Reviews
Saskia Baron
The Cannes jury in 2017 gave best actress to Diane Kruger for her performance in In the Fade. She plays Katja, who turns avenging angel when her son and Turkish husband are murdered. It’s Kruger’s first acting role in her native German and she’s on screen for almost the entire film. Whether you are absorbed by the narrative of In the Fade (German title: Aus der Nichts) or find yourself distanced by the stylistic tics and plot holes, probably depends on how much Kruger/Katja convinces you. I kept being reminded of another intelligent, beautiful model turned actress, Jessica Lange, who took on Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Forgive the sports metaphor, but David Byrne knocked this one out of the park. Coming out of the concert at the Eventim Apollo, you felt that the presentation of popular music had changed - that to go on stage with a conventional band with the usual clichéd movements - everything from the wince of a complicated guitar solo to the vocalist waving to the crowd to join in - all should be banished to history’s dustbin. Likewise the whole set up on stage was new - Byrne’s band were entirely untethered to wires and able to move around the stage in complete choreographed fluidity. It is Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It’s not as immersive as New York’s The Gates, 2005, nor as magnificent as Floating Piers, 2016, in Italy’s Lake Iseo – it has also, according to Hyde Park regular Kay, “scared away the ducks,” – but superstar artist Christo’s The London Mastaba looks quite absurdly unreal and is totally free for the public.Constructed with 7,506 brightly painted oil barrels, the 600 tonne sculpture – which is shaped as and named by the bench found outside ancient Mesopotamian houses – floats like a serene 3D gif between bridge, lido and island. The Serpentine Gallery's Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Eel Pie, the tiny eyot in the Thames, is not too a long walk from Twickenham stadium – within hollering distance, almost, if you had that kind of voice. And if anywhere could lay claim to being the nursery that provided the perfect growing conditions for The Rolling Stones, then Eel Pie and The Crawdaddy in Richmond would be it. Mick Jagger name-checked them both during the gig, and George Melly once said of its legendary music venue, “You could see sex rising from Eel Pie like steam from a kettle”.That head of steam pumped out the 1960s spirit of sex and liberation into the local and then Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Squirrels are a breed as diverse as they are ubiquitous: they inhabit environments as extreme as desert and tundra, and all the lush greenery, rainforest and urban jungle imaginable between. So bless the producers of The Super Squirrels who humorously avoid a straight-down-the-line profile of the nearly 300 species around the world and instead showcase their not inconsiderable abilities through a series of gleeful reality TV piss-takes.We’re guided through the squirrel family by enthusiasts and academics, each of whom seems to have absorbed some of the characteristics of their quick-limbed Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
From an early age, Barbara Strozzi would have entertained the guests of her father’s Venetian academy with songs, including her own works. A similarly intimate room at London’s Handel House museum provided a suitable setting for Strozzi’s work to be heard alongside the greatest of late Renaissance vocal composers, Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi came out ahead, but only by a nose.The life of Barbara Strozzi (pictured below in a famous portrait) is an extraordinary one: illegitimate daughter of a famous opera librettist in the earliest years of opera, mother of four illegitimate children of her Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
John Eliot Gardiner was 75 in April, and to celebrate, the Barbican Centre staged a weekend devoted to his favourite composer. Gardiner himself provided the backbone of the event, three concerts of cantatas with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, while most of the other events were chamber music recitals. That felt like a random combination, and no justification was given for the mix. Even the name was provisional: it was originally marketed as a "Bach Marathon", but became the "Bach Weekend" to prevent it sounding like an endurance test. Fortunately, the individual events Read more ...
David Nice
Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years? Faced with the "which of the three did you like best?" question – and I saw them all on a single day at the King's Cross makeshift theatre – the answer would have to be "each one at the time I saw it". So it's good to relive the first as screened on BBC Four – Henry IV and The Tempest are already available on the BBC iPlayer – which is as compelling, keenly paced Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
All those pranks, set-ups, fake letters and disguises, they just keep coming thick and fast in Verdi’s Falstaff. The score has irresistible energy and momentum. The composer made sure in his last opera that when the fantasies, schemes and hopes of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff are given apparent encouragement, only to be systematically unpicked and nixed, it all happens with allegro markings like vivace, brioso and brillante. And this was a musical performance led by Richard Farnes with exactly the right kind of verve about it.And yet the dreamy setting, the Wormsley estate Read more ...
Owen Richards
Despite the Welsh repute for singing, the Festival of Voice in Cardiff has always been more than just music. Indeed, on the Friday evening, Welsh/Cornish pop enigma Gwenno was appearing alongside the gloriously titled one woman show Lovecraft (Not the Sex Shop in Cardiff) and English, an interactive theatre experience on language in Britain.An apt subject for its audience, judging by the conversations flowing as we waited in the forgivable summer dusk. There’s a curiosity on the show’s content, with vague promises on building a contemporary Babel. English is a co-production between National Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Scorpions stepped on stage wearing leather jackets and shades, and launched straight into "Going Out With a Bang". For a band who, only a few short years ago, were tempted by retirement, the song was a statement of intent. "No sign of slowing down," went the words. And boy did they mean it. Saturday night's concert was a thrilling, high-octane show full of dry-ice and guitar pyrotechnics. There was even a flying drum-kit.The evening, though, was not just about Scorpions. The band were appearing with Megadeth, as part of the Stone Free Festival. It was virtually a double-headline, and the two Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perfectly timed, in theory, for the advent of #MeToo and Hollywood’s post-Weinstein era, this girl-power redesign of the Ocean franchise has lined up a turbo-charged cast and then not given them anything very interesting to do. Director and co-writer Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Free State of Jones) was probably wise not to try to replicate the sleight-of-hand plotting, laconic wit and stiletto-sharp editing of Stephen Soderberg’s Ocean flicks, but the unfortunate consequence is that Ocean’s 8 often ends up lapsing into a glammed-up vacuum.The set-up is that Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock Read more ...