England
Simon Munk
A tidy, English village. Swings hang in the breeze, a bicycle's discarded by a phone box, smoke curls over an ashtray in the pub garden. But no one's here. No one's ever coming back.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture isn't just one of the most arresting, creepy and intriguing pieces of domestic sci-fi since John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (or Jeff Noon's Falling out of Cars); it's also an exercise in minimalism at play – what happens in a game if you remove all the controller grappling and actual interactivity from it. Here, you simply wander around finding things.Waking up near an Read more ...
Richard Bratby
At the beginning of Act Two of John Savournin’s production of HMS Pinafore, the quarterdeck is in darkness. Kevin Greenlaw’s Captain Corcoran steps out of his cabin, downs a brandy stiffener, and launches into his melancholy lament to the moon. Woodwinds echo the ends of sighing phrases as the strings pluck their accompaniment: something about this sounds familiar. And as cymbals clash melodramatically and David Steadman, conducting, underlines the ominous chromatic rise and fall of the bass line in Little Buttercup’s fateful duet with the Captain, the target of Sullivan’s musical satire Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted in two parts by Sadie Jones from her own 2008 novel, The Outcast (**) is a morbid tale of emotional sterility and many kinds of self-harm. Leaving his troubled childhood for an even worse young-adulthood, our "hero", Lewis Aldridge, carves a great gash down his forearm with a cut-throat razor. However, he's only the most extreme case in a whole gallery of weirdos.The story opened in England just after World War Two. Period cars and trucks and Blitz bomb damage had all been dutifully marshalled, and the officers' club where Elizabeth Aldridge (Hattie Morahan) reunited with husband Read more ...
theartsdesk
There were female pioneers of photography before Christina Broom, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. And others have hidden their light under a bigger bushel: Vivian Meier's body of work remained stashed away only to be discovered after her death. Broom's importance is partly one of timing: she prowled the streets of London at a time of great historical significance. As suggested by Soldiers and Suffragettes, the title of a new exhibition and book celebrating her work, she was a witness to the struggle for universal suffrage and the First World War.Her career starrted late. In 1903, at the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 1998, Ian McKellen starred in Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, an account of the final days of the ailing and tormented film director James Whale. Echoes of it are discernable here, where Condon has recruited an older McKellen for a carefully-crafted depiction of the imaginary dotage of Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional detective. Aged 93, the doddering sleuth struggles to reassemble the jumbled jigsaw of his memories and hence solve his final case, which turns out to be himself.Condon has based his film on Mitch Cullin's novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, and the narrative whisks Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New sci-fi series aren't exactly a dime a dozen on British TV, awash as it usually is with serial killers, cops and costume dramas, so the fact that Humans not only exists but is also bold and fresh-looking triggers instant brownie points. It doubtless helps that it's a collaboration between Channel 4 and America's AMC, home of Mad Men and The Walking Dead. It pitches us into a contemporary London which looks superficially unchanged, but has been rendered utterly alien by the new boom in synthetic humans, or "synths".It seems the Smart TV, the Apple Watch and Mr Dyson's latest dust-sucking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world.Not that Boorman brings us to any gore-sodden battlefields or strategic command bunkers. His focus is strictly personal and intimate, as he takes his protagonist Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) – nine years old in the first film, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine if broadcasters thought the only living pop star worth giving air time to was Lady Gaga. Imagine – the horror. It would be wall-to-wall Gaga for the foreseeable future. And then imagine if the only living contemporary artist commissioning editors at Channel 4 and the BBC even bothered looking at was… Grayson Perry. Imagine. But wait. You don’t need to imagine – Perry has carved himself a big niche: as the go-to telly transvestite sociologist-cum-artist, fronting programmes trying to pin down the essence of Englishness, taste and class, and why critics seem to sneer at the type of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The country is groaning under the weight of commemorations, exhibitions, publications and programmes all marking significant anniversaries of World War One, but the underlying message – lest we forget – remains as potent as ever, perhaps even more so in these tumultuous times.Narrating this documentary chiefly concerned with the art of the First World War, Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne told us that the art described the indescribable, conveying what is beyond description. If that sounds unbearably fey it isn’t at all, for the surprise and interest of this programme was in fact two-fold: Read more ...
Sheila Rock
I had never really photographed landscape. But I spent many wonderful weekends in Suffolk and Norfolk along the coast. This project began when I just decided to photograph the sea in a very abstract way. The sky and the light and the flatness were quite inspiring for me.And then commercial jobs were taking me to places like Staithes near Whitby in North Yorkshire, and Cornwall, and I just thought it was so beautiful that I’d say to my assistant, “If I book you for a day or two, let’s travel along the coast and do some more atmospheric pictures.” As I began to explore other parts of the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
"I sometimes wish we were more normal," sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the froth and the substance of this early play, written in a blaze of youthful elan over three days in 1924. What has kept it a theatrical staple for 90 years and counting is not just its writer’s talent to amuse, nor its near-perfect structure: it is also the stain of truth that seeps through its merry mayhem, drawing on Coward’s own experience as a hapless weekend houseguest, and his sharp-eyed observations Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ken Russell remained British cinema’s enfant terrible till his death in 2011, aged 84. Rather than fade into respectability, he retreated to amateur provocations filmed in his back garden, and returned to the dramatised documentaries on classical musicians which made his name for the BBC in the Sixties. His notoriety peaked with Women In Love’s nude male wrestling in 1969, the nude nuns and corrupt bigotry of 1971’s The Devils and his chat show assault on its critic Alexander Walker, and The Who’s Tommy (1975).Russell’s decision not to direct Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday as his cinema debut Read more ...