Reviews
Tom Birchenough
It doesn’t take long, I think, to work out the associations of the title of Insyriated: we are surely being presented with a variation of “incarceration”, one tinged by the very specific context of the conflict that has ravaged Syria for six years now. But there’s a certain ambiguity at the centre of Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw’s film about a Damascus family confined in their apartment as civil war goes on around them – they have not been literally locked up by anyone, rather their temporary self-confinement, presided over and enforced by the powerful matriarch Oum Yazan (Hiam Abbass Read more ...
David Nice
Of Sondheim’s half-dozen masterpieces, Follies is the one which sets the bar impossibly high, both for its four principals and in its typically unorthodox dramatic structure. The one-hit showstoppers from within a glittering ensemble come thick and fast in the first half – stop the show they certainly did last night – and it’s hard not to miss all that when the camera zooms in exclusively on the quarrelling quartet. Dominic Cooke’s less-is-more National Theatre production, full of subtle touches, finds a better solution than any to the nominally climactic “Loveland” sequence and wisely Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stephen King’s IT attempted ultimate terror, cutting far deeper than a killer clown. It idealised childhood friendships and their adult honouring even as one of those kids was forced to eat shit by sadistic bullies, and their idyllic small-town of Derry had a stream of child-killing evil running through its sewers. Andy Muschietti’s elegantly crafted adaptation – the first part of two – does King’s achievement superficial justice, while rarely causing nightmares of its own.Its opening scene is one exception, as 12-year-old Bill (Jaden Lieberher, pictured below third right) sends his adoring 7 Read more ...
David Nice
It can’t be too long before “women” no longer needs to prefix “conductors” to define what’s still a rare breed. Yet seven at the Proms is certainly an improvement, with many more coming up through the ranks. And American Karina Canellakis turned out to be very much the season’s final trump card. She seemed precise and watchful in a new work and in getting the BBC Symphony Orchestra to keep perfect tabs on live-wire Jeremy Dank in Bartók’s dizzying Second Piano Concerto (he watched, too, in return). But it was Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony which defined the Canellakis style – keenly-spring and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
They say that living well is the best revenge. To be fair, they also say it’s a dish best served cold and I’m pretty sure they’re thinking of gazpacho, so I’m not entirely clear how much real meaning is to be found in these dictums. I’m also not sure how much real meaning is to be found in BBC One’s infidelity drama Doctor Foster, which returned to our screens for a second series and saw Suranne Jones as the titular doc left reeling by the return of her cheating hubby, Simon (Bertie Carvel) and his former fling, now wife, Kate (Jodie Comer). We’ll need to, if possible, ignore the fact Read more ...
graham.rickson
Morag Tinto’s documentary is a profile of composer Alma Deutscher, who hit the headlines at the end of last year when her opera based on the Cinderella story premiered in Vienna. What’s unusual about that, you might ask? Apart from being female, Alma was 11 years old when she finished writing it. Eleven. Think about it. I can’t recall much about my own talents at that age, apart from being able to tie my own shoelaces and build passable models out of Lego.Alma is the real deal; frighteningly talented but disarmingly likeable. We see her at the family home in Surrey, the footage intercut with Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Even tuning up, the multinational musicians of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra make a lovely sound, well-anchored by the tug of four period-instrument cellos and three basses, yet buoyant and stippled with upper-wind colours, flutes circling and dipping like a cliff-edge bird colony. Ideal, then, for the Hebrides Overture which opened this Mendelssohn matinee (★★★★).With the gentlest of rhythmic swells in the violins, just enough turbulence registered beneath the surface to give an early hint of what would become a subtly revisionist account, formed in the quietly authoritative hands of Pablo Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you get to heaven, especially if you need to reach the pearly gates by way of the earthbound acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall? With Chief Conductor Daniele Gatti as their spirit guide, the sumptuously arrayed pilgrim band of the Royal Concertbegouw Orchestra from Amsterdam sought different routes in the centrepieces of their pair of Proms. In Bruckner’s majestic, yet often intimidating, Ninth Symphony, unfinished on the composer’s death in 1896 and presented here without any of the fabricated finales that later hands have slapped on it, the way turned out to be blocked despite the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is fictional Nordic noir. And then there is this, the real thing. Subject matter really couldn’t be much darker than that of Mayhem: A Memoir in which publisher, philanthropist and heiress Sigrid Rausing gives her perspective on her younger brother Hans Kristian’s long-term drug addiction. She tells the story of the effect it had on her, of her own descent into depression which coincided with one of his relapses. She recounts his arrest with his wife for drug possession in 2008, when they attempted to smuggle drugs into a party at the US Embassy. As she has said elsewhere: “Your life Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
We’ve been here before. Not to exactly the same territory, but to a neighbouring space in the same time frame. Last year, theartsdesk looked at a reissue of 2007’s Room to Expand, the first widely available album by the minimalist pianist Hauschka. The album’s reappearance was a moment to reflect on Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Christian Wallumrød, some of Hauschka’s fellow travellers in the inelegantly tagged post-classical groundswell, all of whom first attracted widespread attention a decade ago. Also mentioned in that review was Iceland’s Ólafur Arnalds. Now, his debut album Eulogy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So who killed Cinnamon? Six weeks ago we saw the strangled sex-worker – packed in a pink suitcase – pushed into Bondi Bay. The finale of Top of the Lake: China Girl withheld enlightenment. Puss, the chief suspect, denied responsibility. Why would the baby-farmer destroy such a valuable (pregnant) asset? The couple that ran his brothel (the concubines were advertised as surrogate mothers) disposed of the body but perhaps an overexcited client did the actual deed. The only sure thing was that Cinnamon was still toast.Jane Campion’s drama – it was never a thriller – began uncertainly, showed Read more ...