Theatre review: Game is nasty and brutish – but effective March 6, 2015 Almeida Theatre | ★★★★☆ Game at the Almeida is a disturbing collage of contemporaneousness that aims a poison-tipped dart at a number of hot-button issues ranging from the shortage of affordable homes to our reality TV obsession. Writer Mike Bartlett and designer-directors Sacha Wares and Miriam Buether have gone to extreme lengths to realise their [...]
Film review: Unfinished Business is a bit like watching paint dry March 6, 2015 Cert 15 | ★★☆☆☆ Unfinished Business might sound like a badass film in which Charles Bronson guns down the fat-cats whose corporate greed killed his daughter, but sadly it’s about Vince Vaughn (pictured), Tom Wilkinson and James Franco’s little brother trying to score a contract to sell metal shavings to a multinational conglomerate. It’s not [...]
Film review: Still Alice March 6, 2015 Cert 12a | ★★★☆☆ For all the horror genre’s attempts to scare us with demonic possession and serial killers, real terror rarely lies in external threat but in the machinations of the mind. By that logic, Still Alice is one of the most haunting films released in years, as it charts one intelligent, vivacious woman’s [...]
Art review: Inventing Impressionism is a joyous exhibition March 5, 2015 National Gallery | ★★★★☆ So familiar are the impressionists that it can be difficult to gain a sense of how revolutionary they were from our vantage point in the 21st century. The National Gallery, in its small but perfectly balanced new exhibition Inventing Impressionism, has come up with an ingenious way of evoking their iconoclasm [...]
Something for the weekend March 5, 2015 Our guide to the best things to eat, drink, watch and do, from yoga in an Alpine lodge to a skeletal horse in Trafalgar Square. Make sure you don’t miss out. EAT! SLOW FOOD & LIVING MARKET Head over to the Rosewood hotel in Holborn this weekend for a food market with an ethical twist. [...]
Theatre review: Closer is going through the motions February 27, 2015 Donmar Warehouse | ★★★☆☆ Patrick Marber’s Closer, which debuted at the National Theatre in 1997, is a caustic, bitter, sometimes hilarious exploration of modern relationships and the perils of lust. Those parts of us we keep hidden away – petty jealousies, nagging doubts that the grass is greener somewhere else – are laid bare, opened [...]
Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime at the Wellcome Collection – art review February 27, 2015 Wellcome Collection | ★★★★☆ After a £17.5m rebuild, the Wellcome Collection reopens with another stomach-churning exhibition for the “incurably curious”. The Institute of Sexology made visitors blush with an extensive collection of risqué artefacts, while Death: A Self-Portrait chilled them to the bone with ghoulish exhibits. Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime has more in [...]
Film review: It Follows is terrific, horrific fun February 27, 2015 Cert 18 | ★★★★☆ The last decade hasn’t been kind to the slasher movie. Its heyday came in the late 1970s and early 80s, with John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween, which paved the way for the likes of Friday 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. Then Wes Craven reinvigorated the genre with 1996’s Scream – a [...]
Theatre review: The Nether at the Duke of York’s Theatre February 27, 2015 Duke of York’s Theatre | ★★★★★ In the near future, the internet has evolved into the Nether, a construct of increasingly convincing fantasy realms, where ever more people choose to escape the costs or privations of the real world. A man known as Sims (Stanley Townsend), has created a private realm called the Hideaway. It [...]
Theatre review: Tour de force Ralph Fiennes steals the show in Man and Superman February 26, 2015 Lyttelton Theatre | ★★★★☆ Whew, how he does talk!” So exclaims the commodore from Don Juan, listening in as Ralph Fiennes’ garrulous Juan debates with the Devil. The same applies to Jack Tanner, Juan’s descendant and the protagonist of this supremely wordy play. First performed in 1905, George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman may be [...]