Stage

I know this pandemic has dealt the arts a knockout blow. Live theatre has been particularly hard hit, and faces some of the biggest obstacles to its return. As someone put it to me recently: sitting and enjoying a performance together is the art. But it is also the business. And as long as social distancing rules remain in place, it makes it very hard to make the numbers stack up. … [Read more...] about The world looks to British theatre. So let’s get it back on track…

TOM is a dreamlike portrait of a man ravaged, or more accurately emptied, by depression. He’s a shell, and yet his inner life permeates his environment. Branson takes cues from cinema – gritty drama, fantasy, even disaster movies – but his ability to construct an emotional journey without script, or much in the way of plot or action, is an art learned in dance. … [Read more...] about Wilkie Branson: TOM review – a sublime, slow-burn study of isolation

Pitched somewhere between a personal drama, a bone-dry black comedy and a sociopolitical thriller (“It’s time to reshuffle the deck, to retake control!”), The County is handsomely photographed by , with carefully composed (and frequently static) widescreen frames, letting the action play out like a series of elegant tableaux vivants, avoiding sudden moves or agitated edits. Composer Valgeir Sigurðsson accompanies the tonal shifts with delicacy and tact, mixing strings and synths with ambient sounds as he moves from the plaintive drones of early scenes, via eerie notes, which heighten the sense of suspense and danger, to a mournfully melodic cue (simply entitled Farmland) that builds to an almost religious epiphany. The drama may be down to earth, but that doesn’t stop the film – or indeed its protagonist – from dreaming big, and daring to look beyond the horizon. … [Read more...] about The County review – one woman against the herd

It was Barrett who more or less transformed the Abdabs, another wearisome student combo who specialised in playing Roadrunner and little else, into a decidedly more intriguing project. The Pink Floyd (name derived from old jazzers Pink Gingham and Floyd Cramer) quickly became the darlings of London’s dilettante “avant-garde” culture, then holed up in Arts Labs and clubs like the UFO. Their first publicity shots – four clean-faced youths disguised in Jim McGuinn specs, posed in front of a rather tepid light show – seem almost as lame now as, say, the Seeds’ first flower-power flack photos. The magic was the fact that they were the first English band to assimilate the waves of emerging psychedelia sent off by the raga-rock Byrds and the Tomorrow Never Knows experiments of the Beatles. Their light show, however ragged, was still the first in the British Isles. … [Read more...] about Syd Barrett: the genius who almost was – a classic profile by Nick Kent

This charming, lightweight comedy begins with the last stages of the marriage of a Los Angeles couple aged around 30 – Celeste, a successful "trend predictor", author of a book called "Shitegeist", and Jesse, a feckless graphic designer – who, to the annoyance of all their friends, remain inseparable friends despite their impending divorce. Their relationship as a major social issue or a serious phenomenon is moderately interesting but not enough to sustain a 90-minute movie. It is, however, interesting to compare it with Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, which touches on similar issues, and with the movies discussed by the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell in his study of 1930s screwball comedy, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, one of the best books ever written on American cinema. … [Read more...] about Celeste and Jesse Forever – review