Reviews
Helen K Parker
After a long break from thievery – both in the real world and in the anthropomorphic universe he calls home – dapper gentleraccoon thief Sly Cooper is back doing what he does best: pinching things. It's been eight years since Sly and the gang pinched things in the globe-hopping PlayStation 2 caper Sly 3, and now he's returned to a more powerful console and with a different developer – can the ageing mascot still hack it in the modern day?Well, yes and no. The good news is that this is unmistakeably a Sly Cooper game, with all the jumping, sneaking, fighting and minigameing we've come to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Scandi thrillers have a lot to answer for. Ever since the small-screen success of the Swedish Wallander series, based on the books by Henning Mankell, there has been a host of other must-sees — including the brilliant Borgen — plus British imitations such as Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander. Not to mention various outings of The Killing and its local progeny such as Broadchurch. Now the Swedish actor who best embodied Wallander makes his West End debut in this Swedish-language drama.So, welcome to London Krister Hendriksson. He stars as Doktor Tyko Glas in this stage adaptation of Hjalmar Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The combination of Romeo, Juliet and the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky should be almost too much for the blood pressure. Those defiant lovers, that emotive yet intellectual young Russian craftsman of ballet. Hence the huge turn-out of balletomanes for National Ballet of Canada at Sadler’s Wells last night.Hence the disappointment. Any fool could tell you the keywords of Romeo and Juliet: passion, youth, rule-breaking, sex, risk, panache forever. Any fool should have told Ratmansky, whose ballet created in 2011 for the Canadians' 60th anniversary seems to have missed them altogether, being Read more ...
peter.quinn
OK, so you've given your copies of Rod's It Had To Be You and Robbie's Swing When You're Winning a few listens (released many, many years ago, the latter is still top of the iTunes jazz albums chart in a gazillion countries). You've memorised the words and now you quite fancy giving “Summertime” a bit of a go. A touch of rubato here, a judicious tweak of the melody line there and, hey, you're singing jazz! Er, not quite.As shown in last night's masterclass by the inimitable Kurt Elling, "singing jazz" requires a number of things: the desiderata would include developing your own approach to Read more ...
Heather Neill
During rehearsals of his new play, Howard Brenton and the company had a sudden realisation: they were willing partners in "the vast Ai Weiwei project". The Chinese dissident artist, a constant critic of his country's human rights policies, was arrested on his way to Hong Kong in 2011 because his travel would "damage state security" and detained for 81 days. Now he requested that this story be told in a play to be based on interviews he had given to the journalist Barnaby Martin. One of the conditions for his release had been that he should not speak to foreign journalists. And here he was Read more ...
terry.friel
Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.British film-maker Olly Lambert’s Syria: Across the Lines strode confidently over that hurdle, giving a unique insight into the people on both sides of Syria's civil war as it continues to veer in and out of the headlines after two years of fighting and more than 70,000, mainly civilian, deaths. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Following in the footsteps of hugely popular television dramas and film adaptations of various Scandi noir novels comes this overwhelmingly sympathetic piece, a romcom that hasn't an ounce of gloopiness and, unusually, is about middle-aged people getting it together.Pierce Brosnan plays Philip, an uptight Englishman living in Copenhagen who is still grieving the death of his Danish wife some years before and is estranged from their adult son, Patrick (Sebastian Jessen). Ida (Trine Dyrholm, pictured below with Brosnan), meanwhile, is a hairdresser in the same city coming to terms with both the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some plays are game-changers. When Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing opened at the tiny Bush Theatre in 1993 the joy that radiated off the stage was ample affirmation that this tale of puppy love had changed the face of gay plays for ever. Gone was dreary soul searching; gone was guilt; gone was militancy. Instead, we got fun, laughter and real heart.Then came the culture clash. When, the following year, the play transferred to the West End, along with Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, the London Evening Standard inveighed against the corrupting “plague of pink plays”. Two plays — some plague Read more ...
David Benedict
They’re back, and this time it’s Gorky. Dream team director Howard Davies, translator Andrew Upton, designer Bunny Christie and lighting designer Neil Austin have repeatedly attached tragicomic jump-leads to the unfamiliar (Bulgakov’s The White Guard) and the well-worn (The Cherry Orchard) to explode the myth encapsulated by Ira Gershwin’s lyric: “I’ve found more clouds of grey/Than any Russian play could guarantee.” But despite the welcome return of their vision and some juicy performances, it’s increasingly obvious why they didn’t stage Children of the Sun before now.With a lobby opening on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
South Korea begging Washington for protection as the dread threat of nuclear apocalypse looms? As Graham Norton recently twitquipped, the news headlines are no more than the publicity campaign for Olympus Has Fallen. Most amusing etc, but that was before a bomb on an American street killed three and injured many others.The latest excrescent live action video game from Anthony Fuqua has a fortuitous kind of oafish currency, what with those freaky North Koreans brandishing fists at the neighbours over the fence. But without wishing to rain on anyone's parade of braindead jingoistic fervour, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When I visited Rachel Whiteread two years ago, there were two old sheds gathering dust in her basement as though waiting to be loved and put to use. Why was she cluttering up her studio with such large and intrusive objects, I wondered? “Things fester,” she told me by way of explanation. “I like to mull things over, so they might lie about for years. It’s to do with me noticing them; they need to relate to my train of thought and investigation. I’m drawn to things that are not too considered or self conscious like bathtubs, wardrobes and windows that are taken for granted as part of everyday Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Down in the cellar where the monsters were in Sam Raimi’s 1982 debut The Evil Dead, you glimpsed a poster for Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, ripped symbolically in half. The bar for gruelling low-budget horror, Raimi was saying, had just been raised.In employing another debutante, Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, to remake The Evil Dead, Raimi, these days the unlikely Hollywood insider behind the Spiderman trilogy and Oz the Great and Powerful, invites him to raise the stakes again.The original’s fireproof premise is kept: five friends spend the weekend in an isolated cabin in the woods ( Read more ...