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‘John Cranko’ Review: Sam Riley Gives a Bravura Performance in Accomplished Ballet Biopic
Joachim A. Lang’s biopic charts the comet-like trail of a choreographer whose too-brief career took him from South Africa to London and beyond.
Steering well clear of “Eureka!” moments and other clichés within the portrait-of-an-artist genre, Joachim A. Lang ’s feature finds unusually vivid means of conveying how a driven creator’s mind works by having the dance ideas in his head constantly integrated into the everyday life depicted. Adored by his dancers, a sometime headache for others, Cranko was a high-maintenance bundle of contradictions: generous, ebullient, depressive, highly cultured with a taste for rough trade, able to do focused work after having drunk enough to incapacitate a lesser mortal. Though Walter Mair contributes some brief transitional scoring, the majority of music heard are excerpted classical compositions by Brahms, Britten, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, etc., all newly recorded by the Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra.
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