humour
Saskia Baron
It says a great deal about how very bad this film is that the pre-title montage of viral cat videos clawed from the internet is the most amusing sequence in it. This is one of the most cynical "family entertainment" movies to come out of the Hollywood machine in a long time. It has all the charm of smelling an atrophied mouse left behind the sofa by a vindictive moggy. Kevin Spacey plays a Trump-esque mogul, Tom Brand, who is determined to build the tallest skyscraper in New York. He plasters his face all over his business in various heroic poses, but is loathed by all his investors Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Once they’ve died nine times, Lynne Truss’s evil talking cats become immortal. Whether Truss has such ambitions for the literary lifespan of her curiously addictive feline thrillers, this second outing, after 2014’s Cat Out of Hell, suggests a robust life-expectancy for an idea apparently sprung from a tiresomely persistent internet meme. In The Lunar Cats, we re-make the acquaintance of protagonist and widowed librarian Alec Charlesworth, hapless actor Wiggy, and feline mastermind Roger, on an adventure in the perilous universe of evil talking cats - featuring most bizarrely, this time, a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If the Trocks didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Every genre needs its loving parodists, treading the fine line between homage and dommage, and an art form as stylised and convention-governed as classical dance is riper for it than most - as evidenced by the continuing worldwide success of this all-male comedy troupe after more than 40 years. Now they're in London, and this second programme proves that they can be just as diverse as any great Russian company, taking in as it does the romantic ballet Les Sylphides, the Imperial kitsch-fest Don Quixote, and modern American masters Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The appeal for commissioners of turning Rob Temple’s superb Very British Problems Twitter feed into a TV show is easy to see. The account has more than a million followers and the planning discussions will, no doubt, have included the words, “brand”, “awareness” and “maximise”. Probably “leverage” as well, but used wrongly, and by an idiot. Presented here as an extended collection of talking heads, it’s also cheap. Julie Walters will have cost a few quid for the voiceover – as will the contributors – but even when you add on the cost of the crew and the petrol to get to each of the houses for Read more ...
fisun.guner
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his conscience, and yet Claudius, conflicted, cannot pray. He must, therefore, remain a captive among the ghosts and the monsters where no light may fall.What did light mean for Philip Guston? Not what it means for most painters, nor for those seeking the redemptive light. The naked light bulb that pops up in so many of his paintings is both the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
"I sometimes wish we were more normal," sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the froth and the substance of this early play, written in a blaze of youthful elan over three days in 1924. What has kept it a theatrical staple for 90 years and counting is not just its writer’s talent to amuse, nor its near-perfect structure: it is also the stain of truth that seeps through its merry mayhem, drawing on Coward’s own experience as a hapless weekend houseguest, and his sharp-eyed observations Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the dance world's better-kept secrets is the existence of a brilliantly inventive comic double-act consisting of two paunchy, balding 50-something men. Neither humour nor the over-50s are seen all that often in dance, but it isn't tokenism which makes dance insiders turn out in delighted force for choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion: it's the knowledge that Burrows and Fargion's shows are one of the surest bets in dance for an evening that will be original, funny and clever in equal measure.I didn't get time to cast an eye on the incredibly brief programme note Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
His Girl Friday is funny. Very, very funny. It is also crammed with cutting verbiage as sharply delivered as the moves of a complex pas de deux. Yet another no-frills appearance of the 1940 film on home video is not a surprise as – despite being a Hollywood product – it fell out of copyright and has been just-about endlessly reissued. Nonetheless, anyone looking to enjoy a laugh riot with an intelligent slant should seek it out. Despite being over 60 years old, this screwball comedy still feels daisy-fresh.The plot of this dazzlingly fast-moving film is as wafer-thin as that of a farce or a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The recent comedy awards on Channel 4 threw up little in the way of surprises – or, indeed, laughter for that matter. It was, however, notable for the first real-time, on-screen mugging at an awards bash, as Harry Enfield strolled off with the Best Comedy Actor gong, leaving Mathew Baynton looking very much the wronged man. That James Corden wasn’t even nominated was another crime.The sense of outrage (all mine) was directly proportional with how much there was to like in the first series of the pair’s excellent comedy drama, The Wrong Mans, which saw Berkshire County Council employee Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The frozen north of Norway seems an unlikely spot for a Serbian drug gang to be operating alongside a local mob, but this is the world which snow-plough driver Nils meets head on when avenging the death of his son. Throw in larger-than-life characters, cartoonish but very strong violence and a beautiful snowy backdrop and the result is the Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, a revenge drama which doles out its thrills at a pace in total contrast to the bleak serenity of the landscape which defines this part of the world.This formula has been seen before, most notably in the Norwegian Read more ...
David Benedict
In what is undoubtedly one of the earlier recorded examples of the single entendre, the original ad campaign for Some Like It Hot yelled “Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom Companions”. Well, the posters may not have minced words, but there’s more than a little mincing on screen as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon escape the mob and the St Valentine’s Day massacre and go on the lam by joining a band. An all-girl band. Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters, to be precise, who are to be holed up beneath the sheltering palms of a millionaire-strewn Florida hotel. That’s a whole lot better than being held Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That 1971’s Harold and Maude still confounds and delights in equal measure is a tribute to its timelessness. Despite evocative, period-specific music from Cat Stevens, and settings and trappings which place it as a film conceived and completed as the Sixties still cast a shadow, it still hinges on finely honed characterisations and a story which was, and remains, unique. Although mainstream, it played with the nature of romance and what is or isn’t acceptable in the day-to-day to such an extent that it continues to be both uncomfortable viewing and engender warm-hearted feelings. Reactions Read more ...