Reviews
Nick Hasted
This is the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of the Pokémon franchise, bringing the video game’s cute critters into a live-action, film noir world, as Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) turns Holmes-hatted detective to help teenage human Tim (Justice Smith) find his apparently murdered dad. Their quest takes them through Ryme City, a utopia where Pokémon and people exist in perfect harmony, thanks to the beneficence of corporate chief Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy, whose Blofeld-like cat makes you doubt his motives early). The ensuing fight against corporate corruption of Pokémon-human relations is helped by Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I hope you’re not only Wolverine fans or this is going to be a long night,” a grinning Hugh Jackman tells a screaming Glasgow crowd. The line – delivered in front of a giant screen on which Jackman, adamantium claws extended, is climbing out of a river with his shirt off – sums up a particular curiosity about the actor known to many as the Greatest Showman: how did an award-winning musical theatre actor end up playing a comic book mutant?There’s actually an answer of sorts in Jackman’s new one-man show, which kicked off an extensive world tour with three nights in Glasgow – as well as a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has come a long way since his early days as a hip hop artist, but the outsider status is obvious even before the curtain goes up on Medusa, his first commission for the Royal Ballet and the centrepiece of a triple bill showcasing the company’s contemporary side.Cherkaoui’s choice of subject – the ultimate #MeToo story of classical myth – rules out the usual ballet tropes. Far from being a love story, Medusa’s is a tale of power abuse times two. Sexual violation by a powerful male (the god Poseidon), is followed by punishment meted out by a second authority figure who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s first season of Deep State featured cloak and dagger exploitations of chaos in the Middle East by the capitalist West and its intelligence services. Judging by its opening episode, this second iteration is about to do something similar, except moving the target area left and down a bit to Niger and Mali.An explosive start was mandatory, and was duly delivered with a bullet-spattered set-piece in a bar in Bamako, where a bunch of off-duty American undercover agents had their pool game interrupted by a squad of turbaned jihadists spraying them with AK-47s. This all kicked off when a Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Young Vic, a welcoming theatre with a culturally diverse audience, has been home to memorable Miller revivals before, notably Ivo van Hove's emotionally shattering, stripped-back A View From the Bridge in 2014. But before that, in the 1980s and Nineties, the then artistic director David Thacker was an important champion of Miller's work at a time when he was less well regarded at home. Miller, who died in 2005, became a close friend of both Thacker and the theatre and observed with pleasure several productions of earlier work and the London premiere of The Last Yankee here.Now, 70 years Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let's start with that kiss – the one that propelled Seann Walsh from “Who?” in last year's Strictly Come Dancing line-up to being the “bad boy” of the series after pictures of his drunken late-night clinch with Katya Jones, his married professional dance partner, appeared in the tabloids.The title, After This One, I'm Going Home, is a nod to the laddish behaviour that many of Walsh’s previous shows have recounted and which – who knows – might have been useful advice to take earlier on the evening in question. Actually, the title and the tour were planned before he signed his Strictly contract Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“You are not the cat. You are inside the cat.” This has to be one of the most memorable first lines you’ll hear this year, and it belongs to one of the most singular films, an American indie drama that charts a teenage girl’s efforts to navigate mental illness, troublesome adults and a burgeoning talent as an actress – all through a theatre process in which reality and fiction become dangerously interlinked. An initially puzzling title is, therefore, perfectly precise, as the young Madeline attempts to find her voice – to be her own person – amid the frantic demands of others. And Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly 17 years ago, Simon Rattle inaugurated his era at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic with Mahler's Fifth Symphony. It couldn't hope to possess the thrill of discovery which had marked his Birmingham Mahler – after all, the Berliners had long enjoyed a more organic view of the composer with Claudio Abbado – but eventually the team gave us a supreme Proms performance of the Seventh Symphony, the one best suited to Rattle's curious form of micro-management. The London Symphony Orchestra, on the other hand, must be so relieved to be free of Gergiev's superficial Mahlerian glut, and while Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Claire Denis's High Life is science fiction as a fever dream rather than a frenzy of ray guns and aliens. Our first contact is Monte (played by a gaunt Robert Pattinson); he’s alone on a rickety space ship, fixing the leaks in the hull, nurturing both the crops in the biosphere and his baby daughter, Willow. Pattinson is a mesmerising screen presence with his close-cropped skull and sharp-angled jaw; there’s real tenderness in the opening scenes where he interacts with the infant as her sole parent. But that idyll doesn’t last; Monte is the last survivor of a crew of murderers Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Five years ago this Kneehigh Theatre production caused a stir with its vibrant modern retelling of John Gay’s 18th century satirical classic, The Beggar’s Opera. It’s currently on tour again and it’s easy to see why a revival was greenlit. It’s a bawdy story of political corruption with no sweet ending, not, in fact, that far from popular boxset dramas such as The Wire or Broadwalk Empire, but with a whole lot more silliness and songs.Set in a grimy, dream version of post-World War II austerity (there’s a running joke about the exoticism of bananas), the plot centres on super-criminal Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival between the Famished Road writer and author Colin Grant it’s how to “upwake”.The phrase, coined in his new (11th) novel The Freedom Artist – a post-truth fable set in an imagined future – describes a retaliation state after people find themselves unable or unwilling to think for themselves. He describes it as being the opposite of waking up, which is a slow uprising – being upwake is swift, vertical and immediate. It’s the need to question, and the challenging of blind acceptance.He speaks of how Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Placed in a long and artfully Arcadian vista, earthy bronze subdued against verdant grass and trees, the restless form of Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure: Cut, 1979-81 (Main picture), both disrupts and is absorbed by its surroundings. A rampant limb rears snakelike, the energy in its writhing form arrested but not dissipated by a violently efficient cut slicing it in two. A cut this clean belongs to machinery and cold metal, not to nature, and it is the contrast with the gentle romance of Houghton Hall’s 18th century landscaping, complete with its Palladian folly, that draws out Read more ...