Reviews
Nick Hasted
Terry Gilliam’s career currently resembles Orson Welles’ declining years, and not just in both men’s seemingly impossible quests to finish a film of Don Quixote. Gilliam too is trying to work outside a Hollywood system that has tired of his maverick talent, finding himself in far-flung European corners with motley casts of famous friends and fans, doing him favours in the hope his old lightning will strike.The bad sort of stormy weather has, though, buffeted Gilliam since his greatly underestimated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 16 years ago. The Brothers Grimm, Tideland, The Man Who Killed Read more ...
Sarah Wilkinson
Luca Silvestrini paints his contentious look at multiculturalism in Britain in the brash primary colours of stereotyping, allowing little space on the canvas for the light and shade of personal insight. He woefully underuses the experiences of his international company (experience which fed fascinatingly into the post-show discussion on Wednesday night) and for the most part pitches the work on one tediously derisive level.Border Tales starts promisingly enough with the audience at The Place seated in the round, poised for confrontation or communal enjoyment, for judgement or acceptance. The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a career arc Miranda Hart has had; from playing tiny venues at the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 2000s, followed by roles in television comedies including Hyperdrive, Lead Balloon and Not Going Out, to starring in her own sitcom, Miranda, and in the BBC One drama Call the Midwife. And now she is returning to live comedy not with a few dates in standard-size venues, but with an extensive arena tour.Her blazing-lights-and-blaring-music entrance at the O2 for My, What I Call, Live Show (devised with creative director Thea Sharrock) is deliberately reminiscent of Beyoncé (of which more Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Zany Dublin family comprising eccentric parents, neurotic daughter and dozy slacker son prepare to meet daughter's new boyfriend... Sound promising? No not especially, but The Walshes is written by Graham Linehan (with help from the "Diet of Worms" comedy troupe), and where there's Linehan there's always hope.This first episode of three was entitled "Doctor Burger", a clue to the absurd case of mistaken identity that propelled it through its whimsical 30 minutes. Excitement gripped the Walsh household at the news that Graham (daughter Ciara's potential boyfriend, played by Shane Langan) was a Read more ...
Simon Munk
Flow states – experienced by athletes, religious zealots and videogamers playing Titanfall. This explosive action game is the most eagerly anticipated and hyped-up videogame of the "next generation" console war so far. It could singlehandedly transform Microsoft's slow start for its new Xbox One console. And while being deeply dull and reactionary in many ways, it encourages a gaming flow state of constant fun like little else in some time.In Titanfall two off-world factions vie for control of a planet. Both are armed to the teeth, not just with conventional weaponry, but giant "Titan" Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ten-year-old Ahlo is the energetic, cheeky, joyous centre of Kim Mordaunt’s drama The Rocket (Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo, main picture), which follows him through a series of challenges towards a triumphant and redeeming final act. That may sound like a familiar narrative arc, but it’s told with new freshness and considerable humour in the film, which is billed as the first ever to come out of Laos.Made in the Lao language, it’s set in the remote and strikingly beautiful landscapes of the small, cut-off South East Asian nation. The peasant life that we see there may be poor, but continues Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty years ago this month, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits that were deemed "uneconomic", a decision which would incur the loss of 20,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, responded by calling a strike that would become the longest industrial dispute in British history. It was also probably the most bitter, as the recollections of the former miners and their wives assembled for this documentary painfully demonstrated.Even with its furry low-definition quality, the 1980s news footage of the striking miners and their clashes with Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In Trasmín, the curtain rises on two bodies leaning apart, yet reaching back to face one other, each columnar figure a twisted into a perfect spiral line from knees to the tips of curved fingers. Their feet are concealed by the great fabric swathes (for which “frills” is much too flimsy a label) of their traditional bata de cola dresses: rising from those grey cascades they look like two rococo sculptures in a fountain.One of the dress wearers is Belén Maya, a star who has done much over her career to incorporate other dance influences into traditional flamenco. And the other is Manuel Liñán Read more ...
fisun.guner
Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. His new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery adopt the Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and bright palette of Willem de Kooning, while the British Museum displays prints from the early Sixties and Seventies, alongside the graphic works of five postwar German contemporaries. The third outing opens this week at Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Crime drama at its best not only offers a satisfying mystery and characters with whom we want to spend time, but a strong sense of place, a location that captures our imagination and makes us want to know more. Little wonder then that the BBC snapped up the rights to Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet of novels featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, the Scottish cop with the Spanish ancestor. With its authentic Shetland locations, Raven Black (the first of three two-part stories) was beautiful to look at.It's the middle of summer and nobody can sleep. It's making the locals crazyFrom the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The history of computer games being turned into movies has not been a happy one (Max Payne, Battleship, Lara Croft), but the blockbusting Need for Speed car-racing franchise fares rather better. This movie version is of course simplistically plotted and completely ludicrous for almost every one of its 130 minutes. But the action is frantic and non-stop, the stunts are performed by stuntmen rather than computer software, and the cars are freakin' awesome.What's more, you have Aaron Paul in the lead role of Tobey Marshall, a poor boy from the nondescript blue collar town of Mt Kisco, New York Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There are more bizarre, horrific and unnervingly beautiful moments in Jonathan Glazer’s much delayed third film than in the rest of his star Scarlett Johansson’s career. The strap-line - Scarlett as an alien fatally seducing Scottish men - suggests bonkers B-movie elements which Under the Skin has its share of. But by abandoning the hoary s.f. back-story of the Michel Faber novel this adapts, Glazer has made a film which teeters on the edge of pretentious absurdity, and to its detractors falls in headlong; which is broken-backed, losing its way for crucial periods; but which is also memorably Read more ...