Reviews
Tom Birchenough
There can’t be many American public figures who are welcome on Russian television these days, but Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage is one of them. In Hunted: Gay and Afraid we saw him sitting in on legislative gatherings too, and when the World Congress of Families (WCF) holds its assemblies in Moscow – which it seems to do quite often – the atmosphere is of a meeting of minds between leading Russian politicians and the ideologues of the conservative, Christian-aligned American organisations that, through their emphatic upholding of traditional values, effectively reject Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I can’t remember a time I felt so profoundly disquieted by a Handel staging. It’s partly that, as an oratorio, Saul breaks so many dramatic rules that lend the operas their reassuring structural certainty, but there’s also something – a tenderness certainly, but also a violence – to Barrie Kosky’s production that uncouples the music from any residual cosiness England’s favourite adopted composer still inspires in British audiences. It’s unsettling and exhilarating in about equal measure, a startlingly sensitive and telling statement from a director better known for his dramatic shock-and-awe. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The boxing movie has been a gift to filmmakers virtually since the dawn of cinematic time. In 1932 Jimmy Cagney was swinging for the title (and the gal) in Winner Take All, but some say 1947's Body and Soul, starring John Garfield as boxing champ Charley Davis, is the one most of the other screen boxers are indebted to, from Sly Stallone's Rocky to Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw isn't likely to set a new benchmark in celluloid pugilism, despite contusion-evoking verisimilitude in the fight scenes (Jake Gyllenhaal, playing the central character Billy "The Read more ...
ellin.stein
As Noah Baumbach moves into his forties, his youthful archness is becoming increasingly tempered with a wry melancholy. It adds depth and piquancy to this story of a forty-something couple trying to come to terms with the fading of youth’s infinite possibilities (“What’s the opposite of 'the world is your oyster'?”) by embracing, occasionally literally, a pair of Millennials who introduce them to cool enthusiasms such as cycling, walking in disused subway tunnels, and ayahuasca ceremonies (self-realization through shamanic ritual and copious magic mushroom-induced vomiting).Josh (Ben Stiller Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Congratulations, Krams. After three long years of chapter by chapter instalments, the epic fairytale is complete. Fans who have been following the wanderings of the heavily sedated Anna and her companions since 2012 can now see the whole story in context, and new players can see an end in sight, which is helpful because playing through the first chapter is akin to pulling teeth.Poor little Anna seems to be surrounded by adults with a Fritzel complex. Grandpa wants to keep her locked in their farm away from the dangerous outside world, and the evil witch Winfriede wants to keep her locked in a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Its title may hint at exotic worlds – a Western, even – but Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is anything but. Carlyle himself plays the title character, one of life’s losers (“haunted tree” being one of the more memorable descriptions we get of him) who’s barely getting by as a Glasgow barber until the story, and his own unplanned actions, pitch his mundane existence to another level altogether.But from the hangdog humour of Barney’s opening overvoice narration onwards, it’s clear this is no bleak drama of existential deprivation, even if Scottish writer Douglas Lindsay’s source novel The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shall we blame The Bridge? The Swedish-Danish cop show opened for business with a scenario of outlandish gruesomeness: two halves of two corpses straddling the border between two countries. How to grab the viewer by the lapels, lesson one: hook them with a crazy, wacky, weird murder scene, so bonkers they’ll just have to hang around to find out what’s what.Witnesses is reading the same playbook. We began with three bodies strewn around a show home, and it was swiftly revealed that these bodies had nothing to do with one another and had been dug up from a variety of cemeteries. Precisely how Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We can’t seem to move these days without stumbling into the path of a zombie movie, making one wonder why walking dead with a penchant for fast food are suddenly so alluring.When George A Romero effectively created the genre in the late Sixties and Seventies, zombies were a device for satire; today they seem to reflect a communal sense of societal breakdown. While comedies such as Warm Bodies and Zombieland make broad fun of post-apocalyptic decay, and the horror of World War Z is mitigated by its global scale, the zombie stories that truly strike home – such as The Walking Dead on television Read more ...
Phoebe Michaelides
Many festivals have become increasingly family-friendly. The children who, 10 years ago, were taken to outdoor multi-dayers such as Latitude, Camp Bestival and the now-defunct Big Chill, are now teenagers. Many have grown up with festivals as a usual part of their summer holidays - rather than a countercultural escape - and now they want to strike out on their own. Theartsdesk asked 17-year-old aspiring actor-writer Phoebe Michaelides to attend Latitude (with a friend) and report back. This is what she had to say. With minds full of high expectations and Morrisons Basic cider in hand, my Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. With Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden the light is on Paul Vallée, a club DJ trying to make his way in the fertile early Nineties French electro-dance music scene from which Daft Punk became the global breakout phenomenon. And it’s the helmet-wearing duo which loom large over Eden.Eden takes the factual and merges it with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
All the charm in the world provided by two seasoned pros can't make a satisfying whole out of Ruth & Alex, a glutinous portrait of a longtime marriage that is gently tested when the eponymous couple decide to move house. Burdened with a bewilderingly wrong-headed pair of subplots, British director Richard Loncraine's film makes only partial use of the off-the-charts amiability and ease of leading players Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman: so much so, in fact, that one wishes the two Oscar-winners had thrown away Charlie Peters's script altogether and started from scratch.Intermittent voice- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
How often do the streets of London throng with concert-goers demanding admission to a recital of Latin motets? Even for Sloane Square, the crowds hoping for a last-minute ticket to the sold-out Proms Chamber Music debut concert by The Cardinall’s Musick of Tallis and Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s world premiere were exceptional. For the most part, these music-lovers displayed excellent judgement, for this was an inspired programme and performance. Not, however, in the way most probably had in mind.Despite his popularity, four of the Tallis pieces were receiving their Proms debut, including, Read more ...