The White Crow
Not a sequel to Black Swan. And all the worse for that. This review is also up on Channel 24 What it’s about The true story of Rudolf Nureyev, an acclaimed Soviet ballet dancer who, in the early 1960s, defected to the West after the KGB viewed his behaviour during a successful tour in Paris as seditious and a betrayal of communist values. Nowhere more so than in his increasingly intimate relationship with the “aristocratic” Clara Saint, who introduces him to a world far livelier and freer than anything he has ever known. What we thought It’s hardly unheard of for a film to be less than the sum of its parts but it’s hard to think of a film in recent memory with such excellent constituent parts adding up to a massively frustrating and unsatisfying whole. Ralph Fiennes has yet to fully translate his exceptional skills as an actor into his still fairly nascent career as a director (Coriolanus did nothing to make palatable one of Shakespeare’s most notoriously difficult...