Reviews
Stuart Houghton
Noir Syndrome is a procedural detective game. That's to say procedurally-generated rather than a police procedural - the game is designed to create a random mystery for you to solve with each new game, and puts you in the worn-out shoes of a down-at-heel private eye who must catch a serial murderer who is cutting a swathe through the inhabitants of a big city.The game is rendered in a faux-retro 2D pixel art style and scored with a smoky jazz soundtrack that evokes just the right atmosphere for a gumshoe walking the mean streets. You have just two weeks to catch the murderer, and considering Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Science has fallen in love with comedy – or maybe that should be the other way round. Whichever, geek is now chic, and being in possession of a brain is something to be laughed with, rather than at. All of which explains the popularity of Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, or Dara Ó Briain's School of Hard Sums on the Dave channel, both of which employ a large dose of comedy to discuss some terrifically complex topics.Helen Arney, Steve Mould and Matt Parker are all scientists by training and perform comedy separately as well as together under the moniker Festival of the Spoken Nerd. Their Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
If Crystal Fairy is about "the birth of compassion in someone’s life”, as director Sebastián Silva explained when it premiered at Sundance last year, then Magic Magic (which he shot at the same time) can be seen as a companion piece of sorts. It’s not too far a reach to assume Silva is testing his audience with this disorientating and incredibly taut look at mental illness. He explores how deep sympathies really lie for a disorder that some have difficulty empathising with and how the decisions arrived at by a pack mentality can lead to devastating consequences.Silva cleverly sets this Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Plotted on the Nunn Curve of Fatal Attraction to Flare Path, Sir Trevor’s latest West End outing – Noël Coward’s post-war comedy Relative Values – lands solidly in the upper-middle reaches. Why not the unqualified upper? The stock answer here would be that Coward’s play is fatally flawed, blighting even a director at his best. Any alternative risks straying into the stickiest of ideological mires, braving the final social and theatrical taboo: class.“Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners,” proclaims Wodehouse-esque butler Crestwell in Act II. Coward Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Not so long ago, photographers were rejoicing in the freedom the digital revolution seemed to bring; unencumbered by the limitations of film, paper and darkroom practice, photography was suddenly liberated from the niggling pedantry of material constraints.So it is in the cyclical nature of things that the photographers shortlisted for this year’s Deutsche Börse Prize all hark back, in some way, to pre-digital image-making, whether in their choice of equipment, technique or subject matter. Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery, argues that this illustrious prize plays a Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection, though - and there was space enough for that - it turned out to be a back-to-front journey through German musical history, from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s atom bomb of light to classical-romantic Beethoven and late-romantic Brahms ending in a homage to Bach The sequence of works was executed with the sometimes blinding clarity we’ve come to expect Read more ...
Naima Khan
Written and directed by the ever-varied Amir Nizar Zuabi, Oh My Sweet Land tells the story of a German-Syrian woman living in Paris and struggling with her connection to the raging civil war abroad. Zuabi, the Palestinian theatre-maker who gave us 2012's divisive treatment of the story of Abraham in The Beloved and the RSC's Middle East-inspired take on The Comedy of Errors, now looks at similar themes of love, loss and reunion, albeit with a very different tone. Performed by Corinne Jaber who, like her character, is German-Syrian but based in France, Oh My Sweet Land couples Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spider-senses will be buzzing alarmingly before the end, as deadly danger approaches Peter Parker and his loved ones - just the sort of danger, in fact, that some viewers may remember from the distant days of 2004, and Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi’s superhero movie high-water mark. It’s the problem that won’t go away for the series reboot Sony’s budget and creative conflicts with Raimi required, when the series had only just begun. Everyone has done an excellent job on director Marc Webb’s exciting, well-crafted sequel to his first Spider-Man film. But it’s impossible to reboot audiences’ brains, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Before Boris Eifman’s second visit to London this week, ballet lovers who missed the divisive Russian dancemaker last time round will have been weighing up the merits of a punt on a ticket. If they were basing their calculations on reviews, I imagine their mental reasoning went as follows. Against: Eifman’s ballets send many English-language dance critics into tail-spinning, virtuosic displays of vitriol (based on genuine dislike: Eifman makes one colleague “want to stand on her chair and howl.”) For: other critics like him; Russian audiences apparently love him. Plus, controversial might Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a misnomer, of course. Water. It’s not even a prissy misnomer as in “when did you last pass water?” It’s more categorical than that: solids rather than liquids are our subject here. This is essentially a show about shit. Shit and all who sail in her.There’s a general principle that the worst jobs attract the nicest people, and clearing blocked drains teeming with raw sewage probably counts as a career path with one of the shorter queues at the job centre. But what delightful people do it, at least in the North-West where Waterman: A Dirty Business has set up stall for one of those Read more ...
fisun.guner
When it comes to the two vying giants of 20th century art we do – don’t we? – all fall into that cliché of two opposing camps. You have the seductions of colour and decorative form on the one hand and you have the more classical rigours of line on the other, the one exemplified by Matisse, the other by Picasso. It’s not an absolute demarcation – a line that’s never blurred (and Matisse had, of course, a very elegant line); just a profound difference in emphasis and sensibility. It’s also a difference in artistic temperament. And how we respond shows, I think, a difference in temperament, too Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.We Are the Best! is the story of Bobo, Klara and their unlikely soul mate Hedvig. It’s about their assertion of individuality and how Read more ...