TV
Jasper Rees
Teamwork, as the song once said, makes the dream work. Homo sapiens knows this, if not quite by nature, then at least by nurture. Turns out that there are some chimpanzees in Leipzig which are all over the team thing too. Offered the chance to pull together on a simple mechanism to retrieve a nut – one each – two chimps will work in tandem to make it happen.Perhaps these are just highly efficient Teutonic chimps who uniquely understand the meaning of Vorsprung durch Technik. But no. That stat about sharing 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees? It seems the ability to cooperate is part of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The ancients teach us that after hubris comes nemesis, and Luther's writer/creator Neil Cross has taken the lesson to heart. The big question hanging over this third series is, can the bullish DCI John Luther continue to hunt villains in his own headstrong, politically-incorrect fashion, or will he be brought down by snarling Detective Super George Stark, a bitter and vengeful man hauled out of retirement to bring Luther his come-uppance? He's played with spittle-flecked animosity by David O'Hara, and you can't help hoping that at some point Luther will drop him off the top of a tall building Read more ...
fisun.guner
David Mamet has composed a love letter to Phil Spector. It may not be the most mellifluous ever written, and its tone may occasionally jar, but that’s what this fictional film, which he also directs and which stars Al Pacino as the bewigged legendary music producer, effectively is. It focuses on the months leading up to and during his first trial for the murder of struggling actress and nightclub waitress Lana Clarkson, and ends before we hear the verdict (it’s a hung jury; a retrial convicted him of second-degree murder in 2009).But just in case there’s any danger of mixing fact and fiction Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When television goes off exploring classical civilisation, you can hear those lines from The Life of Brian chiming in your head. “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?” Such has been the glut of Roman TV in recent times that no couch potato is in any further doubt. The Romans have kept the plebs royally entertained. But what of the Greeks?The ancient ones, that is. (Of their modern descendants we know quite enough from the financial pages.) What Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many of my friends find the entire idea of festivals abhorrent. It’s not that they’re on some appalled-of-Purley Daily Mail campaign to put a stop to them, just that the idea of staying under canvas for a few days in a field full of noisiness is their idea of Hell. Especially if the weather is inclement. Many of them would also find the pie-eyed utopian warbling, with which this film is entirely packed, irritating in the extreme, irrelevant delusional blather in our world of international debt crisis and cynical political shenanigans.I should state, then, that I am not one of these people. I Read more ...
David Nice
Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong. I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today. This year, though, it was business as usual: the panel lit up by a gracious Dame Kiri, three of the singers who didn’t make it to the final,sound telly opera trouper Mary King and I all agreed that regal American with a twinkle Jamie Barton deserved the palm.How so, given that all five finalists – not to mention the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After a two-year gap, Luther returns to BBC One for a third series at the beginning of July. Devotees of Idris Elba's broody, enigmatic, rule-trampling 'tec may feel disgruntled that they're only going to get four episodes, but at least the great man is on stonking form.Naturally your spoiler-free artsdesk can't give much of the game away, but this time the sometimes erratic Luther appears to have found its own natural tone, in which heightened realism and jump-out-of-your-seat grand guignol shocks sit comfortably with grimy east London locations. You get not one but a generous two killers to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mobster roles have helped define many of America's greatest screen actors, from James Cagney to Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Thanks to his portrayal of Tony Soprano in HBO's TV masterpiece The Sopranos, James Gandolfini has made an unforgettable addition to their ranks.Though he has died, apparently of a heart attack, at the shockingly early age of 51, Gandolfini's performance across the six seasons of The Sopranos felt more like a piece of American folklore than a mere acting performance. Violent and thuggish yet also confused and conflicted, Tony Soprano was the all-powerful Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have thought BBC sitcoms had sunk to the depths with Ben Elton's The Wright Way, but Quick Cuts is giving it a run for its money. The opening episode of a three-part series started last night and, while I'm not a betting woman, I'll vouchsafe Quick Cuts won't get a full run. Or should it do so, I may have to ask for my licence fee back.Georgia Pritchett's offering, unlike Elton's monumental failure, at least doesn't have the added burden of a laughter track (at least not in the preview version I saw), so I was able to appreciate just how silent I was watching it. To be fair, I did Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I bought a new car recently, but by the end of The Route Masters (***) I was feeling a powerful inclination to sell it. The film would have rung a masochistic bell with anybody accustomed to trying to travel round London on a regular basis, and the soundbite claiming that the average speed of the city's rush hour traffic is 9mph sounded like a wild exaggeration.It was a gentle study in collective lunacy. Cab driver Howard Taylor, frozen in West End traffic, enunciated it neatly: "Anyone who drives in London has got to be off their rocker." Howard looked comparatively sane, so why is he still Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In recent times, the Middle Ages have been ghettoised on those channels you watch in pubs. Game of Thrones, and anything by Regius Professor of bunkum Ken Follett, are history laid on for people who don’t give a toss about history. You know, the snorey stuff about canon law and tithe barns. For those who prefer their medieval high jinks only semi-faked, The White Queen prances into one’s purview on a white liveried steed. Its aim is to show a clean pair of hooves to all that oikish pillaging and plotting which have lately steamed up the nation’s undergarments.Philippa Gregory’s trilogy about Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Being a woman soldier in the Afghan army must rate among the world’s “least wanted” jobs, if only 14 applicants came forward for 150 places in the year’s intake covered in Afghan Army Girls. It apparently took a year’s negotiations to get a single camera allowed in to follow them over their six months' training, and even then some on the course insisted on having their faces blanked (understandable, when the Taliban threaten retaliation). After all that trouble, but more importantly because it spoke a real quiet truth, this insightful film from photojournalist Lalage Snow surely deserved a Read more ...