Reviews
Helen K Parker
It’s been a good month for lovers of bootylicious action games, where the swag is plentiful and the guns are ridiculous. With its novel Grindhouse aesthetic, Borderlands 2 comes hot on the heels of last week’s similarly loot-obsessed Torchlight II, replacing that game’s swords and skeletons with sniper rifles and caterwauling midgets. It also has one of the best, most stylish opening sequences I’ve seen in a game for a long time.Lured by the call of the charismatic and treacherous Handsome Jack, your character (be it the weapon-obsessed Gunzerker, the sneaky Assassin, the magical Siren or the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mostly thanks to Armando Iannucci, we are currently spoilt for political satire. Between the two of them Veep and The Thick of It have Westminster and Washington running for cover: to use that gratingly pious phrase, they speak truth to power. One behemoth that Iannucci has yet to bring down is the befuddling, clusterfucked idiocy of the American electoral machine. Its cynicism has lately been exposed in George Clooney’s The Ides of March, but that was about a candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination who was too good to be true. What of Republicans lower down the pecking order?Step Read more ...
David Nice
Dissatisfied housewives who eventually stand by their men joined jewelled hands in a divine evening of operatic decadence. Suppressed Bianca all but steps over the body of her strangled lover to get at the muscles of her killer husband in Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, taking its cue from the deep purple imagery of Oscar Wilde’s story. And in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the Dyer’s Wife readily gives up her dreams of sacrificing motherhood and taking up with a fantasy toyboy when domestic violence looms. Dodgy premises both, and unlikely subjects Read more ...
Veronica Lee
First a confession: I've never been a great fan of Michael McIntyre. He's a nice bloke for sure, works at his craft and is a slick performer with a huge following, both live and on television. Plus - and this is one of the best compliments I can pay to a stand-up because it's a difficult skill to pull off - he's one of the best MCs in the business. But I can't get past the feeling that some of his material, to borrow shamelessly from another context, has the whiff of previously used about it.But that's my problem and, to judge from the packed house at the O2 Arena, not something that bothers Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead. Now, 18 months later, with all legal ducks finally in a row, the first episode went out last Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a reasonable assumption that Emile Zola would never have guessed his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise, part of the Rougon-Macquart series) would be the inspiration for a BBC costume drama. And it's an even safer one that he would have barely recognised his 1883 novel, an acute observation of capitalism and bourgeois life in mid-19th-century France, in Bill Gallagher's adaptation The Paradise.Gallagher, who wrote the equally soapy Lark Rise to Candleford, has relocated the action from Paris to an unnamed city in the North-East of England, presumably Newcastle, where the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The 1989 production at the Tron in Glasgow of Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman’s translation of Les Belles-Soeurs, the 1965 play by Québécois writer Michel Tremblay, has become a landmark event in Scottish theatre. This new co-production between the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Scotland marks a major and very welcome revival of a work which, although initially written to challenge the prevailing cultural constraints of Canada in the 1960s, retains a real contemporary kick.The themes of The Guid Sisters – economic desperation, the politics of language, religion, the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric. Following on from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which chose to set its verbose and violent social critique in a white stretch limo, Holy Motors uses a similar vehicle both to transport and transform its protagonist.The short prologue sees the film’s French director, Leos Carax, fumbling blindly about a hotel room, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The Special Relationship might be on a sticky wicket politically, but in telly at least it seems to be thriving. Spooks, Downton and Episodes have all recognised the sound commercial sense in bringing together marquee names from both sides of the pond. Now comes Cuckoo, a new six-part comedy series which pitches budding US film star and Saturday Night Live stalwart Andy Samberg against our very own comic giant Greg Davies. The third lead, Helen Baxendale, presumably ticked several boxes simply for being known on either side of the Atlantic seaboard for her (terrible) turn in Friends.So much Read more ...
joe.muggs
John Cage is funny: this much we know. The deadpan prankster at the heart of 20th-century artistic experimentalism was always about the inadvertent punchline, the chuckle that comes from unexpected disjunction, the relief that comes from reminders of the absurdity of reality, as much as he was ever about any engagement with progress, technology, the transcendent. It's entirely natural, then, that Stewart Lee (pictured below), who has spent his whole career reaching outwards from the comedy circuit towards the avant-garde, should want to present his work.It was good to see Cage's work Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In Beatles’ lore, the Prince of Wales Theatre is totemic. Here, on 4 November 1963, the cheeky quartet played the Royal Command Performance before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. John Lennon quipped, “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery”. Now, 50 years on from the release of their first single, a tribute of sorts is taking place on the same stage with the arrival of Let It Be in the West End.Let It Be tries to hide what it is – at the end of the show, the cast members are introduced for the first time as “on Read more ...