Reviews
Joseph Walsh
It’s 1968, and Seberg leaves her husband, Romain Gary (Yvan Attal) and son, Alexandre (Gabriel Sky) for an audition in Hollywood. She seems happy to be going. Touching down in LAX she joins a group of black activists, led by Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), and offers up a black power salute. Her intentions are unclear. Is this an act of solidarity in the fight for racial equality or a publicity stunt? It’s hard to tell, but it’s caught the attention of the FBI, and there are far reaching consequences.Rachel Morrison’s crisp, elegant camera work and Jahmin Assa’s lavish production design, add an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mischief Theatre's “Goes Wrong” oeuvre is now well established: broad humour combined with physical comedy and slapstick mishaps. Magic Goes Wrong, though, is the company's first outside collaboration – with American magicians Penn & Teller, themselves purveyors of fine spoof comedy of the ta-da! kind.The set-up here is that we are at a fundraiser for Disasters in Magic charity, prompted by our host, Sophisticato (Henry Shields, main picture) recently losing his magician dad in a freak accident involving an attic stuffed with his props. As you might expect, the evening is on a steady Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most recently Dunkirk. Sam Mendes’ 1917, which has just won two Golden Globes and could well triumph at the Oscars, joins their ranks.Inspired by the stories of his late grandfather, who fought in the First World War, Mendes has forged a film that combines the contrivance of a race-against-time thriller with the verisimilitude of documentary, astonishing Read more ...
David Nice
The devil wore all manner of outlandish attire in last night's chameleonic programme devised by Peter Ash, the London Schools Symphony Orchestra's challenging artistic director. There was searing verse from Marlowe, Milton and Goethe; music from Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Liszt to Penderecki and Schnittke featuring waltzes, marches, a galop and a Hammer-horror tango; and performers aged from 13 to 80.Holding it all magnificently together were the encouraging, unfussy guidance of master orchestral and conducting trainer Sian Edwards and the supreme authority of Janet Suzman, viscerally exciting Read more ...
Owen Richards
Oh how British indies love a road trip. Trekking across the rugged landscape, meeting a colourful cast of characters, realising it’s not the destination but the journey. It takes something special to stand out from the pack. The Runaways, debut feature from Richard Heap, has that something special.Reith (Mark Addy, pictured below with Molly Windsor) and his three kids Angie, Ben and Polly run the donkey rides at Whitby beach. It’s a hardy life, cramped into a hut with a pittance to their name, but they have each other. This existence is turned on its head when Reith’s brother Bryce returns Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's the smallest lies that can bring you down. When he is asked by a detective how he got on with his family, who have just been murdered in a mass shooting at their Essex farm, Jeremy Bamber (Freddie Fox) says: “Really well. We were friends.” A quizzical look briefly scutters across the face of his cousin Ann Eaton (Gemma Whelan) who overhears. As this six-part series unfolds, we will see that it was pointless mistruths like that that would help bring about Bamber's eventual undoing.It was one of many subtle moments of doubt dropped into ITV's White House Farm, which tells the story of how Read more ...
Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle, BBC Four review - meticulous account of a haunting American tragedy
Adam Sweeting
It happened 42 years ago, but the mass suicide of 900 people at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana is still an event that freezes the blood. They were members of the Peoples Temple, the semi-totalitarian cult founded by Jim Jones, who began as a mere egomaniac but morphed into a bullying dictator convinced of his own God-like powers.This was the first of two 80-minute Storyville films (on BBC Four) but the length paid off, allowing director Shan Nicholson to assemble a meticulously detailed portrait of the way Jones built up his “Temple” and persuaded ostensibly rational people to follow him Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The Tyler sisters start as they mean to go on: bickering. Middle sister Gail (Bryony Hannah) has come home from uni to find that youngest Katrina (Angela Griffin) has stolen her room. “What about Maddy’s? Why didn’t you take that?” Gail snaps. “She’s in it,” Katrina points out. “I am in it, to be fair,” confirms eldest Maddy (Caroline Faber), trying her best not to take sides. “I am actually in it.”A traditional family drama might have maintained this dynamic throughout – so often in plays and television series, we see the same feuds arising between the same siblings in later life – even as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Series about fishing have become a durable mini-genre, including the likes of Deadliest Catch and Saltwater Heroes. However, this new six-parter on BBC Two brings us much closer to home than Alaska or Tasmania, and probes into the lives of the fishing families of the Cornish village of Mevagissey.Unlike many other British ports, Mevagissey is enjoying a comparative boom in its fishing business, with 74 active boats in its harbour, but that doesn’t mean that fishing the Cornish coastal waters is a licence to print money. Frequently, the fishermen are only one bad season from bankruptcy, and Read more ...
Jo Southerd
In 2019, music kept its place as a vital means for expression and escapism in an increasingly troubled and troubling world. Happily, there were plenty of brilliant albums to get lost in over the course of the year. Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow was a masterclass in comeback albums. After her short hiatus from music, the record saw her trade in her folky roots in favour of synthesisers, elevating her sound to dizzying new heights while maintaining the intimacy and intensity that first stole her fans’ hearts. Remind Me Tomorrow provided a steady stream of great singles - "Jupiter 4 Read more ...
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Martín, Barbican review - songs of protest and resilience
David Nice
In youth we trust. That can be the only motto worth anything for 2020, as the world goes into further meltdown.So it was startling, stunning and cathartic, two days after the big downer of 3 January – the American horror clown seemingly in competition with the Australian apocalypse – to witness 164 teenagers under a conductor they clearly adore, Jaime Martín, making their voices heard, sometimes literally, in 20th century music of fear, anxiety, protest, violence and just a smidgen of hope.Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, short though it is in time-span, has long been overlooked as one of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As one decade gives way to the next, the beginning or end of the ten-year cycle rarely yields anything cut and dried. With pop music, a host of decade-related platitudes have no respect for the decade-to-decade switch. Depending on points of view, the Sixties didn’t begin until 1962, 1963 or 1964. With the Seventies, the kick-off could have been 1971 or 1972. Or maybe 1976 or 1977.Even so, it’s clear when some groundswells originated. Most of the early Seventies’ successful glam rockers were active in the preceding decade. Bolan, Bowie, Slade, Sweet and Alvin Stardust had all done their Read more ...