Reviews
Joseph Walsh
Best-known for his TV series Legion and Fargo, director Noah Hawley makes the leap to the big screen with an existential space drama based on true events, starring Natalie Portman.During the Apollo 11 space mission, Michael Collins was left in the shuttle on the far side of the moon. While sat there, he reportedly said: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.” Such an awe-inspiring level of isolation in the vastness of space is an experience few humans will ever know. But what are the psychological effects of escaping terra firma, and how do you Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I was just released from the hospital…the doctor told me that the medicine can’t do me no good. They told me what I have is beyond medical science…he told me that what I have is more serious than cancer. He told me what I have is a very, very bad case of the blues. I found out the best remedy for the blues is to be with the one you love.”This astonishing spoken declaration comes during the first half of Jerry Washington’s “Right Here is Where You Belong”, a 1972 single which its performer, producer and writer self-released on his own Top Pop label. Washington’s day job was as a New York Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two young boys play by the water. Soon, one is dead. This enigmatic tragedy is the core of a four-decade Chinese saga of grief, guilt and love, at once intimately personal and scarred by the state’s grinding turns. Director Wang Xiaoshuai shuffles time like a stacked deck’s cards, withholding vital facts, but keeping his camera on the lost boy’s parents, Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and Liyun (Yong Mei). Although years and memories crush them, they keep on.Mao’s Cultural Revolution is recalled. But it’s the Eighties’ One Child Policy which haunts this story. Liyun and Yaojun are best friends with Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The cape, the banked-up synths and the glam have gone. Rick Wakeman’s Grumpy Old Christmas Show consists of just the man, his piano and his stories and jokes, mostly about Christmas and family. The music is partly from his new solo piano album Christmas Portraits (Sony Classical), plus tunes from his own back catalogue, notably Piano Odyssey, and songs by Bowie, the Beatles and others. This was the second date of an 11-date tour of venues in England, and Wakeman is just enjoying the process of letting the set list evolve. As he mused while describing his programme: “It sort of works, really.” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Trance boogie,” states My Baby frontwoman Cato van Dijck before submersing herself in the rising tribal rhythm of “Sunflower Sutra". Trance boogie is, indeed, what My Baby do. The song is decked with floating flecks of glissando guitar from virtuosic New Zealand bandmate Daniel Johnston on the other side of the stage. “Sing with me, brother,” Cato demands with a smile and behind his drum kit her sibling Joost leans into his microphone and harmonises. Behind it all is a housey four-to-the-floor beat, but their sound is all organic groove.The van Dijcks are Dutch and the band hails from Read more ...
David Nice
Music and visual art, at least at the highest level, should go their own separate ways; put them together, and one form will always be subordinate to the other. A composer being inspired by an artist's work, or vice versa, is something else altogether. Last night at the Southbank Centre gave the perfect context to appreciate the exchange – charged up from the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed on theartsdesk with appropriate wonderment by Florence Hallett, you could walk the shortest of distances to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear what the equally astonishing Austrian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Happily, Joe Barton’s tinglingly original thriller (BBC Two) finished as smartly as it began, not by any humdrum tying-up of loose ends but by giving free rein to the story’s ambiguities and impossible choices. If indeed they really were choices. Earlier in the series, Kelly Macdonald’s Sarah delivered a philosophical manifesto which suggested that we exist in an infinite time-loop – “Everything is controlled by a mad conductor… everything we do is an echo of what we’ve done before.”The question might be, if we keep doing it, do we do it better? One of Giri/Haji’s underlying themes was the Read more ...
Tom Baily
Blue periods can lead to golden streaks. Such is almost the case with Honey Boy, which Shia LaBeouf wrote during a court-ordered stay in a rehab clinic for the treatment of PTSD symptoms. Based on LaBeouf’s upbringing and childhood acting years, the film focuses on the troubled relationship between Otis (Noah Jupe) and his dad James (Shia LaBeouf), switching occasionally to a young adult Otis (Lucas Hedges) undergoing rehabilitation.Director Alma Har’el turns LaBeouf’s script into an aesthetic vision of L.A. neorealism with a dab of the surreal. The main ingredients in the broth are dialogue Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve had Chess the musical; now, here’s Chess the play. Tom Morton-Smith, who has experience wrestling recent history into dramatic form with the acclaimed Oppenheimer, turns his attention to the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, in which American challenger Bobby Fischer battled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. The event gained outsize importance from the Cold War propaganda battle – the two men pawns in their countries’ games, and the match characterised as the lone hero versus the Soviet machine.The play follows the tournament through, as both Fischer (Robert Emms, pictured Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Abba fans can already have an immersive dining/dancing/singing experience at the O2 in Mamma Mia! The Party, and now, almost as a companion piece, is ABBA: Super Troupers The Exhibition, a show that sets out tell “the story of the band, their music and the era they defined”.That's a pretty tall order and I'm not sure – even as a dedicated fan – that Abba defined an era, but on the other two points this multimedia exhibition makes a decent go of it as it describes the group's history from first meeting to eventual break-up, and beyond.The four – Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Benjamin Britten died on 4 December 1976. Last night’s Wigmore Hall concert, on the 43rd anniversary of his passing, proved that his real legacy lies not in inert acts of homage but a living engagement both with his work, and the unruly energies that drove it. Although we heard some high-quality Britten performances, from Ailish Tynan, Allan Clayton, Robert Murray and the Aurora Orchestra strings conducted by Brett Dean, the most hopeful pointers to a Brittenesque future came in the world première of Josephine Stephenson’s song cycle Une Saison en Enfer.The young Franco-British composer’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Amidst the deluge of high-profile year-end releases, it would be a shame if the collective Oscar-bait noise drowned out Ordinary Love, as quietly extraordinary a film as has been seen in some time. Telling of a couple whose marriage is impacted by a cancer diagnosis, this collaboration between the husband-and-wife team of Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa offers a performance for the ages from Lesley Manville, whose career ascendancy in middle age remains a wonder to behold.Liam Neeson, playing Manville’s beloved yet often bewildered husband, isn’t far behind in a portrait of Read more ...