1950s
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
On paper, the appeal of a Sylvia revival is questionable. If even the choreographer (Frederick Ashton) wasn't sure his 1952 original was worth saving for posterity, do we really want to watch a 2004 reconstruction posthumously pieced together from rehearsal tapes? Especially given that, with its arcadian setting, it totters delicately on the dividing line between delightfully arch and camp as the Queen Mother's curtains? Happily I can report, after last night's performance by the Royal Ballet, that this revival comes down on the right side of the line, and is absolutely worth your time.Sylvia Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you’re hoping for an incisive look at Fifties American suburbia in this unappealing film, directed and co-written by George Clooney, you’ll be disappointed. It’s hardly worthy of the director of Good Night, and Good Luck, also set in the Fifties and co-written by Grant Heslov. It could have been much more satisfying if Clooney and Heslov had stuck with the original plan and explored the timely real-life story Suburbicon is partly based on – the racist riots sparked off by an African-American family moving into Levittown, an all-white suburb in Pennsylvania, in 1957. But instead, Clooney Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Incredible Shrinking Man starts innocently with a young couple bantering on a small boat off the California coast. Before what looks like an atomic mushroom cloud wafts towards the unfortunate Scott Carey, lightly coating him in glittery fallout. Six months later, Carey seems to be getting smaller. Initially it’s little more than an irritation.Shirts and trousers don’t seem to fit any more, but a chirpy doctor refuses to believe his baffled patient. Soon, this unwanted diminution is undeniable, and medical tests – cue ominous shots of phials, test tubes and syringes – confirm that a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so the mini-boom in motor racing movies continues, this time with a look back at the history of Ferrari and the intense on-track battles of the 1950s, a decade in which the Scuderia won four of its 15 Formula One World Drivers Championships. In particular, Race to Immortality zooms in on the unique partnership of the British drivers Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, who called each other “mon ami mate” and would split their race winnings equally between themselves. Their machiavellian boss Enzo Ferrari began to suspect that their great friendship was blunting their will to win races.The Read more ...
graham.rickson
The opening shot sets the tone for what follows: a pair of duelling cockroaches attached to a string, tormented by a bored child. In 1953’s The Wages of Fear, we quickly sense that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s characters are similarly powerless. His multi-national misfits, marooned in an unnamed South American town, are effectively prisoners, scrabbling around for the money with which to escape a place which is “like a prison: easy to get in, impossible to get out”. The film’s exposition is overlong, but creates a sense of oppressive dread.As with Hitchcock’s The Birds, the leisurely first act Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Terry Johnson's award-winning 1982 play Insignificance hasn't been seen in London since the playwright directed a 1995 revival at the Donmar (though Sam West staged his own production a decade later in Sheffield). But even the intrigue inherent in finding Johnson's own daughter, Alice, in the pivotal role of the unnamed actress who is clearly Marilyn Monroe can't steady director David Mercatali's reckoning with the play this time out.Four hugely distinct icons of American history are thrown together during one eventful 1950s night in Albert Einstein's New York hotel room as he finds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a challenge to review this film without resorting to adjectives like “plucky” and “well-meaning”, and its mainstream comfiness made it a strangely cautious choice for the opening night of the recent London Film Festival. Breathe is not only Andy Serkis’s debut as a director, but also a film based on the family experiences of its producer, Jonathan Cavendish. It tells the story of how, in the 1950s, the latter's father Robin met and married society beauty Diana Blacker but later contracted polio, which left him paralysed. The couple’s indomitable battle against his condition eventually Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Like Steptoe and Son with ideological denouncements, Stalin’s Politburo have known each other too long. They’re not only trapped but terrified, a situation whose dark comedy is brought to a head by Uncle Joe’s sudden, soon fatal stroke in 1953. The prospects of replacing him and of his survival alike cause behaviour which would disgrace rats in a sack. Armando Iannucci’s portfolio of political satire has found its perfect subject.He’s helped by a cast of fascinating contrasts. Steve Buscemi’s Nikki Khrushchev is all sardonic Brooklyn cynicism, mixing acerbic putdowns with disbelieving dismay Read more ...
The Lady from the Sea, Donmar Warehouse review - Nikki Amuka-Bird luminous in a sympathetic ensemble
David Nice
What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...
David Nice
It was a topsy-turvy evening. Sometimes the things you expect to turn out best disappoint, while in this case the relatively small beer yielded a true "Little Great" of a production and the best singing in Opera North's latest double bill (subject to reshuffling during the rest of the run). Janáček's Osud (Destiny) should have packed the emotional punch of the night – a score authentically vivid in every bar tied to an experimental plot and a libretto sometimes pretentious in its observations on art and life; Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti has more trouble finding its heart. But conviction, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s more than 40 years since Sparks appeared on Top of the Pops with “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”, one of a handful of hits from the brothers Mael, Ron and Russell, who grew up in 1950s and ‘60s LA detesting the “cerebral and sedate” folk boom and grooving to such British acts as the Who and the Kinks. They spent part of the Seventies in London, gaining an Island Records deal on the back of an Old Grey Whistle Test performance.They looked weird then and they still do, Russell Mael leaping about manically like an ageing pixie, brother Ron still sitting impassively behind his Read more ...