mon 04/11/2024

Colombia

Birds of Passage review - mesmerising Colombian family saga

“Do you know why I’m respected?” demands Ursula (Carmiña Martinez), a Wayuu matriarch in La Guajira in northern Colombia, of Rapayet (José Acosta), who wants to marry her daughter Zaida (Natalia Reyes, soon to star in James Cameron’s Terminator...

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Blue Planet II, BBC One review - just how fragile?

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Embrace of the Serpent

The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El...

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CD: Sidestepper – Supernatural Love

Sidestepper have been ploughing the rich ground of "electro-cumbia" for some years now. Their appealing contribution to the world dance scene is the fruit of a collaboration between Richard Blair, with his taste for drum‘n’bass and dub, and a number...

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The Gamechangers, BBC Two / Narcos, Netflix

Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser, who's portrayed as the dominant creative mastermind behind Rockstar Games and its phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto series, The Gamechangers (**) sought to depict legal battles over GTA's violent...

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Mouthful, Trafalgar Studios

Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human...

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CD: Shakira - Shakira

The other day I woke up with Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” fracking my mind. Round and round it juddered, wouldn’t leave me alone - horrid production, killer chorus - and much too much of that bloke whose career used to be endlessly repeating, “One...

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Reissue CDs: The Best of 2012

Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Bill Withers, Massive Attack, Django Reinhardt, Diablos Del Ritmo

Bill Withers: The Complete Sussex and Columbia AlbumsKieron TylerThis box set is several cuts above the usual major-label, no-frills cheapo collection gathering together a selection of an artist’s albums. Produced with evident care, it’s a superb...

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The Arts Desk Radio Show 6

Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available...

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Ondatrópica and Konkoma, Hackney Empire

What function does a critic even serve at an event like this? Some of the best Colombian musicians across several generations are playing some of the best music Colombia has ever produced to an audience that largely consists of blissfully happy...

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CD: Ondatrópica - Ondatrópica

English producer Will "Quantic" Holland has brilliantly captured the sound of this Colombian big band who came together solely to make an album that represents the best of Colombian tropical music past and present. For capturing is all you really...

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