Reviews
Martin's Close, BBC Four review - where did the scary bits go?Wednesday, 25 December 2019
The series of short films, A Ghost Story For Christmas, became a Yuletide staple on BBC One in the 1970s. Most of them were adapted from the works of medieval scholar M R James, and drew their unsettling supernatural aura from the understated and... Read more... |
Cinderella: After Ever After, Sky 1 review - preposterous fairytale sequel tweaks the funny boneWednesday, 25 December 2019
This divertingly daft sequel to the Cinderella story (Sky 1) was the brainchild of David Walliams, who introduced it as himself, sitting smugly by a roaring fire in his authorial smoking jacket. What, he wondered, happened after Cinderella and... Read more... |
Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen, BBC Two review - hiding in plain sight?Tuesday, 24 December 2019
This charming BBC Two hagiography – which may be a contradiction in terms – opened on a montage of praise, with just a hint of irony for the hugely successful actor Hugh Grant. He was born in Hammersmith Hospital, although neither he nor his father... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, BBC One review – Dickens classic recast as gruelling horror storyMonday, 23 December 2019
If you came to this expecting to be reminded of such ghosts of Scrooges past as Alastair Sim or Bill Murray, you will have been reaching either for the brandy or the defibrillator. In the hands of screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight and... Read more... |
The Libertines, Margate Winter Gardens – last post on the TS Eliot-named tourMonday, 23 December 2019
Once upon a time – before the nation’s schism – an indie band with dubious reputation espoused the virtues of Albion and invited us on the good ship Arcadia to travel to this Utopia. Things are a bit different now.Unfashionably nostalgic and... Read more... |
Girl From The North Country, Gielgud Theatre review – poignant collaboration between Conor McPherson and Bob DylanMonday, 23 December 2019
Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapped-out buildings like lost souls. This poignant collaboration between playwright Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Big Front YardSunday, 22 December 2019
In June 1978, the still-extant independent label Cherry Red issued its first record. The seven-inch featured three slices of terse, Buzzcocks-ish art-punk by The Tights. The band were from Great Malvern, Worcestershire – as was the label. They only... Read more... |
The Courier review – lacklustre hit job goes bad in every waySaturday, 21 December 2019
The Courier is a split entity that comprises two interlinked parts. One half involves a silent Gary Oldman who occasionally becomes hysterically enraged, the other a furious Olga Kurylenko who is never allowed a moment of silence. Director Zackary... Read more... |
Rod Stewart, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, O2 review - Tonight's the NightFriday, 20 December 2019
I can’t look at Rod Stewart without thinking of Barbara, one of the naughtier girls in my third-form class at East Barnet Senior High School. She was tiny, and obsessed with him, her hair cut like his. “Maggie May” was number one, playing from tinny... Read more... |
Heston's Marvellous Menu: Back to the Noughties, BBC Two review - ghost of food trends pastFriday, 20 December 2019
Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining... Read more... |
Cats review - feline freakinessThursday, 19 December 2019
Tom Hooper’s freakily phantasmagoric visualisation of an already strange West End smash is a high-wire act risking the sniggers which greeted its trailer. And yet it never falls, sustaining a subtly hallucinatory, wholly theatrical reality. Doubling... Read more... |
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Alexandra Palace Theatre review - JM Barrie's classic as you have never seen it beforeThursday, 19 December 2019
Mischief Theatre is a wonder of modern commercial theatre. In 2008, a group of young actors who had met at drama school started the ensemble – writing, producing, directing and performing their own work. They had their big breakthrough with The Play... Read more... |
