1960s
graham.rickson
This Blu-ray reissue brings sci-fi masterpiece Ikarie XB 1 back to its original visual glory, with the 1963 film presented here in the 4K restoration first shown at the Cannes festival in 2016 (distributor Second Run had previously released an earlier restoration on DVD in 2013). Just how good the film looks in its latest incarnation can be observed when it's compared to the title and closing sequences recut for the film’s English language dub that are included as bonus features. Both are distinctly dim and scratchy, though worth watching to see what happens at the very close, Czech Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For her swansong, departing Donmar Artistic Director Josie Rourke goes Swinging Sixties in this stylish but flawed revival of the Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon musical. From the numerous Andy Warhol homages to Charity’s silver minidress and the cigarette haze, it’s a period dream, but the production shimmers more than it grips.Anne-Marie Duff stars as the eternally hopeful New York taxi dancer, making a pittance at her “temporary job” at the Fandango Ballroom; she’s been there eight years. Too quick to trust, Charity has been let down by numerous boyfriends, but she finds a real Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“I don’t know if I’m going to recognise any of it,” I say to my accomplice as we drain a couple of light ales amid the sea of grey beards in The Old Market’s bar. “I don’t think they’ll play the hits,” he replies, deadpan, “but don’t worry, there should be some onstage banter that’ll give you a couple of the titles.”“The hits” he refers to are composer Terry Riley’s seminal works, such as the totemic minimalist masterpiece In C and the 1969 electronica milestone A Rainbow in Curved Air. He’s right; they do not turn up. Alas, he’s not so right about the banter which is limited to a couple of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Billy Wilder’s co-writing collaboration with IAL Diamond encompassed comedy masterpieces such as Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, Irma La Douce, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and several others, and One, Two, Three (1961) is just as polished a quick-fire performance of story-telling and dialogue. A Cold War satire, the film pokes fun at the Soviets and the Americans, the extremes of capitalist opportunism and the idiocy of communist dogma, ridiculing both with zest and Olympian detachment.James Cagney, in one of his last roles, plays the boss of the West German division of Coca-Cola Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Mary Quant first made her name in 1955 with the wildly fashionable King’s Road boutique Bazaar. Initially selling a “bouillabaisse” of stock it was not until a pair of pyjamas she made was bought by an American who said he’d copy and mass produce them that Quant began dedicating herself to her own designs. Fittingly then, the V&A’s exhibition is not so much about the clothes as the attitude – commerce topped Quant’s priorities, fashion was the means.The roughly chronological exhibition is spread over two floors. While the lower level deals with the early, post-war years when Quant’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career. She once told theartsdesk that even in her early 20s, faced with the global hyper success of Come Away With Me, “I think I was smart enough to know at the time that it was money in the bank: ‘You can do what you want now, so do it.’” And what she wanted, fantastically, was essentially to be the musician she already was only more so: steadily getting deeper into country melancholy, lounge jazz dreaming and other romantically-lit hinterlands of the American psyche. And now, 17 years on, well Read more ...
james.woodall
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th anniversary year of their horrible break-up we need reminding of pop’s Biggest Bang in 1963. This was almost the film to do it. Yet for such an explosive moment in cultural history it was curiously downbeat.That might be because, as we were reminded throughout, the group’s genesis was scruffy and full of false starts. Liverpool in the 1950s seemed Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
I am deeply jealous of Miles Jupp's dressing gown in The Life I Lead, the solo play at the Park Theatre. It's a silky-grey patterned number of exquisitely comfortable proportions, and just the sort of thing a chap should wear to tell the story of his life via some genial patter over an hour or two. The story told, though, is not of Jupp but of David Tomlinson, the British actor who died in 2000 and was famous for playing upper-class fumblers, in particular Mr Banks, the irritable banker father whose life is changed forever by Mary Poppins. Like that dressing gown, the play comes with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
London's impromptu mini-season devoted to the work of Athol Fugard picks up real steam with Blood Knot, Matthew Xia's transfixing take on one of the benchmark titles of the apartheid era and beyond. I first encountered this play during its Tony-nominated Broadway engagement in 1985, in which Fugard and his great South African friend and colleague, Zakes Mokae, returned to roles they had originated in Johannesburg in 1961. Now 86, Fugard continues to proffer a theatrical call to conscience which Xia and his exemplary collaborators at the Orange Tree Theatre understand to their core. And if the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Genius is as genius does, and Rudolf Nureyev made sure nobody was left in any doubt about the scale of either his talents or his ambitions. Based on Julie Kavanagh's biography Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, The White Crow pairs director and actor Ralph Fiennes with screenwriter David Hare to deliver an involving and often thrilling account of Nureyev’s rise to fame as a ballet dancer and his sensational defection to the West in 1961. It pulls off the tricky feat of being both successful drama and a plausible depiction of the rarefied world of ballet.In its recounting of Nureyev’s life from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The US music trade weekly Cashbox chose a picture of the then-hot Diana Ross & the Supremes and Temptations joint enterprise for the cover of its 14 December 1968 issue. On page 28, under the header “Best Bets”, a review of the “It’s the Loving Season” single by The Vareeations (pictured above) said “Standout female lead makes an especially fine showing on this blues-pop ballad side. Single is bound to attract attention and could prove a solid seller.”Despite the thumbs-up, the 45 did not attract much more attention outside The Vareeations’ Philadelphia home base. Nonetheless, “It’s the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Marvel at Stranger in the House’s title sequence, the pulsating multi-coloured shapes accompanied by the cheesiest of title themes. It’s not Saul Bass, but it’s effective. Pierre Rouve’s 1967 film contains elements which may confound, irritate and annoy, though it fully deserves this handsome reissue in the BFI’s Flipside strand, with its mission “to rescue weird and wonderful British films from obscurity”. They don’t come much more weird and wonderful than this, with Hungarian émigré Rouve fresh from duty as executive producer on Antonioni’s Blow-Up. You can tell.Georges Simenon’s source Read more ...