New York
Thomas H. Green
If we think of Robert De Niro and Brian De Palma, we likely think of The Untouchables from 1987 with the great actor in his career pomp, chewing up the scenery in a memorable cameo as Al Capone. However, the pair had history. They made three films together in the 1960s – Greetings, The Wedding Party and Hi, Mom! – which are now gathered together in 2K restorations from the original negatives. The short of it is that two of them are now little more than historical curios for archivists, but the other is revelatory on a number of counts and well worth exploring.The Wedding Party began Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I want to be a man without any past,” said Michel Legrand, who has died at the age of 86. He had perhaps the longest past in showbiz. Orchestrator, pianist, conductor, composer of countless soundtracks, who else has collaborated as widely - with Miles Davis and Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbra Streisand and Jean-Luc Godard, Gene Kelly, Joseph Losey and Edith Piaf? When I visited him at his house at his splendid classical manoir 100km south of Paris, on the mantelpiece in the large white sitting room four familiar gilt statuettes stood sentry. The oldest was for “Windmills of My Mind”, the best Read more ...
David Nice
Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir: three names on quite a list I reeled off earlier this week when someone asked me why the compositions of Rebecca Saunders, in the news for winning the €250,000 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, make me lose the will to live, and whom I’d choose instead. Saunders gets a look-in at the very end of this Kings Place year of music by women, Venus Unwrapped, so I'll just have to try again. Meanwhile the first three, communicators all - as Saunders is not, for me - kicked off Bang on a Can's affably presented gallimaufry celebrating 27 years of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This well-crafted addition to the films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is subtler and less commercial than last year’s The Hate U Give but covers similar terrain. Writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green sets Monsters and Men in Brooklyn and structures his narrative into a triptych, following three young men’s different reactions to the same police killing. In the process he sets the audience questions about complicity and loyalty. Drawing on the death of Eric Garner, choked by police officers when they caught him selling loose cigarettes in 2014, Green’s approach is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade: that bromide is about the only one absent from the astonishingly bad Life Itself, which in actuality might require a stiff drink to make it through the film intact. Folding together an interconnected set of stories told across continents and out of sequence, writer-director Dan Fogelman (of TV's This Is Us) hurls one tragedy after another at his hapless characters, none of them so serious that they can't be caught up in the tidal wave of triteness. By the time we're informed, near the end, that "life brings you to your knees", you may well be full of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Bruce Springsteen’s one-man show opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on New York’s West 48th Street in October last year it was only supposed to run for six weeks. This being Springsteen, however, demand proved almost limitless, so the season was extended twice, and the Boss (as he doesn't like being called) takes his last bow on 15 December.So you never got a ticket? No worries. There’s an audio version of the show in various formats, and now Netflix is launching a full-scale film of the event, directed by Thom Zimny, which puts you right at the front of the stalls and lets you see Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After Sam Raimi’s original mixed-bag trilogy, Andrew Garfield’s all too familiar outing as the webslinger, and last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it would be fair to say we’ve had enough Spider-Man films. Despite the potential fatigue from yet-another-origins story, we now have Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Whilst the cynic might see it as another attempt by Sony to tighten their grip on their IP before inevitably relinquishing it to Marvel, the reality is that, whatever the motivations, they’ve created something spectacular.This should come as no surprise given the talent in charge of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play out. It’s probably a good idea to let audiences know that they won’t get child-rearing tips from Rosemary’s Baby. But with Three Identical Strangers, a lot of its pleasure is in its narrative twists. To write about it critically is to risk dissipating the intricately paced revelations that make Tim Wardle’s documentary work so well. My advice Read more ...
Calidore String Quartet
Classical musicians spend much of their lives inhabiting the realms of the past. To effectively practise and perform the music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and countless others, performers must combine research and personal intuition to time travel into the era of these great composers’ lives. After months of exploration, as one begins to comprehend the social customs, politics and science of the era, a clearer understanding of the composer's individual personality and musical aesthetic begin to emerge.Many performers spend their entire life unravelling issues such as how Beethoven’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You get plenty of Dylan for your buck these days, with the Mondo Scripto exhibition currently at the Halcyon Gallery in London, and a totemic and arrestingly beautiful set of Jerry Schatzberg's photographs of mid-Sixties Dylan in all his fuzzy glory just published by ACC Art Books. And now, following on from last winter's gospel-era entry into the Bootleg Series, Trouble No More, comes another generous hawl from the tape archives.At first sight, the prospect of a single album’s worth of sessions spread across six discs and 87 tracks – even if it is Blood on the Tracks – is a daunting one, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Abbandonata: Handel Italian Cantatas Carolyn Sampson (soprano), The King’s Consort/Robert King (Vivat)The young Handel’s desire to be an opera composer prompted him to spend the years 1706-1710 in Italy. He was already a superb academician and master of counterpoint, but a colleague recorded that Handel felt that his melodic gifts needed honing. Where better to go than Italy? There, he composed much church music, a couple of successful operas and scores of chamber cantatas. These were mostly written in Rome – a city in which opera had been banned by papal decree as penitence for an Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be. Ah, a weighted paradox – Company is full of them. Successful New Yorker Bobbie (Rosalie Craig, pictured below with Alex Gaumond and Jonathan Bailey) is celebrating/avoiding her 35th birthday, amidst the overbearing friends she both loves and longs to escape Read more ...