Reviews
Tom Birchenough
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making Read more ...
David Nice
Violins, violas, wind and brass all standing for Schumann: gimmick or gain? As John Eliot Gardiner told the audience with his usual eloquence while chairs were being brought on for the Berlioz in the first half of last night's concert, Mendelssohn set the trend as conductor with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester - though as I understand it, only the violins stood - and some chamber orchestras of comparable size have adopted the practice. But Gardiner didn't need to reason the need; we'd just heard it at work in Schumann's Genoveva Overture - a brighter, more vibrant sound than usual from the Read more ...
Heather Neill
It would be so easy to make fun of the 1945 Noel Coward/ David Lean film in which, famously, nothing happens between two guilt-ridden married lovers. That oh-so-British middle class restraint, those flet, perfectly enunciated vowels, the overwhelming romantic rush of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 – isn’t it all a bit OTT, just crying out for a French-and-Saunders-style send-up? Thank goodness, Emma Rice has resisted the temptation in her stage adaptation. She has brought her customary larkiness to the party, but treated the agonised love affair at the centre of the story with respect and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Glasgow International Comedy Festival kicked off with a performance by one of its most popular performers, Craig Hill, a comic far better known in his native Scotland than south of the border. That may be because his shtick relies so much on knowing the ins and outs of Scottish social classification – anyone from Fife, Paisley or Aberdeen was fair game for insults here, but non-Scots may be none the wiser.Hill, dressed in a petrol-blue kilt and kick-ass boots, started the show by gyrating to a dance track as he came on stage at Òran Mór. If wearing fetching kilts is Hill’s trademark, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now 24 years since Pink Floyd pretty much stopped being a going concern and 33 since the departure of artistic powerhouse Roger Waters. So, apart from a brief band reunion at 2005’s Live8 concert, Floyd-heads have had little to keep them happy apart from periodic album reissues for the best part of a generation. It is a truism, however, that nature abhors a vacuum, and into this vacuum has strode a substantial tribute-act industry. Once upon a time it was the Australian Pink Floyd Show that dominated this stage. These days, however, Brit Floyd have taken up the challenge to reclaim the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read Adam Sweeting's review of the Below the Surface FinaleAfter recent experiences with the likes of McMafia, Troy and Collateral, mysteriously moribund affairs apparently designed by a committee of box-ticking zombies, many a viewer will turn with relief to another dose of good old Scandi drama. Terrorist thriller Below the Surface isn’t exactly Denmark’s finest hour, but it has enough intrigue and tension to justify its place in BBC Four’s ever-popular Saturday night import slot.In outline, the setup is none too complicated. A group of lethally efficient and heavily-armed terrorists have Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life. The ranks of the natives, as well as the city’s other cultural immigrants – the French have an uncanny skill at adopting those they wish to – have proved no less fascinating.In Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 Agnès Poirier has chosen an unusual decade on which to concentrate. This is a truly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive history may have missed some nuts out. Not that anyone would question the sanity of a deserter from the US Army in 1968. Seen on the ground and from the air, the hot front of the Cold War was no place to be.Thus a group of four daring pioneers shucked their uniforms while on leave in Japan, and made their way via a fishing vessel to the eastern shore of the Soviet landmass, across which they were ceremonially paraded as propaganda Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The similarity is intentional. The cover design of When the Day is Done – The Orchestrations of Robert Kirby nods explicitly to that of Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left. That wasn’t just the first record by the singer-songwriter, it was also first time most people heard Kirby’s string arrangements. He and Drake had been friends at Cambridge University. The album’s producer Joe Boyd commissioned arrangements by Richard Hewson but Drake rejected them and the call was made to Kirby, who had already worked with him live.For Kirby, this was the beginning of a career which flourished until Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The sheer ambition of the BBC’s new Civilisations is becoming apparent. This second episode, with Mary Beard grasping the presenter baton from Simon Schama, was subtitled “How Do We Look?” and themed around representation of the human image. It moved from the massive memorials of Mexico’s Olmec culture, via some equally sizeable relics in Ancient Egypt, to changing manners of sculptural portraiture in 5th century BCE Athens. After a side-track to China’s terracotta warriors, we were immersed in 18th century European attitudes to classical art, that were themselves reappraised by Beard in a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In recent months Woody Allen has been publicly disavowed by a conga line of major film stars. The latest who seems to have expressed regret for working with him – if not by name – is Kate Winslet. She stars in his latest film, and may also feel slight regret for artistic reasons. Set in Coney Island in the 1950s, Wonder Wheel has the jaded flavour you get off an old-timer playing oldies on a thinner, reedier instrument.Its nearest stablemate in Allen’s filmography is Blue Jasmine. That also attracted an actress of stature in Cate Blanchett. More pertinently, it channelled the spirit of a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...