Coldplay Moon Music review: Could this be perfect pop? October 8, 2024 Every now and then I find myself considering the fine margins between major and minor success. I remember, for instance, a gig I attended at the turn of the millennium at the Nottingham Arena performed by the band Travis. In those days, like their rivals Coldplay, they could easily fill a stadium of 10,000 people. [...]
A Different Man review: Expertly observed dissection of image October 8, 2024 A Different Man | Dir. Aaron Schimberg | ★★★★☆ Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a lonely New Yorker with Neurofibromatosis, a series of tumours on the face that make him feel disconnected from the outside world. He undergoes miracle surgery to cure the condition, and begins a new life with the name Guy, finding renewed professional [...]
The dirty, dangerous and ‘obsessive’ world of mudlarking October 8, 2024 Once the domain of Victorian street urchins, the art of mudlarking has gone mainstream. Lucy Kenningham investigates
Children of The Cult review: Cult documentary charts abuse October 7, 2024 Children of The Cult | Dir Maroesja Perizonius & Alice McShane | ★★★★☆ Documentaries about cults have become sensationalist streaming fodder in recent years, but Children of The Cult strips away the headlines and brings you face to face with victims and their stories. It’s an investigation into the Rajneesh Movement, a cult that had [...]
Joker: Folie à Deux review – a strange, dark musical October 7, 2024 Joker was a fascinating outlier in modern cinema. The violent, Scorsese-inspired psychodrama was a huge risk, whisking the Clown Prince of Crime away from the world of comic books and placing him in a grimy 1980s Gotham City that resembled nothing more than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The gamble paid off, with an Oscar for [...]
What does it take to be the best… at Karaoke? October 7, 2024 Barging past a swarm of small children jostling upwards from the seafront, I arrive at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. It is, with the best will in the world, an ugly building, like a bingo hall had sex with a secondary school. Inside is a different story. Its intestines are a marbled maze of tiles and [...]
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at Tate Modern – a house of horrors October 3, 2024 Were you to stumble upon the works of Mike Kelley in, say, an abandoned warehouse rather than the galleries of the Tate Modern, you would fear for your safety, if not your sanity. Strolling through works collected from the late 1970s up until Kelley’s suicide in 2012 is like happening upon the headquarters of some [...]
No more Noma: What’s next for Copenhagen’s food scene October 3, 2024 For decades, Noma has been one of the most coveted restaurants on the planet. It birthed ‘new Nordic’ cuisine in 2003 and stamped the small Danish capital on the gastronomic map, winning the world’s best restaurant award multiple times and holding Michelin stars since 2008. Its stratospheric success was led by head chef and co-founder [...]
Cush Jumbo: On playing Hamlet and choosing which cake to eat October 3, 2024 There are two types of people: those who already know about Cush Jumbo, one of the finest British actors of her generation, and those who are soon to find out. The star of wildly successful TV shows including The Good Wife, Criminal Record and Deadwater Fell, Jumbo cemented her A-List credentials when she became the [...]
The eternal jobstopper? The future of face tattoos October 3, 2024 Jamie McPhee’s first face tattoo was a little star under his eye. He just fancied it. After the star under his left eye, he got a star under his right eye – the asymmetry was bugging him. Before you could say, “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Jamie?” he had a skull and crossbones [...]