Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 22 November 2024. Kim Deal (above: photo by Alex de Cortehas) has shared her debut solo album Nobody Loves You More. In keeping with Deal’s meticulous approach to her art, the album was refined over several years; its oldest…
Olivia Ruggiero is talented. No doubt about it. She is operatic and she is adept at musical theatre, but at times there is a struggle between the two. I noted that very early on in Broadway Diva, when she sang a medley of show tunes. The operatic tended to overwhelm what I would call traditional musical theatre and…
A relentless, super intelligent mind puzzle, which gets better and better as the stakes grow, this is one of the year’s best offerings. Based upon Herman Koch’s 2009 international bestselling novel – which has been published in more than 50 countries – The Dinner is a dark, suspenseful drama about the lengths people will go…
Danish drinking culture is put under the microscope in Another Round, the new feature from director Thomas Vinterberg, an adherent of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme school of filmmaking. Mads Mikkelsen reunites with Vinterberg, who directed him in The Hunt. That was a tense drama about a teacher falsely accused of molesting a student. Here plays…
A sharp and witty British woman unpicks her life before our eyes and what a life it has been. It has included the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. She explains how she met her one true love, her husband, in a queue at an Italian airport and what came before him, not all of…
The Eight Mountains presents a beautifully shot and languidly paced story exploring the friendship between Bruno and Pietro over the course of four decades. “I didn’t expect to find a friend like Bruno in my life. Nor that friendship was a place where you put down roots” says the adult Pietro in the opening moments…
Balletic excellence and stunning beauty characterise The Stuttgart Ballet’s adaptation of the classic fairytale popularised by the Brothers Grimm. With choreography by Marcia Haydée, after Marius Petipa, she and artistic director Tamas Detrich have crafted something quite delightful. It premiered in Stuttgart in May 1987. Unfolding in three acts, with two intervals, the first involving…
Politically incorrect, deliberately crass, with many scenes orchestrated to be painfully awkward, Why Him? is a kind of Meet the Parents crossed with Bad Santa. Owner of a mid-sized printing business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ned (Bryan Cranston) is genial, outgoing and adored by his employees, his friends and his close-knit family. The latter consists…
The world has gone crazy. How often did you hear those words or similar utterances during COVID-19? It is May 2020 and the preposterous meets the absurd in the dark Western comedy Eddington, as conspiracy theories abound. The starting point is decidedly opposing views from the sheriff of seven years in a small town in…
The Nightingale and The Rose is a Gothic fable. It was first published in 1888 as part of Oscar Wilde’s anthology titled The Happy Prince and Other Stories. It explores the beauty of love and art from the perspective of an effervescent nightingale. The bird hears the longing cries of a young student desperate to…
