Dick Whittington at Lyric Hammersmith pantomime review: wholesome fun for children and utter filth for adults November 30, 2018 Dick Whittington at the Lyric Hammersmith is just the smutty, heart-warming silliness you need to kick off the festive season. Like all good panto, it works on two levels, with wholesome fun for children and utter filth for adults. In writer-director Jude Christian’s production Dick Whittington (Luke Latchman), a good-natured simpleton from Cardiff, somehow bumbles [...]
The Wild Pear Tree film review: A languorous exploration of cultural change in modern Turkey from Palme d’Or-winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan November 30, 2018 There are two Turkeys in The Wild Pear Tree. One – the film’s backdrop – is the shabby provinces, where the summit of prestige is a career as a teacher. The other, lying at the story’s edge, is the cosmopolitan realm of high culture and aspirations. Sinan (Aydın Doğu Demirkol) is trapped in between. After [...]
Déraciné review: A virtual reality puzzler about haunting a boarding school November 30, 2018 From the studio that created Dark Souls, a twisted Gothic action RPG so infamously challenging that it’s become gaming shorthand for punishing difficulty, comes Deracine, a ponderous virtual reality puzzler set in a Victorian boarding school, in which you take on the role of a mischievous fairy playing tricks on the residents. Headset on, you [...]
Ralph Breaks the Internet review: Heart and jokes combine to make this video games drama a hit November 30, 2018 Wreck-It Ralph became a surprise hit two years ago thanks to its nostalgia-tingling portrayal of retro video games. Now the reformed bad guy, voiced by John C Reilly, is back and heading into The Internet in order to save the game of his best friend, Vanellope (Sarah Silverman). With a host of online obstacles in [...]
Roma film review: Alfonso Cuarón’s follow-up to Gravity is a meandering, neorealist valentine to the Mexico City November 30, 2018 Alfonso Cuarón is that rare thing, a director who has achieved the holy trinity of relevance, critical acclaim and widespread popularity. His last film, Gravity, was a CGI spectacular with a $100m budget. What better way to follow it than with a meandering, neorealist valentine to the Mexico City of his youth? Roma’s unhurried, ethereal [...]
Focus On Acton: This once ‘unloved’ part of west London is transforming thanks to the imminent arrival of Crossrail November 30, 2018 For some places in London, the housing market is a complicated beast; riding high in some streets, but not in others; a tale of two postcodes; a slow-burning demographic change subtly altering the character of an area; the promise of new transport links. In Acton, it’s more straight-forward; it was once an unloved pocket of [...]
Disobedience film review: Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams shine in Sebastián Lelio’s lesbian drama November 30, 2018 Chilean-Argentine director Sebastián Lelio chooses an unlikely setting for his first English language film: the austere surrounds of a North London orthodox Jewish community. It begins with something of a mission statement: an ageing rabbi, in what turn out to be his final sermon, asks what it means to be disobedient. The angels cannot deviate from [...]
The former Stasi headquarters in Berlin has turned into luxury flats – but will it ever really get over its murky past? November 30, 2018 After the headquarters of the East German Secret Police was stormed in 1990, the building it was housed in has understandably struggled to find a place in modern, vibrant Berlin. But now it’s been renamed 2052 Industrie Lofts and turned into luxurious apartments that boast some of the largest outside terraces in the German capital, [...]
Interiors: Don’t put up your tree this weekend without first checking out the best designer efforts in London’s luxury hotels November 30, 2018 As December gets under way, London has lit up and is ready to party with yuletide cocktails aplenty. For visiting family, I planned half a dozen pitstops around the capital to show off the best of our installations – venues that ramp up the festive atmosphere without being naff. It’s the Tipples ‘n’ Trees tour [...]
Why everybody should be doing the conservation work workout November 30, 2018 If we compress human evolution into 24 hours, then for around 23 hours and 58 minutes – over 99 per cent of our existence – we lived, worked and thrived in the great outdoors. In this mostly challenging environment, despite the lack of medicines, technology, communications and our relative weakness to many predators, we became the world’s [...]
