Reviews
Grand Theft Auto: San AndreasFriday, 24 January 2014
For lovers of PS2-era games, the conversion of titles like GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City to mobile platforms has delivered a welcome dose of retro-gaming thrills, but for real fans of Rockstar's crime epics, a visit to San Andreas is the one they have... Read more... |
Jack Ryan: Shadow RecruitFriday, 24 January 2014
Assuming you care at all, your favourite incarnation of Tom Clancy's industrious CIA agent Jack Ryan is probably Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Before him came Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, and afterwards there... Read more... |
Rapture, Blister, Burn, Hampstead TheatreFriday, 24 January 2014
Feminism suddenly seems to be all the rage in London theatre. Yesterday, I reviewed Nick Payne’s Blurred Lines, and tonight I saw this show by American provocateur Gina Gionfriddo, whose Becky Shaw was at the Almeida three years ago. This current... Read more... |
Tommy Tiernan, Soho TheatreFriday, 24 January 2014
In Irish mythology, a stray sod is an enchanted piece of grass that, if stepped on, leaves a person feeling disorientated and lost, even in familiar surroundings. Although there's no reference to this in Tommy Tiernan's new show, Stray Sod,... Read more... |
Inside Llewyn DavisThursday, 23 January 2014
Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen's brooding homage to the Greenwich Village folk scene, is set in 1961 (January probably), just before Bob Dylan's revelatory songs popularised it. The film is named for its protagonist, a working-class singer... Read more... |
Issipile, La Nuova Musica, Bates, Wigmore HallThursday, 23 January 2014
A question flitted through my mind in advance. Was I down to review La Nuova Musica’s modern premiere of Conti’s baroque opera Issipile, or was it Issipile’s opera Conti? To many music lovers, even those well grounded in history, both... Read more... |
Blurred Lines, National Theatre ShedThursday, 23 January 2014
You can’t accuse Nick Payne of being fainthearted. His new play explores what it means to be a woman and it features a wonderful all-woman cast. But wait a minute: isn’t he a man? And what do men really know about being a woman? You see what I mean... Read more... |
Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness, BBC FourWednesday, 22 January 2014
If you’re going to make a programme about the Rococo, that ornate and playful decorative arts movement that began in France at the start of the 18th century and flourished under the French king Louis XV, naturally you’d want to start in Bavaria. Or... Read more... |
Giorgio de Chirico: Myth and Mystery, Estorick CollectionWednesday, 22 January 2014
An exhibition of work by a giant of 20th-century painting cannot reasonably be expected to turn up too many surprises; the most we can usually hope for is a good proportion of lesser-known works to temper the “masterpieces”. To reveal a whole body... Read more... |
The Girl of the Golden West, Opera NorthWednesday, 22 January 2014
Puccini’s unlikely Spaghetti Western still convinces in Aletta Collins’ vivid new production. The incongruities in this uneven yet powerful work aren’t dodged but embraced. Most of them are musical: the sheer delight, for instance, of seeing stage... Read more... |
August: Osage CountyWednesday, 22 January 2014
Anything planned as Oscar-bait never works – although the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that underpins the film August: Osage County has a pedigree to please the Academy. By some accounts, it began with a lunch between Harvey Weinstein and Emmy-... Read more... |
Big Brother Watching Me: Citizen Ai Weiwei, BBC FourTuesday, 21 January 2014
For a film that opened with Ai Weiwei’s statement, “Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one,” there was an irony in the fact that Andreas Johnsen’s Big Brother Watching Me… started practically without words. When the... Read more... |
