wed 18/12/2024

magic

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Anyone who has ever sat through a Las Vegas show – whether in the Nevada desert city or on tour – will instantly recognise the cheesy, overblown nonsense being lampooned throughout this movie. Whether they'll find it as funny is another matter. For...

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Tomb Raider

Like a faded star, wearing the moth eaten dresses of her past, still stalking a shuttered Hollywood set, Lara Croft has seen better days. Ah, the old days – she made or broke consoles, appeared on fashion magazine covers, had Angelina Jolie play her...

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DVD: The Wicker Man/The Wicker Tree

The Wicker Man is a great British film, one of the top horror films of all time. Since its release in 1973, its curious combination of queasily jolly folkloric ritual and sinister paganism has only grown to seem more discomfiting, reeking of the...

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Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre

WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering...

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The Tempest, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Memo to William Shakespeare: could we have more, please, in The Tempest of the anxious, angsty Prospero, the mortality-minded magus played in his most riveting theatre performance in years by Ralph Fiennes? As long as Fiennes is prowling the...

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CD: Jackie Oates - Saturnine

Saturnine means to be hard, impermeable, gloomy and dull. Thudding, even. The word quite literally means to be like lead. It is an odd choice of album title for a record which is none of those things. Jackie Oates’s fourth studio album is, in fact,...

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Conan the Barbarian

The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic...

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Q&A Special: Magician Paul Kieve

'You are flying by the seat of your pants': Paul Kieve on stage illusion

Hollywood has turned the special effect into a birthright for a generation of movie-goers. “How did they do that?” is no longer a question you hear in the multiplex. In the theatre it’s another thing entirely. Whatever the reception for the show...

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Derren Brown: Svengali, Shaftesbury Theatre

Derren Brown: Witty and urbane performer who never humiliates his on-stage subjects

Derren Brown is witty, urbane, clever and a keen student of what makes humans tick - which must come as a huge advantage when you are developing an evening’s entertainment based on kidology. He makes it clear he’s not a psychic or clairvoyant and...

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who...

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