Reviews
Matt Wolf
If you're going to make a film whose title mocks a particular tone of voice, it helps to have a voice of your own. And that turns out to be one of the many hugely beguiling aspects of In A World ... , the actress Lake Bell's first film trebling as writer-director after years playing goofball also-rans in films starring the likes of Meryl Streep. A wry look at Hollywood and the (sometimes) wonderfully whacked-out people who inhabit it, the venture takes its name from the doomily spoken opening words beloved (or not) of movie trailers. How lovely, then, that Bell's own achievement heralds so Read more ...
David Benedict
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.To be fair, film composer Neil Brand was onto a winner since TV, the home of show and tell, is an ideal place in which to examine and explain exactly how music works with Read more ...
Simon Munk
The greatest strategy videogames deliver a balance of time to think and pressure to act. The greatest strategy videogames deliver the thrill of battle mixed with clear strategic choice. Several entries in the Total War series count as great strategy games. But not this one. The eighth in the series fails on two distinct fronts, both in terms of execution – vital to keep its hardcore of fans engaged – and in terms of engaging content for new players.Like most of the rest of the series, Total War: Rome II has two separate but linked main modes. A gigantic Risk-style top-down map of most of Read more ...
David Nice
It’s raining Bunyans, and since Britten’s early American operetta with its sights originally set on Broadway teems with song and invention that can’t be a bad thing. A fortnight after Welsh National Youth Opera commandeered Stephen Fry to voice-over the giant American folk hero of the title, their counterparts in BYO are offering London its first production for 15 years. There were singers at the starts of their careers in that Royal Opera special – remember Susan Gritton and Mark Padmore, anyone? – but not enough: it ought to be a paradise for the young, and here it truly was.In my books, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a testament to how good an idea Who Do You Think You Are? is that well into its tenth series (and several others worldwide) it still provides great entertainment – and not a little emotion. Its secret, I suspect, lies in the fact that every family has its stories and dramas and last night's subject, comic Sarah Millican, uncovered some interesting tales buried several generations back, long lost from current family folklore.The comedian is, by her own description, a home bird (the title of her latest tour), deeply rooted in her working-class South Shields origins – so much so that she Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Since his arrival about a decade ago, Dennis Kelly has proved himself to be a master of versatility. He has written in-yer-face shockers such as Osama the Hero and Orphans, elaborate experiments in theatre form such as Love and Money, sprawling epics including The Gods Weep, the paranoid fantasy Utopia for Channel 4 and the deliciously heartwarming Matilda the Musical. Now making his belated debut at the home of British new writing, the question is: which style will he adopt?The answer is a bit of this and a bit of that in what must be the weirdest play of the year. The Ritual Slaughter of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation. Even fleshed out with free-standing cabaret-style sketches, at 90 minutes this sometimes felt as long as Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Day 1During the Soviet era, Katowice was the industrial hub of Upper Silesia, a poisoned region of multiple coalmines and rivers running yellow with chemicals. It now prides itself on 20 years of ecological clean-up and being one of the less polluted cities in Poland. This weekend it will be one of the noisiest. Doof! Doof! Doof! It’s techno time for myself and accomplice Finetime. With beer at 60p a bottle and the best vodka in the world on hand, we’re prepped and ready.Things start gently at a nineteenth-century mining complex that’s been converted into a gallery, the Szyb Wilson. An Read more ...
fisun.guner
Grayson Perry is sitting pretty amid a swathe of soft-focus pink. Dressed as his alter ego Claire he sits on a pink bed with pink pillows, his pink ruched dress spread about him with its frilly underskirt on view. Placed on his lap are his thickly veined, restless hands, fingers knotted, and he stares out at us from this frosted-pink confection of a canvas wearing a look that might be described as both winsome and quietly content. Two powder puffs that resemble plump macaroons, a perfume bottle and a floppy-brimmed hat are among his accoutrements.An earlier portrait Yeo painted of Perry- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ronan Bennett doesn’t do protracted. The writer of Top Boy has whipped us through another series, in the course of which an awful lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge. Except that it’s blood rather than water that tends to flow in Summerhouse, and the first we saw of a bridge in that neck of East London was in the last seconds of episode four, with Dushane hiding underneath one. He looked more than a bit cornered – not how we’re used to seeing him.Ashley Walters has grown Dushane (main picture) into a character whose confidence knows few bounds. He’s even arbitrated a feud Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the most mystifying of working relationships is that between an artist and model. For any sitter the experience must be tiring, if not tiresome, but for the artist their compliance is as integral as paint or clay; one may become famous, while the other remains anonymous, the silent partner in a work of art; there’s also the fact that, in the most common permutation, the arrangement involves a man staring for hours at a naked woman, without reproach – and where else can you find that? Well, filmmaking.The Artist and the Model is not the first film to explore the relationship, nor the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the UK’s entire power supply were to fail, how long do you reckon it would take for society to regress to the point that people would begin eating cold chips they had rescued from a bin? According to Blackout, a feature-length docu-drama directed by Bafta-award winning Ben Chanan, the answer is a mere two days.This is a serious piece of work which, by its closing moments, turns from exploration of an intriguing what-if scenario to fully realised psychological horror. And yet it’s the elements of humour among the panic and the drudgery that make Blackout so engrossing. The film follows a Read more ...