Reviews
ryan.gilbey
Christmas movies, like seasonal in-store promotions, really are arriving earlier every year. But despite being released before this month’s Catherine wheels have even started spinning, the new Disney version of A Christmas Carol has about it the desperate whiff of an end-of-line knock-off grabbed from a depleted branch of Argos just as the shutters are falling on Christmas Eve.With its motion-capture animation and state-of-the-art 3-D, as well as a simultaneous release in the eye-popping IMAX format, the film proves that it is possible to be both high-tech and superannuated. Because the Read more ...
kat.brown
Firstly, no, Tom Wrigglesworth's Open Return Letter to Richard Branson isn’t that letter. His epistle is not to be confused with Oliver Beale’s, whose email to the Virgin boss complaining about the food on a Virgin flight went viral last year. The Sheffield-born comic, currently appearing at the Soho Theatre in London, set about an altogether more decent-hearted campaign after witnessing some gross unfairness meted out to an elderly passenger on a Virgin train journey last autumn.Wrigglesworth was nearly arrested when he organised a train-wide whip-round after a grandmother was fined £115 by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Garrow's Law: Tales from the Old Bailey, writer Tony Marchant has turned to the real-life archives of the Old Bailey to find cases to illustrate the pioneering legal work of William Garrow. In the late 18th century, courtroom trials bore more resemblance to bear-baiting or witch-finding than to anything connected with justice or due process. Defendants couldn't speak in their own defence, and the notion of having counsel who could demolish dodgy witnesses or interrupt the prosecution's outrageous slanders hadn't yet caught on.Thus the stage was set for the redoubtable Garrow, who was so Read more ...
mark.hudson
The head of John the Baptist floats in darkness, lips blue, eyes rolled back, the severed neck so realistic that the trachea, oesophagus and paraspinal muscles can be clearly differentiated around the jutting bone. With its explicit gore and hypereal materiality, its air of heightened theatricality bordering on camp, this feels in some ways the most contemporary exhibition currently showing in London. And the irony is that at a time when we’re positively inundated with powerful exhibitions devoted to major living artists – Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Anish Kapoor, Sophie Calle – Read more ...
sheila.johnston
This poetic romance starts with a surprisingly prosaic image: an enormous close-up of a needle plying its trade. Surreal and (it will turn out) remarkably resonant, it sums up the director's oblique way of looking at the everyday. At first sight a decorous literary costume drama, Jane Campion's telling of the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne offers us a total immersion in a world that's both familiar and fascinating, intimate and infinitely strange.John and Fanny (played by Ben Whishaw and the fast-rising Australian actress Abbie Cornish, pictured below) met in 1818 when he was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be put off by the deliberately dim interior that first greets you at Mrs Klein, the Nicholas Wright play that has been scorchingly revived at the Almeida Theatre by the director Thea Sharrock and a cast including Clare Higgins in her third stand-out performance on the London stage this year. Those who feel as if they've had enough theatrical psychiatry-speak from the Almeida courtesy of that venue's recent revival of Duet For One, think again: a play that can emerge (and has) as too portentous by half reappears with a wry spring in its step and an emotional sting that is sure to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Critics did not cover themselves with glory after the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty in St Petersburg on a snowy January night in 1890: “We cannot help regretting the means chosen by the theatre directorate in lowering the standard of artistry of our ballet,” wrote one. Another: “Such spectacles attract neither a constant public nor a circle of educated adherents.”Indeed, time and place change everything. More than a century later few ballets have a more constant public than Sleeping Beauty and none a more educated circle of adherents - it’s the ultimate theatre ballet, a manifestation of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Stephen K Amos, although a mightily talented comic, doesn’t make a critic’s job easy. His new show, The Feelgood Factor, does indeed offer that and leaves everybody in the Churchill Theatre in Bromley in a happy mood (and many of them planning to buy him a pint afterwards), but unless I quoted reams of his delivery I couldn’t actually describe what the show is about, other than making people laugh. A lot.That’s not a criticism; it’s just that over the past decade or so we have come to expect comics to have themed shows with a narrative rather than simply to tell jokes with punchlines, one Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Slagsmalsklubben, Sponsored By Destiny (Zarcorp)When white 7" singles drop though my letter box with commercially suicidal band names, they're usually from artists just starting their career, boutique vinyl being cannily collectable in our MP3 age. Slagsmalsklubben, however, which means The Fight Club in their native tongue, are a six-piece from Norrkoping in Sweden who have three albums under their belt.I don't know what they usually sound like but "Sponsored by Destiny" is a cracking combination of bass techno throb and a ridiculous catchy arcade game motif. It shouldn't work but it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a brave comic who declares on stage every night that he would like to see a cute television presenter die in a horrific accident (as nearly happened to Top Gear’s Richard Hammond in 2006). But declares it Stewart Lee does and, for good measure, he also disses a fellow comedian while he’s at it.Lee’s style is almost professorial; he lays out his material slowly, deliberately in a low, even voice and fashions a joke that may not get its payoff until several minutes later. He even deconstructs his material at times or condescendingly berates the audience for not getting the point quickly Read more ...
joe.muggs
The first signs were good. I've been to a lot of shows by “heritage bands” in my time, but I don't think I've ever seen a crowd for a band of Fleetwood Mac's vintage that had such a relatively even age distribution. Sure, it was weighted towards the greying end of the scale, but every age group down to teens – including teens there in groups under their own steam, not just with parents – was well represented, right across class boundaries too.But then Fleetwood Mac have always been a lot of things to a lot of people. From the bluesy sixties underground Peter Green era, through the spectacular Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Dylan Moran is, as the ethnic stereotype would have it, a great storyteller. The Irishman doesn’t tell jokes with punchlines as such, rather he rambles on a bit and sort of makes his points along the way. As entertainment, then, his latest show, What It Is, is the sort where one smiles a lot rather than laughs out loud.If that sounds undynamic, it is. Moran shambles on stage at the Apollo Theatre, hair already tousled and a glass of red wine in hand, but now minus the ever present cigarette of his formative comedy years, when he won plaudits galore, including the prestigious Perrier award at Read more ...