Best of 2022: How Games Workshop founder Ian Livingstone created a £3bn giant December 19, 2022 In a leafy enclave of West London, Ian Livingstone is balanced precariously upon a chair in his study, grasping for a top-shelf box filled with incredibly rare figurines. The legs of the chair creak in protest, and there is a moment when I fear I may be responsible for the untimely death of the man [...]
The Revenant and Birdman director returns with an inscrutable journey into his own past December 16, 2022 Six years after The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu returns for an esoteric dive into his own past in the semi-autobiographical Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. Daniel Giménez Cacho plays Silverio Gama, an experimental filmmaker who has recently won a prestigious American award (can you see the connect yet?). Travelling to his home [...]
Shakespeare comes to @shohplace with this all-singing, all-signing As You Like It December 16, 2022 For a new theatre like @sohoplace, the first handful of productions are foundational. They form an idea in the mind of audiences about what kind of place this is, and who it’s for. Last month’s Marvellous, a low-fi biopic of Staffordshire clown Neil “Nello” Baldwin, seemed a little leftfield but was a shrewd choice, having [...]
Kerry Jackson, National Theatre, review: This show would instil empathy in the most hardened sociopaths December 15, 2022 Amid the deafening noise of the culture wars, when everyone’s trying to shout the loudest to get their point across, we need shows like Kerry Jackson. A new piece by April De Angelis, it employs an almost perplexingly simple set up to show how easily we forget to look for the empathy in one another. [...]
The best films of 2022, from Tom Cruise to Paul Thomas Anderson – but who won the top spot? December 15, 2022 While not a classic vintage, this year still offered some cinema gems, with indie darlings taking their place at the top of our table alongside one of the best blockbusters ever made. Here’s the definitive list of the best films of 2022. 1. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE This surreal comedy-drama stars Michelle Yeoh as [...]
Netflix banks on Harry and Meghan to bring the big bucks December 15, 2022 Netflix is counting on the final three episodes of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s docu-series to give their viewership an end of the year bump. The online streaming service lost over 1.2 m subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, and its share prices had declined by over 60 per cent by October. Netflix had [...]
The best London theatre of 2022, from Prima Facie to Jerusalem – but who got the top spot? December 15, 2022 After two years of Covid, London theatre returned this year with a vengeance, kicking off with some of the best new and returning plays of the decade. Here are a few of our favourites. 1. CRUISE (APOLLO) Jack Holden’s incredible one-man show explores the fallout of the AIDS crisis in a spectacularly contemporary way. Having [...]
Dolly Parton’s Christmas Carol, Southbank Centre review: Catchy new tunes in touching show December 15, 2022 As a title, Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol doesn’t give away much. It inevitably conjures images of Parton herself: her widely permed hair and even wider smile, an image as familiar and iconic as the Coca-Cola sign. Eavesdropping on conversationsn in the foyer of the Southbank Centre, it was clear that audiences hadn’t got [...]
Hex, National Theatre, review: Tonally weird and too macabre December 9, 2022 The National Theatre’s Christmas show isn’t exactly a Christmas show. Hex is a modern interpretation of Sleeping Beauty, a boldly imaginative spectacle that is more than a touch macabre. In terms of the plot, a fairy lives deep in a forest and one day a palace worker running from a baby-eating ogre stumbles upon her [...]