Reviews
Jasper Rees
Another week, another serial killer on prime time. In Dark Angel we had the grim story of Mary Ann Cotton, the Victorian poisoner who killed her husbands for the insurance. Meanwhile John Christie continues his grim work in Rillington Place. And now In Plain Sight introduces another chilling psychopath going about his business.While Christie is memorialised in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and in Richard Attenborough’s screen performance, viewers have far less to go on with Peter Manuel, who operated in the same post-war period as Christie and did most of his killing in Scotland. His Read more ...
David Nice
An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter. But then nothing needs overegging in this piece of perfectly-executed seasonal froth. Two Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Igor Levit began his recording career with Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, and his deeply felt, impressively mature readings made his name. Now he is performing a full cycle at the Wigmore Hall, and his take on the earlier sonatas turns out to be very much in the same spirit. There is little sense of Classical reserve in Levit’s early Beethoven; instead everything is performed in an intensely expressive style. It’s impulsive and unpredictable, with huge contrasts of dynamic and tempo. Sometimes the results feel counterintuitive, but they are always compelling.The ‘Tempest’ Sonata (op. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In the late 1960s, photographer Nick Hedge travelled the country, documenting some truly horrific housing conditions and the people who were forced to live in them. He photographed entire families living in one room with no heating or access to running water – people who had almost literally nothing. These weren’t isolated people on the fringes of society, these were communities, for many of those involved, this was normal.I wouldn’t have bet big money on Channel 5 revisiting some of the children pictured in these slums with care and moving sensitivity, while also highlighting the plight of Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Any show that starts with a shot of a naked bubble-butt is likely to grab the attention – especially when it belongs to Milo Ventimiglia – but, alas, the barefaced cheek of this opening gambit becomes all too symbolic. This Is Us scrapes the bottom of the barrel of American TV drama. However, its saving grace could be that it does so with irony – there are 17 more episodes to come.Dan Fogelman, its creator, also wrote Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). The cast of that movie, which includes Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling and Julianne Moore, suggests his work appeals to actors. It’s not so easy to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The nine artists in this exhibition mainly paint large, eye-catching canvases; yet the most arresting image on show is a tiny, rather tentative picture of an unprepossessing man with yellow hair. It is hard to say why Richard Aldrich’s ethereal Future Portrait no 49, 2003 (main picture) is so compelling.The forlorn figure leans into the space and cushions his cheek on a band of green brushmarks. His florid pink skin is painted with thin acrylic washes that make him seem insubstantial; yet the fine black lines emphasising his features lend a watchful intensity to his face. The almost Read more ...
David Nice
Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered masterpiece has had two further performances here proving that the drama is all in the music. Vladimir Jurowski's 2013 Festival Hall interpretation literally had the edge, in its razor-sharp focus, on last night. But it's always good to see the composer as conductor make light of his rhythmic complexity as he nears his 70th birthday, and we also Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK, this account of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden keeps clutter to a minimum as Stone fashions a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.It's no great surprise to find that Stone portrays Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of Read more ...
Heather Neill
The cry "Let's pretend" must have been heard often when J M Barrie played with the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens or at Black Lake Cottage in Surrey. The five sons of Arthur and Sylvia, orphaned as children and adopted by Barrie, almost all had tragic lives: George died in Flanders in 1915, Michael drowned at Oxford, Peter later committed suicide. But during childhood they escaped into piratical adventures and an invented Neverland with "Uncle Jim".It is inevitable that Barrie's own strange childhood story should be scrutinised alongside his possessive interest in the Llewelyn Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As modern kids, they turned their noses up at “pigs’ kidneys in mustard sauce”, “breaded brains with cauliflower” or “chicken gizzards in lightly spiced broth”. Now, our bland tubes of homogenised innards disguise their beastly origins: “Whatever used to grunt, moo, cackle, neigh, is turned into sausage.”You might say that Günter Grass passed the (almost) 70 years of his writing life in a struggle with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.Lundsten’s “Bön 5 – “Förlåt oss våra skulder” (Prayer 5 – Forgive us our Debts) from the 1972 album Fadervår (Our Read more ...