1940s
Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan review - noir settings for classic numbersMonday, 19 July 2021
What is the Shadow Kingdom and how do you gain access to it? In Bob Dylan’s case, it may be found in the film noir classics of his birth – 1941’s The Maltese Falcon onward – and it’s those noir settings, artfully condensed and reduced to a signature... Read more... |
South Pacific, Chichester Festival Theatre review - gloriously revived and also refreshedSaturday, 17 July 2021
We’ve come to learn what socially distanced means but, 72 years ago, the distance that concerned Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers was that between racial groups in the United States. With a catalogue of hits behind them, they turned to ... Read more... |
Tove review - tasteful portrait of the Moomins creatorSaturday, 10 July 2021
Even for this reviewer, who was brought up on Tove Jansson’s quirky children’s books (and is the owner of some 50 different Moomin coffee cups), it’s a stretch to recommend dropping everything to go and see Tove in the cinema. There’s nothing wrong... Read more... |
The Pursuit of Love, BBC One review - extravagantly entertainingMonday, 10 May 2021
Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious energy through two hours still to come. Adapted and directed by the... Read more... |
Lewis, Hallé, Thórarinsdóttir online review - serenity and spiceFriday, 26 March 2021
For the newest performance of their part-postponed “Winter Season” on film, the Hallé return to their rehearsal and performance centre in Ancoats, and with the help of piano soloist-director Paul Lewis and guest leader-director Eva Thórarinsdóttir... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Marlene Dietrich at Universal 1940-1942Sunday, 07 March 2021
Her glory years as the muse of Josef von Sternberg long gone, Marlene Dietrich had been labelled “box-office poison” and was sulking on the French Riviera when the producer Joe Pasternak summoned her back to Hollywood to star opposite James Stewart... Read more... |
Into the Darkness review - disappointingly soapy Danish WWII dramaFriday, 05 March 2021
Can a film be both too long and too short? If so, Into the Darkness definitely fits the bill. Anders Refn’s long-nurtured family epic follows Karl Skov (Jesper Christensen, more famous as a Bond villain), a self-made Danish industrialist... Read more... |
Holy Sonnets/The Heart's Assurance/A Charm of Lullabies, English Touring Opera online review - darkest hoursFriday, 29 January 2021
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” John Donne’s Holy Sonnets may summon all his art of wit and paradox to mock that might and dread; still, we sense the abject terror behind the formal... Read more... |
Romances on British Poetry / The Poet's Echo, English Touring Opera online review - Britten and Shostakovich in a double mirrorTuesday, 26 January 2021
A darkened stage; a pool of light; a solitary figure. And then, flooding the whole thing with meaning, music – even it’s just a soft chord on a piano. It’s no secret to any opera goer that even the barest outlines of a staging can magnify the... Read more... |
Black Narcissus, BBC One review - a haunting in the HimalayasMonday, 28 December 2020
It’s dangerous territory, remaking a classic British film as a TV mini-series. In 1947 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created Black Narcissus, a heady adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, they never set foot in the Himalayas.... Read more... |
Shirley review - hothouse art film about American horror writerThursday, 29 October 2020
Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious. Go to the cinema wanting to be plunged into a fever dream of gothic... Read more... |
The Secret Garden review - blooming charmingSunday, 25 October 2020
With Netflix releasing Rebecca on Wednesday, who’d have thought that a kid’s film would be this week’s best adaptation about an estate haunted by the memory of the deceased lady of the manor? Written and directed by the team behind Channel 4’s... Read more... |
