Finnish horror is a niche genre if ever there was one. Erik Blomberg’s directorial debut The White Reindeer is a seminal example, a beguiling, unsettling little film that’s two parts local colour to one part metaphysical thriller.
The Royal Northern College of Music’s spring opera is a theatrical triumph and musically very, very good. It’s 27 years since they last presented what Vaughan Williams called his "morality" – that was a triumph too, and they made a CD of it which I still have. They may not be issuing a sound recording this time, but as an experience in the theatre, it is even more compelling.
The Crucible is a play that speaks with unrelenting power at times of discord, most of all when the public consciousness looks ripe for manipulation.
For admirers of Henri-Georges Clouzot or Brigitte Bardot, this Criterion restoration of their rarely seen 1960 collaboration is a must have. La Vérité may not be Clouzot’s greatest film, the pace is a little slow and for British viewers uninterested in the French legal system, the courtroom scenes may occasionally drag, but it’s a powerful film nonetheless.
It's an ideal time to revive James Phillips's debut The Rubenstein Kiss. Since it won the John Whiting Award for new writing in 2005 its story, of ideological differences tearing a family apart, has only become more relevant. Joe Harmston directs a slick production at the Southwark Playhouse, which never quite manages to coalesce into something great.
In an interview with Fritz Lang towards the end of his life, he dismisses Human Desire as a film he was contractually obliged to make and for which he had no great fondness. Certainly it isn’t his masterpiece, but it’s a lot more interesting than its director allows and worth revisiting in this restored reissue.
It was back to the very beginning for this final instalment of “Pinter at the Pinter”, with its pairing of A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter. Both were written at the end of the 1950s, which explained a certain rock’n’roll vibe in the auditorium, but brought home how much Pinter’s work stretches beyond period, resounding with new intonations to match new times.
The Fifties? They were terrible: bone-cold houses where people huddled round the fireplace for heat, empty Sundays that lasted a month, drawn-out rationing, bread you could build houses with.
No one worried about melting icecaps and homeless penguins when Vaughan Williams wrote his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic around 70 years ago. (They do now, as a new music theatre piece by Laura Bowler to be premiered by Manchester Camerata next week will show). It was the challenge of the frozen continent and a heroic effort to reach its heart that counted.
This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his mistress Mrs Temes, upright headteacher Mr Elekes and his slovenly and unconventional wife Mrs Elekes.