Critical Week: Have a laugh

The 69th London Film Fest continues this week, which means I am watching rather a lot of big awards-season titles, often with the filmmakers and actors in attendance.  Sometimes this even includes a chance to chat with them at a reception, which is always nice. One of these was Bradley Cooper's new movie Is This Thing On?, a romantic comedy-drama starring Will Arnett (above) and Laura Dern, based on the life of British stand-up comedian John Bishop. It's a terrific story, and the film is strikingly well shot and acted, without a single false note, which is like a miracle in this genre.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Souleymane's Story
Roofman • Frankenstein
Some Nights I Feel Like Walking
ALL REVIEWS >

Elsewhere, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons were on hand for the premiere of Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia, a surprisingly punchy black comedy. Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri came along for Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, an abrasive, challenging drama about morality. Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth turned up for Guillermo del Toro's superbly epic new version of Frankenstein. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal were on-stage for Chloe Zhao's utterly gorgeous Hamnet, one of the most emotional resonant movies in recent memory. 

And there's more! Colin Farrell showed up for Edward Berger's colourful, involving Macau odyssey Ballad of a Small Player. Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots and Nina Hoss were resplendent at the screening of Nia DaCosta's inventive, spiky new adaptation of Hedda. Brendan Fraser was on hand for Hikari's beautiful comedy-drama Rental Family, which skilfully explores modern-day isolation through a strongly engaging story set in Tokyo. Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones attended for Clint Bentley's sumptuous lifelong saga Train Dreams. And Kaouther Ben Hania's harrowing The Voice of Hind Rajab mixes documentary elements with emotive dramatics in a true story from the Israel-Palestine war. I also attended a live performance of Hofesh Schechter's mesmerising Theatre of Dreams at Sadler's Wells.

Coming this next week are a few more London Film Fest movies, including Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or winner It Was Just an Accident, Paolo Sorrentino's La Grazia, Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36, Emirati horror thriller The Vile and the photography doc Love+War, plus the Navy Seal doc In Waves and War.

Dance: A dreamy odyssey

Hofesh Shechter Company
Theatre of Dreams
choreography and music Hofesh Shechter
dancers Tristan Carter, Robinson Cassarino, Frédéric Despierre, Rachel Fallon, Cristel de Frankrijker, Mickaël Frappat, Justine Gouache, Zakarius Harry, Alex Haskins, Keanah Faith Simin, Juliette Valerio, Chanel Vyent
musicians Yaron Engler, Sabio Janiak, James Keane
lighting Tom Visser • costumes Osnat Kelner
music Yaron Engler • sets Niall Black
Sadler's Wells, London • 15-18.Oct.25 ★★★★

Drawing on how dance explores feelings without offering answers, this surreal show unfolds as an almost cinematic odyssey, propelling the audience through a swirling display of vignettes that touch on how we see ourselves reflected in the world. Based in London since 2002, Israeli-born Hofesh Schechter inventively divides the stage using quick-moving curtains and shifting light, transporting us through a wide variety of scenes that are visually dazzling and intriguingly emotive. It often echoes a David Lynch movie: it's impossible to clearly understand, but we feel everything.

The scene is set as a performer in street clothes ducks through a gap in the curtain on-stage. Inside, visions emerge from all sides as more and more curtains slide apart, glimpsing people in poses or groups in wild abandon. Spotlights isolate performers, sometimes in a striking colour wash. Choreography is full-bodied and often looks like anarchic flailing, but this is all carefully staged, as ripples of patterns emerge in the movement, sometimes resolving into full-cast numbers performed in unison. Little dramatic moments are engulfed by crowds of revellers. Sometimes a larger tableaux depicts a specific event.

Music accompanying this ranges from extended sequences of pulsing rhythms to more melodic numbers. At one point a three-piece band dressed in red pops up on stage, then seems to miraculously teleport from place to place as they play instruments and provide vocals. This visual trickery echoes everywhere, as the dancers must race in the darkness to be in the correct place and position exactly when a curtain parts. So what we can't see feeds into the way we interpret what we observe. And at one point the performers encourage us to stand up and join them.

Dancers are constantly in motion, dressed to party but frequently switching things up, including costume changes on the move and a couple of naked moments. They run in place, gyrate on a dance floor and burst out in celebration. There are also yearning scenes in which they watch someone else perform before diving in themselves. Much of this plays out at high energy, with continual explosions of movement, sound and light. And there are also astonishing quiet moments. So the show feels fragmented but thoroughly involving, taking us on a trip into the corners of our imagination.

for details, SADLER'S WELLS >

photos by Ulrich Geischë, Todd McDonald, Tom Visser • 15.Oct.25

Critical Week: Run for your life

The 69th London Film Festival kicked off last night, so things will be very busy over the next 10 days, with pretty much wall-to-wall screenings, meetings and parties. And already, first two days have been pretty glamorous. George Clooney, Adam Sandler and filmmaker Noah Baumbach turned up to present their new film Jay Kelly. It's a smart, witty and moving look at legacy, relationships and regret. And the opening night film on Wednesday was Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunit Wake Up Dead Man, attended by the entire starry ensemble (see below). It's a wonderfully entertaining film, funny and spooky, with serious underlying themes too.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A House of Dynamite • Urchin
Roofman • I Swear • Plainclothes
ALL REVIEWS >

