sci-fi
ArrivalThursday, 10 November 2016
While the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it’s faintly reassuring to imagine that there might be some intelligent life form out there beyond the stars that’s just waiting to land on our planet and make us all love one another – or swiftly... Read more... |
Humans, Series 2, Channel 4Monday, 31 October 2016
Humans is of course not about humans. Or not mainly. But if Channel 4 had called it Synths, which is what/who it is mainly about, maybe fewer would have signed up to watch, presuming it to be an eight-part series about Eighties pop. Synths, if you... Read more... |
LFF 2016: Snowden / The Birth of a Nation / ArrivalThursday, 13 October 2016
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on thrillers like The Parallax View, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American political conspiracies, and inevitably he portrays CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and... Read more... |
Detroit: Techno City, Institute of Contemporary ArtsWednesday, 27 July 2016
Detroit techno music is important. Any student of the club music of the modern age knows this. The sound that fermented among the majority black population of the decaying industrial city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as disco's last remnants... Read more... |
WarcraftFriday, 03 June 2016
The Warcraft series of "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" (or MMORPG if you must) has apparently amassed over 100 million users since it all began with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. Ergo, turning it into a 3D multiplex-buster... Read more... |
Frankenstein, Royal BalletThursday, 05 May 2016
Another year, another new full-length story ballet from one of the Royal Ballet's in-house choreographers. Time was – a long time, in fact, up to 2011 – when that would have sounded like science fiction, but no longer: Liam Scarlett, whose... Read more... |
DVD: Doomwatch Series 1-3, The Remaining EpisodesTuesday, 12 April 2016
When it aired on BBC One at the dawn of the Seventies, Doomwatch became one of the marvels of the broadcasting age, sometimes pulling audiences of over 13 million. Thanks to the keen imagination of its creator, Dr Kit Pedler – a gifted... Read more... |
X, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 06 April 2016
In 2014, Pomona stormed the Orange Tree, turning the previously staid venue into a place of both lauded theatre revolution and disgruntled walkouts. Could Alistair McDowall repeat the feat at the more progressive Royal Court?X should certainly prove... Read more... |
Midnight SpecialTuesday, 05 April 2016
Fans of writer-director Jeff Nichols might detect echoes of his hair-raising 2011 film Take Shelter in his latest effort, not least the presence of regular Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon as one of the leads, but this time his scope has... Read more... |
CD: Orlando Voorn - In My WorldMonday, 21 March 2016
Once upon a time, techno was the future, and Orlando Voorn was right at the heart of building that future. The Dutchman was in early on the late-1980s wave of Detroit electronic production – in which small groups of black Americans surrounded by... Read more... |
We Made It: Stufish Entertainment ArchitectsSunday, 21 February 2016
While most set designers come from an art or theatre background, Ric Lipson has parlayed his architectural training into an unusual skillset: designing not just what goes on inside entertainment venues, but the buildings themselves. At his studio... Read more... |
DVD: The MartianSunday, 14 February 2016
The flip side of the apocalyptic evolution-and-destiny concerns of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's previous foray across the Last Frontier, The Martian is a feelgood take on the theme of space travel. Having landed the first astronauts on Mars in 2029,... Read more... |
