Allelujah! review: Alan Bennett’s NHS play at the Bridge Theatre is cosy and cautionary all at once July 27, 2017 It’s often said that the NHS and the BBC are the twin religions of Britain. If there’s a triplet, it’s probably Alan Bennett, who’s decided to make the health service the subject of his first new play in five years. Allelujah! isn’t quite as sprightly as it sounds, being set on a geriatric ward, but [...]
City of Ghosts film review: An important documentary held back by lumbering, artless direction July 21, 2017 In 2013, after ISIS took control of Raqqa, a group of citizen journalists began secretly recording and publishing their activities. Calling themselves Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), the group formed to counter ISIS’s slick propaganda machine, and deliver the truth about their atrocities to the world. Much of what we know about ISIS’s barbarism [...]
Spider-Man: Homecoming review: Not the character-defining movie we’re waiting for July 6, 2017 The latest Marvel blockbuster is strewn with in-jokes, each one a little gift to fans for continuing to buy tickets for a franchise that now spans 16 movies. Take the title: “Homecoming” does refer to an event in the film – which lasts all of five minutes – but every Marvel geek knows it’s really [...]
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017: The same old show with the same old problems June 8, 2017 Each year the Royal Academy selects many hundreds of works of art, both amateur and professional, and piles them high and wide for its Summer Exhibition. And each year many thousands of words are written questioning whether this is Any Way to View Art. The correct answer is “No, this is No Way to View [...]
Barber Shop Chronicles review: Inua Ellams’ razor sharp play draws profound connections between disparate men June 8, 2017 Set in half a dozen barber shops across two continents, Inua Ellam’s energetic, funny, banter-driven play seeks to join the dots between the experiences and opinions of black men in geographically disparate locations. And there are are plenty of dots to join in a play that ricochets between barber’s chairs as far apart as Johannesburg [...]
887 at the Barbican review: an unmissable evening for fans of Lepage’s brilliant brand of stagecraft June 2, 2017 French-Canadian auteur Robert Lepage returns to the Barbican with a solo show suffused from first second to last with his inimitable brand of heartwarming and absurd stagecraft. It's ostensibly a memoir about Lepage growing up in a working class tenement block in Quebec, with the building brought spectacularly to life by an incredible scale model, [...]
Zero Point at the Barbican review: a visually stunning but eventually tiresome mash-up of ballet and Japanese butoh June 2, 2017 For a while, Darren Johnston’s Zero Point is mesmerising: the bodies of a dozen or so Japanese dancers twist and warp as they contort through beams of light. Projections turn them into living blocks of static. At times they dance alone in the dark, your eyes only making out vague outlines of limbs. The audience, [...]
Into the Unknown at the Barbican: an anarchic journey through the world of science fiction June 2, 2017 Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction is a brilliantly anarchic history of the genre, succeeding both as a surface-level crowd-pleaser and a rigorous collection that will give fresh perspective to even the most ardent of nerds. The curation takes inspiration from the blockbuster exhibitions hosted by the V&A – from the moment you [...]
The Treatment review: A darkly satirical take on the movie business and its players May 5, 2017 The Treatment is a work of lofty, detached genius, reminiscent of the jostling intellectualism of Martin Amis – it's dense, complex, and utterly assured of its own brilliance. On face value, it’s about how the media – in this case, the film industry – edits and rewrites “truth” until it’s at best a distant cousin [...]
Sleepless review: A buzzing cast can’t rescue this low-rent Die Hard-alike May 5, 2017 Universally recognised as the greatest film about clambering around inside air vents ever made, Die Hard has inspired a long list of distinguished imitators, each of them about crawling around inside different kinds of building. Among them was 2011 French action film Nuit Blanche, about a bent cop who gets tangled up in a [...]
