history
DVD/Blu-ray: IcemanWednesday, 26 September 2018
Much has been made of Iceman’s characters speaking the ancient Rhaetic dialect, unsubtitled, but that’s never a problem: Felix Randau’s no-frills revenge thriller doesn’t need any words. The juiciest bits of dialogue are the various grunts and... Read more... |
Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated livesSunday, 23 September 2018
Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have... Read more... |
Eyam, Shakespeare's Globe review - plague drama, dark and looseSaturday, 22 September 2018
The end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhaps intimidating. There’s the sheer scale of the space and the chance to write for a large cast; a historical subject seems... Read more... |
Jeanie O'Hare: 'The play taught me how European we really are'Thursday, 13 September 2018
I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no. I started... Read more... |
Underground Railroad Game, Soho Theatre review - scratching the American woundMonday, 10 September 2018
Underground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s two-hander is as down and dirty as anything you’ll find on the London stage at the moment, with one sex scene that’s belly laugh-... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: RedoubtableSunday, 09 September 2018
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting... Read more... |
Yuval Noah Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century review - a sceptic's optimism?Sunday, 26 August 2018
The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by Bill Gates no less, it has become a worldwide publishing... Read more... |
P.E.Caquet: The Bell of Treason review - the sacrifice of CzechoslovakiaSunday, 26 August 2018
It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time. The Munich Agreement was greeted as a triumph for the appeasers. The price Britain had to pay was a minor stain on its conscience: the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: It Happened HereTuesday, 21 August 2018
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Mishima - A Life in Four ChaptersTuesday, 07 August 2018
So much of Japan can be lost in translation, and yet the West is fascinated by a culture that articulates the possibilities of belief and being in such a different mode than our own. Paul Schrader’s now classic 1985 film on the writer and actor... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: The Years, review - time’s flowSunday, 05 August 2018
“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and... Read more... |
Imperium, Gielgud Theatre review - eventful, very eventful, Roman epicThursday, 05 July 2018
History repeats itself. This much we know. In the 1980s, under a Tory government obsessed with cuts, the big new thing was “event theatre”, huge shows that amazed audiences because of their epic qualities and marathon slog. A good example is David... Read more... |
