Paris
Imagine... Anselm Kiefer, BBC OneTuesday, 18 November 2014
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results,... Read more... |
Rosemary's Baby, LifetimeTuesday, 18 November 2014
Polish director Agnieszka Holland is best known for two Holocaust films, both based on remarkable true stories: the 1990 Europa Europa and the 2011 release In Darkness. Here she tackles horror of the supernatural kind. This NBC two-parter is an... Read more... |
Assassin's Creed: UnityFriday, 14 November 2014
What a setting! The history-hopping stealth action series drops into Revolutionary Paris in Unity. Arguably the first game of the "next generation" uses more processing power to render a gigantic, living city teeming with revolting peasants, towered... Read more... |
La Bohème, English National OperaThursday, 30 October 2014
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen... Read more... |
10 Questions for Soprano Sandrine PiauMonday, 29 September 2014
French soprano Sandrine Piau, born in 1965 in a south-western suburb of Paris, has an agile, supple voice. It soars, so critics reach readily for all those bird metaphors: nightingale, sparrow, "she leaves the earth on wings of song" and so on. She... Read more... |
Manon, Royal BalletSaturday, 27 September 2014
In a moment of wild fantasy, I thought I might try and write a whole review of Manon without mentioning sex. After all, there’s plenty of other stuff going on in Kenneth MacMillan’s tale, which last night at the Royal Opera House celebrated 40 years... Read more... |
DVD: Venus in FurMonday, 28 July 2014
Action film fans should stay away from this Roman Polanski duet. But those who like their sexual politics served in symbolic form will be delighted. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner stars as an actress, Vanda, and Polanski-lookalike Mathieu... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Paris: San Francisco Ballet 2Friday, 18 July 2014
Having a strong company style is usually no bad thing, especially if – as with San Francisco Ballet – the main component of it is a commitment to excellence. It has been impressive watching the gritty energy with which, night after night, the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Paris: San Francisco Ballet 1Thursday, 17 July 2014
In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for... Read more... |
Mr Morgan's Last LoveFriday, 11 July 2014
A May-September relationship is given a winter chill here. When Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), an American widower in Paris, meets pretty young dance instructor Pauline (Clemence Poesy) on a bus, the ageing male fantasy suggested by the title seems... Read more... |
DVD: Boy Meets Girl; Mauvais SangMonday, 30 June 2014
Much has been said before about these two Leos Carax greats, but the beauty of these surrealist French films is that you can enjoy them again and again, each time finding something new to appreciate. It's been a while since Boy Meets... Read more... |
DVD: The PastSaturday, 21 June 2014
A pervading sense of melancholia runs through this film, and yet it is neither chilling, nor disaffecting. Akin to one of the key characters, watching it is a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The Past hovers somewhere between fight and... Read more... |
