Reviews
Marina Vaizey
This charming BBC Two hagiography – which may be a contradiction in terms – opened on a montage of praise, with just a hint of irony for the hugely successful actor Hugh Grant. He was born in Hammersmith Hospital, although neither he nor his father can quite remember. He felt (he told us) that it was a kind of family tradition as about 800 of his own children have been born there since.Thus the tone was set for the classic English trope of self-deprecation. Variations on the choreography of backing into the limelight and making jokes at your own expense, so characteristic of many of Grant’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you came to this expecting to be reminded of such ghosts of Scrooges past as Alastair Sim or Bill Murray, you will have been reaching either for the brandy or the defibrillator. In the hands of screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight and director Nick Murphy (from BBC One in partnership with the American FX network ), Dickens’s perennial tale of seasonal repentance has been transformed into a gruelling journey of cathartic horror.Having said that, it was frustrating that the opening episode (with the final two following on consecutive nights) is the least compelling of the three. It took Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Once upon a time – before the nation’s schism – an indie band with dubious reputation espoused the virtues of Albion and invited us on the good ship Arcadia to travel to this Utopia. Things are a bit different now.Unfashionably nostalgic and romantic, preposterously self-indulgent and adolescent, do The Libertines really have any relevance in this brutal post-truth age? Maybe they’re just what we need when the concept of Britishness is being so fiercely fought over? They make their entrance to the ironic strains of Vera Lynn’s “White Cliffs of Dover” just 10 days after the pro-Brexit Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapped-out buildings like lost souls. This poignant collaboration between playwright Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan – himself born in Duluth in 1941, seven years after this play begins – takes us into a community in which music provides a rare release for individuals scavenging for reasons to stay alive. It was something of a surprise for McPherson to be approached by Dylan to create a theatrical vehicle for his music; when asked why he thought he had been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In June 1978, the still-extant independent label Cherry Red issued its first record. The seven-inch featured three slices of terse, Buzzcocks-ish art-punk by The Tights. The band were from Great Malvern, Worcestershire – as was the label. They only made one more 45 but Cherry Red – named after a Groundhogs song; the label was founded by local concert promoters – was built to last. Later, Great Malvern spawned Stephen Duffy’s Lilac Time and Blessed Ethel. Jenny Lind and Edward Elgar were local, but this seemed to be it as far as it went for entries on the rock ’n’ roll map.Surprisingly, Cherry Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Courier is a split entity that comprises two interlinked parts. One half involves a silent Gary Oldman who occasionally becomes hysterically enraged, the other a furious Olga Kurylenko who is never allowed a moment of silence. Director Zackary Adler perhaps aimed for contrast, maybe even balance, with this ill foray into the hit job thriller, but he’s ended up with confusion and lifelessness.Sinister veteran killer Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman) faces trial and has planned to kill the only living witness to his crimes before the testimony is given. A motorbiked hitwoman, aka “the courier Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I can’t look at Rod Stewart without thinking of Barbara, one of the naughtier girls in my third-form class at East Barnet Senior High School. She was tiny, and obsessed with him, her hair cut like his. “Maggie May” was number one, playing from tinny trannies in lunchbreak. It was from Every Picture Tells a Story, the album that established Stewart’s solo career. Barbara was in seventh heaven. I occasionally wonder what happened to her and kept an eye open at O2 where Hot Rod was playing the second of three dates with the RPO before heading home for Christmas.Sir Rod, as we must now call him, Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining experience (menu, team, decor, diners) from a pivotal year in their restaurant’s history. What’s unclear is if this show was intended as a one-off documentary or the first episode of a series. What’s certain? It was a wacky time capsule.The programme opened with Blumenthal and Giles Coren, The Times’ restaurant critic, choosing a year to recreate. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tom Hooper’s freakily phantasmagoric visualisation of an already strange West End smash is a high-wire act risking the sniggers which greeted its trailer. And yet it never falls, sustaining a subtly hallucinatory, wholly theatrical reality. Doubling down on the bizarre unlikelihood of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s original adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s poems, this is an extreme fantasy vision blooming from the composer’s resolutely mainstream world.Putting plainly human faces and bodies into digitally created cat costumes could be an absurd throwback. Instead, the excellent cast ache with palpable Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mischief Theatre is a wonder of modern commercial theatre. In 2008, a group of young actors who had met at drama school started the ensemble – writing, producing, directing and performing their own work. They had their big breakthrough with The Play That Goes Wrong, which started life in a pub theatre and went into the West End in 2013, and the “Goes Wrong” franchise has turned into a worldwide phenomenon.Now Mischief's touring version of Peter Pan Goes Wrong lands at Alexandra Palace for the festive season; it's in the “secret theatre”, a magnificent Victorian theatre recently given new life Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
So here we are. The final instalment of a nine-film saga, three trilogies across 42 years. It’s debatable what would be harder – saving that galaxy "far, far away", or giving millions of Star Wars fans the send-off they crave. J.J. Abrams certainly had his work cut out. But, with a few provisos, he’s succeeded. The Rise of Skywalker is epic, spectacular, surprising and, most importantly, brings its human stories to resolutions that brim with emotion. The plight of the rebel alliance is more dire than ever. Supreme Leader Snoke may have been despatched by his disciple Kylo Ren (Adam Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Barbican, a week before Christmas, and it’s British folk-rock legends Steeleye Span’s last gig of the year, a year in which its vigorous seven-strong line-up – featuring a new recruit in the shape of former Bellowheader Benji Kirkpatrick – celebrated a half century of Span by releasing a strong new album in Est’d 69. One of the highlights of that new set was blockbuster ballad “Old Matron”, featuring Tull's Ian Anderson on flute.No Anderson tonight, but it nevertheless came with some very special guests too – Martin Carthy, coming to the stage with the mighty fiddler Peter Knight and Read more ...