London
Saskia Baron
Yet another excuse to snuggle down with some cosy wartime nostalgia, Their Finest is purportedly a tribute to women’s undervalued role in the British film industry. Unfortunately it comes over more blah than Blitz. Gemma Arterton plays Catrin Cole, fresh from the Welsh valleys and keen to carve out a career for herself in wartime London.Employed by the Ministry of Information as a typist, she finds herself writing the "slop" – dialogue scenes between female characters in propaganda films. Supporting her artist husband (Jack Huston), who has come with her from Wales and longs to be a war Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Devised and written by John Ridley, the Oscar-winning writer of 12 Years a Slave, Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic) takes us back to London, 1971. The story is set among a group of black activists agitating against racism and police brutality, and the city is portrayed as a shabby, smouldering dystopia about to erupt into apocalyptic violence.Was this really how it was? I suspect not, even though the show brandishes the 1971 Immigration Act as a kind of state-sponsored manifesto of race hatred. What the Milwaukee-born Ridley seems to have done is transplant the Chicago riots of 1968 and an American Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending teased the brains of many a reader with its split time frame and ambiguous conclusion. It was the sort of thing that the interiorised world of fiction can do surpassingly well, and Barnes had handled it skilfully enough to carry off the Man Booker Prize.Director Ritesh Batra’s film treatment offers many incidental pleasures, including its naturalistic London locations and Jim Broadbent’s gruff, minor-key portrayal of the central character, Tony Webster. However, though his are the eyes through which we view the story, he isn’t necessarily the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There have been plenty of films glamourising diamond geezers who live on the wrong side of the law. Some of them don’t even star Danny Dyer. In the history of British film, rhyming slang plus dodgy morals equals box office. Perhaps there is even a special source of European funding ring-fenced for low-budget films about cockney gangsters. The true story of the old lags who pulled off the biggest heist in burgling history was always destined to be dramatised. Someone probably tried to option it as soon as the news broke. The result is The Hatton Garden Job, directed by Ronnie Thompson.A quick Read more ...
David Kettle
The harsh metallic rasp of a cigarette lighter; a glamorous, vulnerable prostitute in distress; a noble lone crime-fighter standing dejected in the rain. All the familiar tropes of noir are present and correct – in fact, almost self-consciously ticked off – in this entertaining thriller from Pete Travis (Dredd, Endgame). But they’re in a jarringly unfamiliar context: this is modern-day, grimy, multi-ethnic west London – located specifically with mentions of Scrubs Lane and Kensal Rise tube station – with its relentless gentrification, luxury housing developments sprouting all around, small- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Updating the classics is not without its pitfalls. How can a modern audience, which has a completely different set of religious beliefs, relate to a 17th century morality tale in which the lead character behaves really badly, but gets his comeuppance by being roasted in hell fire? This is the case with Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, which was originally staged in 1665. In 2006, playwright and director Patrick Marber took this classic and pummelled it into shape as a play for today, complete with contemporary references aplenty. Now it’s being revived, with some rewrites, in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We like to think of Georgian England as a wellspring of elegance: the Chippendale chair and the Wedgwood teapot, the landscaped vista and the neoclassical townhouse. But, as subversively embodied in the mock heroic couplet, the seemly Age of Reason had a seamy underbelly. There was order, but also ordure.Take Harris’s Life of Covent Garden Ladies, published in 1789 and updated four years later, advised on the services available to gentlemen of leisure. Miss All-s-n of No 4 Glanville Street, it reported, is “now just in her prime… rising seventeen… can trot, amble, & even gallop, if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To Westminster and Meet the Lords, a series which Radio Times assures me follows “the larger-than-life characters” in one of our “most idiosyncratic and important institutions”. Obviously it was shot well before the current Brexit deliberations in the Lords, and this first of three films was largely concerned with the passage of the government’s housing bill last year. This perhaps offered a taste of what their Lord and Ladyships hope to do with Brexit, as they roused themselves indignantly from their post-prandial slumbers against aspects of the housing legislation, and forced the government Read more ...
Ralph Moore
It’s a fairly big deal to be interviewing Stan Lee. Generations have been enthralled by his work, from the 1960s comics The Amazing Spider-Man and The Uncanny X-Men – which came to the UK first as US imports and later as black and white reprints via Marvel UK – to the more colourful world of Doctor Strange via The Incredible Hulk and Daredevil. Almost four decades on, the co-creator of Spider-Man (reclusive Spider-Man artist and co-creator Steve Ditko, 89, is alive and well too) and all those heroes and villains has now achieved a global level of fame and notoriety that he never quite Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…One of the many ironies of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s massive novel partly set in 1940s London, is that what follows these opening lines (760 pages in the original edition) actually occurs in the blink of an eye: the time it takes for the falling bomb to hit the sitting ducks in a picturehouse audience. Viewers of The Halcyon have known a bomb explodes at a party to celebrate the luxury hotel’s 50th year in November 1940 ever since the first episode eight weeks ago. Tonight we learned Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“What if the Germans had won the war?” has been a recurring theme in fiction, from Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. There was even a predictive pre-war “future history” version, in the form of Katherine Burdekin’s 1937 novel, Swastika Night.In SS-GB, tellified from Len Deighton’s novel by writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who’ve written all the recent Bond movies), it’s November 1941. The RAF’s famous “Few” having failed to stem the Nazi onslaught – the blackly-ironic opening sequence showed us a Spitfire flown by Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mention the name “Barbara Dickson” and everyone remembers “I Know Him so Well”, the duet with Elaine Paige which hit the top spot in 1985, the era of big hair, shoulders pads and dry ice. That song didn’t feature in Dickson’s concert at Union Chapel, but those who came to hear her other top 20 hits – “Answer Me”, “Caravans” and “January February” – weren’t disappointed. The last was the appropriate opener on a frigid February eve, but like everything she played, it was totally reinvented.Quite deservedly, Dickson has enjoyed considerable commercial success and won awards for her acting (“Tell Read more ...