Reviews
Owen Richards
BBC Two’s flagship crime drama Peaky Blinders returns for another guilty dose of slo-mo walking, flying sparks and anachronistic soundtracks. In the opening episode “The Noose”, we’re served a familiar course of family disputes, sinister threats and violent outbursts – but when the delivery is this exciting, who cares if it’s not anything new?We pick up where the last series left off: the Shelby clan imprisoned and facing the rope. Of course, family patriarch Tommy always finds a last-minute reprieve, but that close call has taken its toll and there’s only one man to blame. A year later Read more ...
Bill Knight
What does it take to be included in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition? This year 2,423 photographers entered 5,717 images: 2,373 of those photographers are left wondering what it takes to make the grade. Remarks from the judges are a little on the Delphic side: "Those we have selected provoked a connection that resonated in all of us." "It’s always tricky to whittle down to the contenders." "We simply nominated our favourite pictures…".What do the pictures themselves tell us? Extremes, as usual, play their part. The selection now on show at the National Portrait Read more ...
peter.quinn
If having several projects on the go is a necessity for most jazz musicians, the US drummer Mark Guiliana is more protean than most, with a musical CV that traverses jazz, rock and electronic music. Like the pianist Robert Glasper, Guiliana – voted Best Jazz Drummer in this year’s Modern Drummer Readers Poll – has been hugely influenced by electronic music and textures, as equally inspired by Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as by jazz drumming legends Tony Williams and Elvin Jones.Across two perfectly paced sets in a packed Ronnie Scott’s, part of this year's EFG London Jazz Festival, we heard Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As Motherland settles down into its first series proper after last year’s pilot, it still seems to be going at a fair gallop. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the sitcom, written by Graham Linehan and Sharon Horgan along with Helen Linehan and Holly Walsh, deals in the pitfalls of parenthood and the primary politics of the school gates, combining smart one liners with slapstick, painfully embarrassing resolutions and a small smattering of farce.What it also manages to do – and quite brilliantly – is to come up with ideal situations on which to hang the comedy. Having already addressed Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is not a movie to see in the front row – intrusive close-ups, hand-held camerawork, colour saturated night shots and a relentless synthesiser score all conspire to make Good Time a wild ride. An unrecognisable Robert Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a nervy con artist who enlists his intellectually disabled brother Nick in a bank robbery. The heist goes horribly wrong and the camera clings to the brothers and their nightmarish fate over the next 24 hours. Directed by real-life brothers Josh and Benny Safdie (the latter also plays Nick), Good Time sometimes plays like an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are more clothes flying Kesha’s way than onto the stage at a Las Vegas Tom Jones concert in the mid-Seventies. She started it. As she introduced her 2010 single “Take It Off”, she announced that since things were so hot she’d be discarding a few items. Duly, she removes the heavy, dark velveteen jacket, decorated with embroidered red roses, that she’s been wearing so far, and undoes her shiny gold shirt down to her sternum, revealing her bra. The song kicks in and the capacity crowd go nuts as she attacks her ballsy ode to a party hole “where they go hardcore and there's glitter on the Read more ...
David Nice
Only connect. As the Southbank Centre's International Chamber Music Series at St John's showcased supreme eloquence in two searing but perfectly-proportioned meditations from the Second World War, over the road at Smith Square Europe House was hosting a tribute to a name that may not resonate as much as Messiaen or Shostakovich, Hubert Butler. Nevertheless just before the Frenchman composed visions for himself and three fellow musicians in a German prisoner-of-war camp camp and the Russian did what he could to mark the horrors of the Holocaust, the Irishman had been in Vienna on his own Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Like an incoming artillery shell, nothing screams “Christmas is coming!” like another Call of Duty game crash landing on the shelves. The mega-budget war franchise makes more money than Santa at this time of year and just to add to the annual festivities, we’re treated to a grim recreation of World War II, courtesy of Activision's latest blockbuster.From the D-Day Normandy landings to liberating Paris and ultimately pushing forward into Germany, it’s a title brimming with cinematic set pieces and epic battles.You will have seen many of the scenarios before – the Normandy beach assaults, for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Outrage knows no time barrier, as the world at large reminds us on a daily basis. So what better moment for the National Theatre to fashion for the internet age a stage adaptation of Network, the much-laureled 1976 celluloid satire about lunacy and, yes, anger in the televisual age. For a generation or more of filmgoers (myself among them), Peter Finch's Howard Beale ranting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" was part of our cultural DNA, and the first thing to be said about Ivo van Hove's theatrical iteration of the film is that its star, Bryan Cranston, does that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“There is something odd, I suppose, about anyone who betrays their country.” It’s an excellent opening line, particularly when delivered in director George Carey’s nicely querulous narrative voice, for Toffs, Queers and Traitors (BBC Four). He certainly knows what he’s talking about: Carey’s last two documentaries for Storyville have been about Kim Philby and George Blake, two other prominent entries in the roll-call of British Cold War intelligence infamy.But spies, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, are surely odd in their own unique ways. They turn traitor for all sorts of reasons, even if Read more ...
Robert Beale
Intellectual rigour and emotional honesty are the rewarding qualities in András Schiff’s Bach playing. Virtuosity comes as standard, too. And you get value for your money – his programme all but filled two-and-a-half hours, and he was as completely in command at the end as he had been at the beginning.More so, if anything. If Schiff is not entirely satisfied with the way something comes out, he’ll play the whole section of the music again, just to show what it really can be like.It was the three big pieces (all published or labelled as "Keyboard Practice" by their tongue-in-cheek creator) Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Should Brexit ministers need help understanding the cultural mindset of their continental counterparts, they might consider a subscription to the Orange Tree, the compact Richmond producing house that is defiantly opening its arms to Europe. This year alone it has staged plays from Germany, France and now the Netherlands, its in-the-round presentations bringing characters and predicaments up close and personal. With the actors almost within touching distance, there is a strong sense of being a privileged voyeur, observing not so much a performance in a theatre as goings-on in a room.Lot Read more ...