Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas, moreover, will have proved again to millions that Harry Potter and his wizard companions have lost none of their potency as divinities in the 21st-century household. The creatures dismissed by a sceptical thinker in 1709 as “ghosts, hobgoblins, witches and spectres” now enjoy a second life across swathes of British popular and literary culture. They have seldom seemed so robust and so resilient. Yet the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Earlier this year, the Peter Laughner box set was more than an archive release. Its diligence and scale forced a wholesale reinterpretation of the evolution of America’s punk-era underground scene. What it collected – aurally and in its book – demonstrated Laughner was more of a pivotal figure than he had so far seemed, and that his actions and vision resonate more than four decades on from his death.Moving through a different musical landscape, the CD compilation The Daisy Age cohesively soundtracked for the first time how hip-hop opened itself up to seemingly unrelated music (and non-music Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Political dysfunction and societal distress led many amongst us to the brink this year, so where better than the theatre to find succour if not always solace in the abundantly thoughtful offerings of a creative community as often as not working at full tilt? Even as a misplaced nostalgia seemed to be pulling Brexit-era Britain backwards, a contemporary light was shone on a community living tremulously on the edge in Alexander Zeldin's Faith, Hope and Charity and on the racial divide in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Pulitzer-winning Fairview, the latter one of a cluster of top-rank American plays Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was a year in which we welcomed some big, big names back on stage, including Ben Elton, Clive Anderson and Jack Dee.Elton was back on sparkling form after 15 years away and, if you still need to know how bad a state we're in in the UK, suffice to say that he almost – almost – misses his old nemesis Margaret Thatcher. But in Brexit old Motormouth has found another big target for some pinpoint insights, and his show also delivered some more personal comedy by way of contrast.Anderson had been even longer away from the stage – since his days in Cambridge Footlights a few decades ago – but his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marketed as a couples-friendly romance, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night made a massive $37 million on its opening day in China but was subsequently denounced by irate viewers who felt they’d been conned into watching a neo-noir pastiche that bafflingly morphs into a journey into the hero’s unconscious mind. Films comprised of reality, dreams, fantasies, and memories are not for everyone. However, fans of directors Alain Resnais, David Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nicolas Roeg, and Wong Kar-wai will likely find this art-house stunner an enrapturing experience.Bi’s follow-up to his impressive Read more ...
David Nice
It says so much for the cornucopia of London's classical music scene alone that all five of the most recent concerts I've attended have made the long list for best of 2019. I'll settle for two. The anger and violence of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony is still resonating after the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano tore into it with focused fire on election night. Shortly before that, beauty rather than ferocity was the keynote of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion as played in an intense Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert by Pavel Kolesniknov (don't miss his Wigmore solo Read more ...
David Nice
There's no question about my top opera choice for 2019, especially since the London houses rarely delivered at the same pitch of engagement. It's Graham Vick's walkabout Birmingham Opera Company spectacular, a production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that worked on every level. Literally, since a full City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alpesh Chauhan - doing superlative work in the absence of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, on maternity leave - was on a raised platform and some of the action took place at other points around the disco-lit, dilipidated Tower Ballroom on the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Another year gone, another year closer to complete Disney domination. Death, taxes, and the house of mouse buying every remaining film studio, the three certainties. But 2019 still packed some surprises. Old hands Scorsese and Tarantino hit late career highs, while indie gems Bait and Burning found worthy mainstream success. As the year comes to a close, our team of writers appraise their hits and misses of 2019.THE HITSAd AstraThere has been much excellent science fiction of late – Gravity, The Martian, Annihilation. But Ad Astra may be the most complete and profound addition to the genre Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been countless film and TV adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel about four sisters coming of age during the American Civil War. This latest, by Greta Gerwig, may be the best of the lot. With its outstanding young cast and a modern sensibility that blows a feisty breeze through the well-worn period action, this is a joyful, moving, near flawless piece of filmmaking. During the recent, rightful clamour for a level playing field for female directors in the male-dominated film industry, Gerwig has quietly asserted herself as a major player. As an actress and writer she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What joy to be back with the Shipman and West families, created by writing team James Corden and Ruth Jones. It has been 10 years since sitcom Gavin & Stacey left our screens, and in this Christmas special there was some catching up to do as the two families, who alternate hosting Christmas in Billericay and Barry, were this year in South Wales.Gavin and Stacey (Mathew Horne and Joanna Page), who were expecting their first child when we last saw them, now have three children, and Nessa and Smithy's (Jones and Corden) boy is now 11, although still called Neil the Baby. Everyone was there, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The series of short films, A Ghost Story For Christmas, became a Yuletide staple on BBC One in the 1970s. Most of them were adapted from the works of medieval scholar M R James, and drew their unsettling supernatural aura from the understated and academic tone of the writing.Mark Gatiss is a fan of this televisual tradition, and in 2013 he adapted James’s story The Trachtate Middoth. After writing his own spooky yarn last year, The Dead Room, now he’s back on the M R James trail with this new effort. Unfortunately it won’t be remembered as a landmark of the genre.Perhaps it’s because all the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This divertingly daft sequel to the Cinderella story (Sky 1) was the brainchild of David Walliams, who introduced it as himself, sitting smugly by a roaring fire in his authorial smoking jacket. What, he wondered, happened after Cinderella and Prince Charming were married and lived “happily ever after”?Well they weren’t happy at all, as Cinderella (Sian Gibson) rapidly discovered. Charming (Walliams) was a braying, posh twit infatuated with his own reflection and obsessed with his hair. At their wedding celebration, he ignored poor Cinders and spent hours doing cringetastic hip hop Read more ...