Reviews
Nick Hasted
The dinosaur credentials of disgraced cop Frank Penny (Aaron Eckhart) litter his flat, from his battered old TV to his binning of his daily newspaper, bar the sports section. As he begins his beat, vlogger Ava Brooks (Courtney Eaton, pictured below) is blathering wokely about the mainstream media. The appearance of a pair of ruthless but remarkably stupid kidnappers results in Penny’s jaw-dropping decision to let her live-stream his hunt for the kidnap victim, due to drown in 63 minutes in an undisclosed location.The film’s real-time rampage through those minutes is screamingly unconvincing, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Picking the best album at the end of the year is always unfair on the early releases. Recency bias means the newer albums carry more excitement. Better Oblivion Community Center's self-titled debut would be a major contender if it had released in September as opposed to January. It feels like part of the furniture now, a testament to the songwriting of Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst. The same goes for Titanic Rising from Weyes Blood, a sweeping epic of melody and melodrama.We've had some big hitters delivering their best work this year. Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride refreshed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Bela Lugosi’s dead,” as Bauhaus sang, in memory of the star of 1931’s Dracula. But of course death has never been an impediment to the career of the enfanged Transylvanian blood-sucker. Filmed and televisualised almost as frequently as Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula would doubtless join the cockroaches as the only entities to survive a thermonuclear holocaust.Whether we needed another new TV version is at least debatable, let alone this lumbering behemoth (for BBC One) from the conjoined brains of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, comprising three 90-minute slabs over consecutive nights. Moffat Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Guy Ritchie enjoyed his greatest commercial success with 2019’s live-action fantasy Aladdin, the most atypical project of his career, but The Gentlemen finds him back on his best-known turf as a purveyor of mouthy, ultra-violent geezerism. It’s 21 years since his debut hit with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but its shaggy-dog story-telling and spirit of high-wire anarchy resurface intact.In time-honoured fashion, Ritchie has assembled a cast which looks a bit weird on paper but pays handsome dividends. Matthew McConaughey’s arrival in Ritchie-land is announced by him striding into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Talk shows can go one of two ways. You can create a welcoming space where your guests can kick their shoes off and start telling daringly revealing anecdotes. Alternatively, there’s the Dame Edna formula where the guests are cannon fodder for the host.At 85, the Dame isn’t as laser-sharp as she was 20 years ago, and her guests wore barcode badges so Edna could flash up their details on a screen, but you wouldn’t dare play poker with her. The fiction for this BBC One show was that she had taken to the high seas on the cruise ship Ocean Widow to safeguard her ill-gotten earnings, having been “ Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Notable anniversaries provided the ballast for this year’s raft of exhibitions; none was dead weight, though, with shows dedicated to Rembrandt, Leonardo and Ruskin among the most original and exhilarating of 2019’s offerings. Happily, a number of our favourites are still running, and there’s a month left to see Rembrandt’s Light at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The show skilfully eschews gimmickry in order to explore Rembrandt’s expert manipulation of light to aid storytelling and evoke nuances of mood and atmosphere (pictured below: Rembrandt, The Denial of St Peter, 1660). Rembrandt was an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just as Joker was the most divisive film of 2019, so Jojo Rabbit may take the mantle for the early months of 2020. The issue is not that director Taika Waititi is making a comedy about the Nazis – plenty of filmmakers have done that, from Mel Brooks to Tarantino – but the manner in which he goes about it. For some, his “anti-hate satire” will be funny, inventive and hopeful, for others too cartoonish for its subject matter. In fact, it's all of those things. Waititi’s determinedly wacky path is certainly challenging.Adapted from Christine Leunens’s novel Caging Skies, it focuses on Read more ...
theartsdesk
In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (Jacob Rees-Mogg's much-derided The Victorians) our reviewers share their top picks – some of which we covered, others which we didn't. From a thousand-page novel of a few sentences meditating on the everyday life of an Ohio housewife to a selection of short stories of disaffected young women, from an illustrated history of the trade routes of Central Asia to sharp insights into the life and works of Lucian Freud – the range is vast. We hope you enjoy!How odd that, in an age of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One good Sixties brouhaha deserves another. After last year’s triumphant revival of the Jeremy Thorpe affair in A Very English Scandal, here comes the sleazy saga of John Profumo, the Conservative Secretary of State for War who was forced to resign from Harold Macmillan’s government in 1963. The cause of his downfall was his brief affair with model and showgirl Christine Keeler, who was 19 when Profumo first met her.Amanda Coe is the screenwriter du jour, though it’s hard to see how the story has been made to stretch across its allotted six episodes. The first two instalments (on Sunday and Read more ...
theartsdesk
As symbolic moments go, the arrival of Martin Scorsese's new gangster epic The Irishman on Netflix took some beating. It exemplified the adage that "TV is the new cinema", and at the same time perhaps suggested a new and less digestible adage, something like "TV and cinema are now both parts of an ever-expanding entertainment continuum". Catchy, eh?The inexorable spread of the global media giants is reflected in our artsdesk critics' choice of 2019's Best and Worst TV shows. While it's well known that Succession or Game of Thrones are HBO productions, it's less widely advertised that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Liam Gallagher knows exactly how "fucking fantastic… and fucking shit I am", and proceeds to tell us so for 85 minutes. This 10-year documentary project came about as a result of director Charlie Lightening’s friendship with Gallagher, formed as Oasis came to a predictable halt. It seeks to be mildly critical, although the only person vaguely putting the boot in is current girlfriend/fiancée/soon-to-be-third-wife Debbie Gwyther – now also his manager – who describes him as "impulsive and a bit silly", and "like a toddler". Otherwise, it’s up to the other brother, Paul Gallagher, and ex- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For dance lovers, it was a year of heavy hitters. There were visits from two of America’s biggest and best, both the Alvin Ailey company and San Francisco Ballet bringing generous programmes of new work. The mighty Bolshoi’s summer programme at Covent Garden brought us Spartacus, that Soviet-era mega-fest of militarism and machismo. More intimate but just as heavily hyped was the new Matthew Bourne, Romeo + Juliet, which toured the country before settling into the August holiday slot at Sadler’s Wells. There was Christopher Wheeldon’s vast new in-the-round Cinderella for English National Read more ...