And then there was the heart-stopping A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow's smart, complex multistrand nuclear thriller starring Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson. Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez star in the musical remake of Kiss of the Spider Woman. The tone is a bit uneven, but the film is powerful. Hunter Doohan stars in The Wilderness, an outdoor experience drama that feels a bit overly pointed, but has a strong message. And from France, Souleymane's Story is a vividly honest exploration of the challenges facing a young asylum seeker over two momentous days. I also attended a live performance of Ghost Stories at the Peacock Theatre

Reviews of London Film Festival movies are linked to this page: SHADOWS @ LFF >

Films I'm watching this coming week at London Film Fest include Emma Stone in Bugonia, Bradley Cooper in Is This Thing On, Daniel Day-Lewis in Anemone, Julia Roberts in After the Hunt, Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein, Brendan Fraser in Rental Family, Tessa Thompson in Hedda, Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams, . There's also a live performance of Theatre of Dreams at Sadler's Wells.

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Stage: A screaming good time

Ghost Stories
by Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman
directors Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman, Sean Holmes
with Jonathan Guy Lewis, David Cardy, Preston Nyman, Clive Mantle, Lloyd McDonagh, Simon Bass, Harry Rundle
sets/costumes Jon Bausor • lighting James Farncombe
sound Nick Manning • effects Scott Penrose
Peacock Theatre, London • 30.Sep-8.Nov.25 ★★★

After its 15th anniversary tour, this acclaimed show returns for another run in London, at long last giving me the chance to catch up with it. It's marketed as the most terrifying theatre experience ever, but perhaps I watch too many movies, so I need more than well-executed jump scares. So while everything about this production has been expertly designed to freak out the audience with lots of atmospheric nastiness, it's actually more funny than frightening. And the way it plays with the premise is very entertaining.

It's ingeniously framed as a sort of Ted talk by Professor Goodman (Lewis), who uses slides to trace how tales of hauntings have been passed down throughout human history, leading to our current viral social media age. It also quickly becomes apparent that he's hiding something about his own experience with the supernatural. Along the way, he highlights three stories of men he has interviewed about their encounters with spirits. These are enacted on stage one by one, and they ultimately draw the professor right into the mayhem.

First is Tony (Cardy), a night watchman whose comatose daughter feeds into something he sees in the dark. Then student Simon (Nyman) is driving home after a party when he has a nerve-jangling encounter in the countryside. And finally workaholic businessman Mike (Mantle) is juggling his constantly pinging phone with his expectant wife's fear of their new nursery when he witnesses some inexplicable goings on. Then all of this comes circling back around the professor in a whizzy final sequence packed with superb visual flourishes that keep us on edge. The cast is superb, especially the wonderfully offhanded Lewis.

The stage design majors in inky blackness, so pretty much the only things visible are illuminated in spotlights. This makes some of the effects sequences a bit difficult to see, but they still send chills up the spine, simply because they're so well-timed to catch us off guard or cleverly misdirect us from other magical trickery. The soundscape is also key, rumbling with increasing intensity until it peaks with a nutty vocal phrase or full-on aural explosion. So it's difficult not to jump in our seats, even if the suspense has been constructed with expert stagecraft, rather than character detail. That said, the show's most inventive point is that we know ghost stories are fake, but we're still frightened because, just maybe, it's true after all.

Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman

For details, GHOST STORIES >

photos by Hugo Glendinning • 7.Oct.25

Dance: Chaos, transformation and rebirth

Bogotá
director-choreographer Andrea Peña
performers Nicholas Bellefleur, Charlie Prince, Jo Laïny Trozzo-Mounet, Marco Curci, Jontae McCrory, Erin O’loughlin, Francois Richard, Frédérique Rodier, Chi Long
lighting Hugo Dalphond • sound Debbie Doe
sets Jonathan Saucier, Andrea Peña
costumes Jonathan Saucier, Polina Boltova
Sadler's Wells East, Stratford • 2-3.Oct.25 ★★

Kicking off this year's Dance Umbrella festival, a month-long series of events online and at venues across London, this 80-minute show was created by Colombian designer-choreographer Andrea Peña and her group of artists to explore her nation's political and spiritual heritage. This is a difficult piece, challenging the audience in ways that feel oddly impenetrable. Intriguing ideas about indigenous cultures, religion and colonialism emerge continually, but everything about this show feels indulgent.

That said, the nine performers are remarkably committed, putting their whole bodies into the nearly naked choreography. Much of this involves moving around the stage in eerily fluid slow motion, initially clad primarily in G-strings and kneepads, sometimes interacting with each other with lifts or as groups pulsing together. There are echoes of synchronised choreography here and there, including a couple of full group moments. But most of this piece features individual expressions, including a series of rather random changes into clothing that is unusually ill-fitting for the dancers.

