Reviews on The Review

Are Midlake adult-oriented? A few minutes into their set and I’m still at the bar, still wearing my jacket and scarf, as M. and I are late arriving for the sold-out show. The bartenders have never heard of Midlake, and the youngish one serving us is surprised they’re so popular yet unknown to her. ‘I’ve [...]

Having counted George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four among my favourite books since the age of 13, I was concerned that over-familiarity might mar my enjoyment of Matthew Dunster’s new stage adaptation.  After three hours’ immersion in this powerful and affecting show, however, I was overwhelmed by empathetic exhaustion, sadness and resignation, alongside deep admiration for the [...]

This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK, Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago.  But Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values.
In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both the [...]

There aren’t many books like Paul Murray’s new novel Skippy Dies. It looks different for a start: instead of the hardback you’d expect for the RRP, you get a boxed set of three beautifully designed paperbacks titled Hopeland, Heartland, and Ghostland and Afterland instead. At about 220 pages long, they’re perfect to slip into the [...]

For a language that bears such a close relation to English, German has been poorly served by translations. Compared to, for example, the ease with which French or Spanish has been rendered, translations of German have often seemed heavy and cumbersome, as if it was being translated into a language that looked and sounded [...]

This quiet, lovely Japanese ensemble piece is much haunted.  It is haunted by the constant presence of Junpei, the older son whose death by drowning is the cause for the family gathering this film records.  It is haunted by the Japanese film maker Yazojiro Ozu and, in particular, his Tokyo Story whose pale but intense [...]

One thing connects the sixteen stories in Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families: despair at the state of modern Mexico. The first story’s ‘family like any other’ live mostly in separate rooms, clinging to fantasy notions of both their country and their chances within it. Elsewhere we see corrupt priests, faded actors, lovers separated by the expectations [...]

When John Updike died last year, various critics suggested that Philip Roth was the last remaining of the great American novelists. Even at the time, this was hard to take at face value. It seemed nothing more than a kneejerk reaction from the same critics whose glowing reviews of Roth’s annual postings from the frontiers [...]

While lacking a childhood nostalgia for the various incarnations of Sir David Attenborough’s long-running nature series – a nostalgia expressed often by many British friends and colleagues – I have in recent years developed a profound respect for what is, by North American standards, very exotic television programming. What would be relegated to the public [...]

According to the inverse law of action movie length vs. depth, every too familiar nuance of this nearly three-hour ‘epic’ can be recounted in a couple of breaths: A disabled ex-soldier is sent in to improve relations with an indigenous population who stand in the way of some economically precious natural resource. Inevitably, he grows [...]