not unrelated to that war.Her black and white documentary photos, as touching as they were trenchant, represented the politically and socially disenfranchised families of north-eastern England during the Seventies and Eighties as photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Charles (French comedian Dany Boon), a jaded taxi driver in Paris, is stressed out. He owes money, the points on his license are mounting up, he barely has time to see his wife and daughter. When he gets a booking for a far-flung ride involving an old lady, he’s not enthusiastic even though the pay’s good. All joie de vivre has left him.Directed by Christian Carion, Driving Madeleine is a life-affirming, charming film with a dark undercurrent, though it’s somewhat formulaic and the flashbacks are not entirely successful in tone.But it's always good to see the streets of Paris – and Read more ...