The stage is as deconstructed as the costumes, with scaffolding, netting and plastic sheeting scattered around. Dancers clamber up the frames, slide slowly across the floor and languish around the edges. At one point, two women bind themselves together with a long cord and have a slow-moving tug of war. Elsewhere, Peña herself appears after a black piñata is bashed into pieces, mopping up the mess with the Colombian flag. This feels somewhat on-the-nose, as do dancers spinning around with middle fingers raised defiantly.

Throughout the show, the sound mix is an escalating rumble with occasional rhythms and vocalisations, while the tone of the dancers shifts more broadly from joyful smiles to sulky glares. It's all rather mesmerising, and the skilled physicality keeps us watching with interest. There are elements that cleverly tap into the scope of history, mixing symbolism with literal expressions to explore how societies transform over time. But these ideas become increasingly elusive, especially in such a cliched industrial setting.

For details, DANCE UMBRELLA >

photos by Kevin Calero, Félixe Godbout Delavaud, Andrea Peña, Antoine Ryan
2.Oct.25

Critical Week: Ready, aim, fire

Things are definitely cranking up in London as awards season takes over screening rooms across the city. Many of the big hitters from recent festivals are being screened for those of us who vote in various awards. There's not a free evening in my diary for a few weeks. After a clash prevented me from attending the only press screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, they made public showings available, so I was able to watch it in glorious VistaVision this week. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall and Chase Infiniti (above) and is a thrillingly entertaining rollercoaster ride.  

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Urchin • The Smashing Machine
The Lost Bus • The Shadow's Edge
Scared Sh*tless
PERHAPS AVOID:
Him • The Ice Tower
ALL REVIEWS >

I also caught up with Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, in which Ethan Hawke gives a superb one-man-show kind of turn as legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart. Riz Ahmed and Lily James are excellent in David Mackenzie's nerve-jangling and smartly twisty thriller Relay. Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers give it their all in the horror thriller Him, but it never amounts to much. And Malcolm McDowell turns up in The Partisan, the intriguing but dryly told true story of a female Polish spy (played by Morgane Polanski) working for Britain during WWII. I also attended live performances of the disco-tastic KC and the Sunshine Band musical Get Down Tonight at Charing Cross Theatre and Andrea Peña's rather elusive Bogotá at Sadler's Wells East.

Films this coming week include George Clooney in Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, Idris Elba in Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite and Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in Kiss of the Spider Woman. The 69th London Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday with Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunit Wake Up Dead Man. And there's a live performance of Ghost Stories at the Peacock Theatre.

Stage: That's the way I like it

Get Down Tonight
The KC and the Sunshine Band Musical
music and lyrics Harry Wayne Casey
book JF Lawton
with Ross Harmon, Paige Fenlon, Adam Taylor, Annabelle Terry, Aaron Archer, Rachel Kendall Brown, Eve Drysdale, Finlay Oliver
director-choreographer Lisa Stevens
musical director Kevin Oliver Jones
sets Bretta Gerecke • costumes Rachel Ryan
lighting Jai Morjaria • sound Chris Whybrow
Charing Cross Theatre, London • 19.Sep-15.Nov.25 ★★★★

Harry Wayne Casey, also known as KC, provides the songs for this lively meta-musical about his life, including the iconic hits he made famous with his Sunshine Band. Each of these numbers is a total banger, so the show plays out like a raucous party. But it's also sharply well written, humorously deconstructing the stage musical formula to tell Casey's story in a way that's thoroughly involving. Working with a terrific live four-piece band, the performers prove to be seriously gifted, diving into the riotous disco choreography with infectious gusto.

After opening with a full-on glitter-ball rendition of Keep It Comin' Love, the story settles in on Harry (Harmon) and his best friend Dee (Fenlon) as teens dreaming of stardom in early 1970s Miami. Later they are joined by their friends Gina (Terry), who has a crush on Harry, and Orly (Taylor), a groovy Vietnam veteran who helps Harry explore his queer side. These four encourage each other to shoot for the stars, so Harry finds ways to record his music, leading to enormous success that changes his life.

While the basic narrative isn't particularly new, the storytelling is buoyant and often exhilarating, which adds a kick to several quieter, more emotional moments. A soulful rendition of Please Don't Go has particular poignancy as these friends confront the reality that they will need to go their separate ways. And because this is a story about someone who simply wants to make people happy, the explosions of joy are thoroughly irresistible, urging us to get up on our feet and dance along with the cast. Of course, we are encouraged to do just that in the wildly exuberant extended curtain call.

The four leads and four background artists adeptly provide soaring vocals, full physicality and punchy emotional beats. Their talent is explosive, augmented by fabulously sparkly costumes, colourful lighting and iconic period dance moves that feel almost weightless, simply because they are having so much fun on-stage. The story is a gentle reminder that success isn't as instant, as easy or as enduring as we all would like it to be. And the show, like Casey's music, suggests that perhaps we would be happier if we spent more time putting on our boogie shoes, shaking our booties and getting down tonight.

For details, GET DOWN TONIGHT >

photos by Danny Kaan • 30.Sep.25

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