fri 26/04/2024

gothic

Blu-ray: The Eternal Daughter

In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its...

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Jekyll and Hyde, Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh review - audacious contemporary resonances

Evil walks among us. But it doesn’t arrive courtesy of mad scientists, bubbling potions and horrifying transformations. Instead, it comes from ordinary people surrendering themselves to their basest desires and resentments. Even worse, doing that...

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Saltburn review - an uneven gothic romp

This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s...

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Dracula: Mina's Reckoning, Festival Theatre Edinburgh review - audacious and entirely convincing

An all-female production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – well, kind of – that transplants the novel’s more local action to the northeast of Scotland, and finds a bloody new calling for one of its less ostentatious characters? Elgin-born writer Morna...

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Rebecca, Charing Cross Theatre review - troubled show about a troubled house nonetheless diverts

There are times when it’s best to know as little as possible before taking one’s seat for a show – this new production of Rebecca would be a perfect such example.It was once talked up as the new Phantom, the next smash hit musical that would do on...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Gothic

Ken Russell’s horror comedy Gothic (1986) compresses into one nightmarish night the fabled three days in June 1816 when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) entertained at his retreat Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva his fellow Romantic poet...

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Album: Genesis Owusu - Struggler

There’s been a sense of anticipation around Ghanaian-Australian Genesis Owusu ever since his ebullient 2021 debut album Smiling with No Teeth. He won a bunch of Arias, Australia’s Grammys, but could he break internationally? He’s toured the US with...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Casting the Runes / The Return / Woodhill

Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ A viciously critical review gets its unfortunate writer driven mad and sent to an untimely death in this adaptation of a macabre MR James chiller. In that case, I’d better be careful what I say...

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Lorrie Moore: I am Homeless If This is Not My Home review - between this world and the next

Lorrie Moore’s brief but haunting I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a bizarre, unsettling read. At times it’s a road trip, at others a romance, then supernatural horror, Greek tragedy, or an epistolary short story nestled within the larger...

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theartsdesk at The Three Choirs Festival - Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Hammond

The Three Choirs is (are?) off again, for the 295th time, but with a very different look, even from the festivals of my youth, never mind 1715, or whenever the first one was held (there seems to be some doubt about it). The big oratorio...

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Album: The Damned - Darkadelic

The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad...

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Album: Depeche Mode - Memento Mori

Depeche Mode’s Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, who died in May last year, was generally held to contribute to the dynamic of the band more than the music. The only member of the band without songwriting credits, his contribution as peacemaker and “...

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