Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
Two years ago Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle dusted off the Robin Williams vehicle from the Nineties with entertaining results, improving on the original with astute casting, a goofy script and special effects that didn’t take themselves too seriously.A sequel was inevitable. And as befitting a film that takes place inside a video game, to make it work the filmmakers had to go onto the ‘next level’ in terms of plotting and spectacle. They’ve achieved that, with a great deal of ingenuity, while perhaps predictably losing some of the freshness of the earlier outing.Jumanji is the literally Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This scary, electrically beautiful adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book about living on the faultline between imagination and reality is a fantastically alternative offering for the festive season. While the parameters of the story are dark, it’s an edgy, stunningly thought through tribute to the wild and wonderful life of the mind, and its ability to help us engage with the horrors that life flings at us. Though there is no shortage of Gothic special effects, the success of the production is due in no small part to Samuel Blenkin’s superb, comically gawky turn as the “Boy” at the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Qdos brought back pantomime to the Palladium three years ago after an absence of nearly 30 years, it set the bar high with superb production values, a large ensemble, a live band – and a stage stuffed with stars. Now those stars – Julian Clary, Paul O'Grady, Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers and Gary Wilmot – have become a sort of panto ensemble in their own right and reassemble for this year's outing, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.Traditionalists will quibble – perhaps fairly – as it's several minutes into the show before it even looks like a panto, when O'Grady's baddie, Baron von Savage Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation. It’s a bold move that adds decided new relevance to the action, grounding proceedings that are more often generalised in their listless disappointment to a very particular time and place. We certainly view the travails of the Chekhov’s eponymous protagonists – instead of Olga, Masha and Irina, here they are Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo – in a different light when starving refugees and the battle Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first feature by Copenhagen-born director Ulaa Salim dives boldly into a cauldron of hot-button issues – terrorism, racism, nationalism and fascism. It’s set in 2025, in a Denmark suffering from bomb attacks and violently polarised politics. This climate has spawned the titular Sons of Denmark. They’re a gang of neo-Nazis preaching racial purity and zero tolerance of immigrants, singling out Muslims for especially hostile treatment, threatening them with severed pig’s heads and slogans daubed in blood.We don’t get to learn much about the Sons of Denmark themselves, who remain sinister, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s not about spontaneity. Bar switching the order of a couple of songs at the beginning and during the encore, the set was the same as a couple of days earlier in Paris. And, just-before that, in Turnout, Belgium. The first UK date on Mark Lanegan and his band’s European tour didn’t deviate much – odd other songs have cropped up during this excursion – from what they’ve been doing since hitting the trail in the last week of October.Instead, it’s about reiterating what Mark Lanegan is about. The gruffness. The lack of chit-chat – beyond a couple of acknowledgments, he limited himself to one Read more ...
The Duchess of Malfi, Almeida Theatre review - a radically original perspective on Webster's tragedy
Heather Neill
This play can be a challenge for modern audiences: a woman who is ostensibly in a position of power, "a prince" in Renaissance terms, is nevertheless constrained by social expectations and a prisoner of the will of her overbearing brothers. A widow, she defies them to marry her steward Antonio in secret and tragedy ensues. The action can seem to move from one set-piece of madness or terror to the next, including scenes of visceral violence, while the onlooker is expected to accept unlikely possibilities such as that the Duchess (who is never named) could have given birth to three children in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alibi is usually your one-stop shop for re-runs of Father Brown or Death in Paradise, so well done them for commissioning this new murder mystery. It comes with a glittering pedigree, having been created by actor-turned-writer Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey etc) and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid, but despite a cracking cast it struggles to pass the credibility test.Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) is an aspiring young lab technician who’s landed herself a prestigious job with the Scottish Institute for Forensic Science and Anatomy (SIFA) in Dundee, where she works under the auspices Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been built in China, but which remains mysteriously un-launched). However, it’s difficult to see why this film has appeared 107 and a half years after she sank.Part of an intermittent series called Great British Ships, it was presented by Rob Bell (pictured below), who ends every sentence with at least three imaginary exclamation marks. I lost count of how Read more ...
David Nice
There is no mention of Marc-Antoine Charpentier in David Cairns's comprehensive Berlioz biography. It seems extraordinary that the master of the most intimate and moving of musical Christmas stories, L'enfance du Christ, knew nothing of the next best, Charpentier's Pastorale sur la naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ composed 175 years earlier, with its similar move from darkness to light, its music of tender intimacy and childlike joy as well as sorrow, an elaborate metaphysical final chorus common to both. Charpentier's moments of seemingly small but potentially momentous drama were Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
She’s back. Dido stopped touring in 2004 and stayed away from it for 15 years. But since starting again in March of this year, she has gone at it with gusto and performed well over 50 concerts, with last night’s Maida Vale session for the series BBC Radio 2 In Concert, introduced by Jo Whiley, her last-but-one of 2019. And she will be setting off again next summer.Dido racked up sales of over 40 million with the albums from the 1999-2004 period, so these songs and above all that distinctive voice have left their imprint on public consciousness. With the benefit of two decades of hindsight, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
A pas de deux is normally an opportunity for two dancers to express the pinnacle of their skill and the choreographer's art. In the case of McGregor + Mugler, the duet receiving its world premiere as part of a Russian-sponsored triple bill, it became an opportunity for a big-name designer to strut his stuff."My Little Pony From Outer Space" seemed to be the theme as Bolshoi prima ballerina Olga Smirnova and the Royal Ballet’s Edward Watson (main picture, and below) stepped out on the stage of the Coliseum virtually naked but for chrome helmets, chrome shin-guards and a membrane of glittery Read more ...