Rage 2 review: This post-apocalyptic zombie sequel falls flat despite some tight gunplay May 24, 2019 On the face of it, it’s strange that this game even exists, given that the original Rage, released in 2011, sold poorly and left little cultural impression. After playing this drab, repetitive sequel, I’m still unsure why they decided to bring it back for a second outing. I heard the faint ringing of alarm bells [...]
John Wick 3 review: Keanu Reeves shines in the action franchise’s brilliant third installment May 24, 2019 The John Wick films are so far ahead of other Hollywood action movies that this third installment is the best the genre has produced in recent years, without even being the best film in the franchise. We pick up immediately after the end of Chapter 2, with Wick having been declared ‘excommunicado’ from the High [...]
Aladdin review: Disney fails to justify remaking the classic animation May 24, 2019 The first thing you notice about this $180m live-action reboot of Disney’s beloved 1992 animation is the unexpected poverty of its visuals. The set design has an end-of-year school play vibe, all gaudy colours and plywood walls stuck together with adhesive. It feels more Disneyland than Disney. The widespread scepticism that greeted Guy Ritchie’s installment [...]
Our Town review: Thornton Wilder’s classic play about everyday life comes to Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre May 24, 2019 Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town is a kind of time capsule, a snapshot of everyday life in a New Hampshire town during the first years of the 20th century. The fourth-wall breaking narrator says as much, promising to bury the play’s text in a box alongside the US constitution, a bible and a copy [...]
Rocketman is an explosively imaginative biopic charting the life of the iconic piano man May 23, 2019 Take the John Lewis Christmas ad that made your sherry-drunk Aunt Pauline cry into her sprouts and stretch it out over a hundred or so minutes and you’ve got yourself Rocketman, the Taron Egerton fronted musical biopic charting the life and travails of bespectacled piano man Elton John. The setting is a booze ‘n’ drugs [...]
Anna at the National Theatre review: A brilliant play about the Stasi that makes you wear headphones May 23, 2019 It’s Stasi-era East Germany and a young woman prepares for a dinner party while a hidden group of shadowy men and women wearing headphones listen in to her every move. The twist? You’re one of them. Anna casts the audience as collaborators in this tale of a young woman caught up in a surveillance operation [...]
Debate: As National Vegetarian Week ends, will this group outnumber meat eaters in the next decade? May 17, 2019 As National Vegetarian Week ends, will this group outnumber meat eaters in the next decade? YES – Sophie Lewis is chief strategy officer at marketing agency VMLY&R. If you’d asked me two years ago, my answer would have been in the negative, but we’ve reached a cultural tipping point when it comes to both vegetarians [...]
Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic review: Casting black actors adds a new dimension to Arthur Miller’s classic May 16, 2019 Such is the power of the racial divide in America that simply casting a black family at the heart of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece presents it in a dark and troubling new light. The Wire’s Wendell Pierce plays Willy Loman, the titular travelling salesman weighed down by economic hardship, social anxiety and a crippling desire [...]
A German Life at Bridge Theatre review: Maggie Smith shines in this examination of Nazi fervour May 10, 2019 “Everything that is beautiful is also tainted, and whatever’s horrible also has its bright side. Nothing is black and white.” These words, at first glance a truism, become morbidly fascinating when spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, the wizened former stenographer to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and subject of the award-winning documentary A German Life. Maggie [...]
Three Sisters at the Almeida: This most Chekhovian of Chekhov’s plays flatters to deceive May 10, 2019 After last year’s superlative Summer and Smoke, the pairing of director Rebecca Frecknall and young star Patsy Ferran is an irresistible proposition. This time they combine to drag Chekhov’s fin de siècle play Three Sisters into an unspecified time and space somewhere between pre-revolution Russia and present-day King’s Road. But despite another fitful, engaging performance [...]