Reviews on The Review

One of the great things about living in Manchester is its closeness to contrasting day-trip destinations.  So when the trend for big bands to tour less obvious, often seaside, locations offered the option of The Manic Street Preachers plus afternoon tea in genteel Llandudno, I didn’t take much convincing. 
Arriving just as the band took the stage [...]

In our era of shows curated with an exhaustive, almost claustrophobic, focus on a single artist or art movement, Mark Wallinger’s show The Russian Linesman at Leeds Art Gallery is a rare beast. Touring after a stint at the Hayward in London, the show takes in sculpture, painting, drawing and video art, and ranges in [...]

Urbis’s latest city-themed exhibition offers a peak at the startling beauty of some of Manchester’s neglected vistas. Photographer Andrew Paul Brooks has sought high and low for scenes of enchantment tightly woven into the city’s fabric. The result is an impressively presented, if slightly blinkered, survey of hidden Manchester.
 
With his camera, Brooks has documented urban [...]

Ian Fleming is reputed to have said that he wrote the James Bond books for warm-blooded, heterosexuals  to read on trains. In Cold Blood, his nephew James Fleming takes that one step further by writing a book that will not only appeal to the same readership, but whose subject is warm-blooded, heterosexual and actually on [...]

Werner Herzog’s new film is a documentary about workers on a scientific research base in Antarctica. It has many of the hallmarks of his previous documentary work, including stunning panoramic shots, the vaguely creepy off-camera voice that sounds like it could be enticing Hansel and Gretel to come into the gingerbread house, and, of course, [...]

The cover of John Updike’s final book bears two phots of the author: the one on the inside of the fly leaf is taken by his wife Martha, and shows a smiling Updike, presumably caught in an unguarded moment of familial intimacy; the Jill Krementz photo that forms the cover is a more familiar Updikean [...]

Caryl Churchill, A Number, The Library Theatre until May 9
 
Caryl Churchill’s 2002 play deals with a contentious issue, human cloning, but is as interested in making cloning into a metaphor as it is in ethics and science.  The play’s success depends on a difficult balance between argument and feeling, exploring ideas and manipulating its audience’s [...]