Mortal Kombat 11 review: The latest entry in the long-running series is the best fighting game in years May 3, 2019 Mortal Kombat 11 marks the latest instalment in this long-running series of over-the-top fighting games that was originally launched in arcades back in 1992. For the unfamiliar, Mortal Kombat involves magicians, monsters, and martial arts masters from different worlds duking it out in a series of gentlemanly one-on-one fisticuffs in an eternal battle of good [...]
Avengers: Endgame review: A fitting finale to the most ambitious series in cinematic history April 25, 2019 Reviewing Avengers: Endgame is hard, because it’s not really a film, it’s more of a ridiculous fairground ride without the boring uphill bits. You could argue that the slow upwards climb for Endgame has been the 21 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that preceded it, and which you need to have watched so that [...]
Time to party: John Lewis & Partners opens summer roof garden on top of flagship Oxford Street store April 17, 2019 John Lewis & Partners is launching its summer rooftop garden at the summit of its Oxford Street store this week. Read more: Ranked: The top 15 retailers to work for The venue will open its doors at the start of the bank holiday weekend on Friday, and busy shoppers can enjoy the opportunity to relax [...]
Which Game of Thrones leader are you? April 12, 2019 From Cersei Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen, every major character in Game of Thrones has a different approach when it comes to leadership. Over the last seven seasons, we have come to learn that attaining power is hard, and maintaining that power is even harder. The same holds true in the real world. Corporate competition often lies [...]
Dragged Across Concrete film review: S Craig Zahler directs Mel Gibson in a well-constructed cop drama that leaves a bitter taste April 12, 2019 Director S Craig Zahler doesn’t make things easy for his audience. A strong stomach and buttocks of steel were pre-requisites for getting through his masterful western-horror mashup Bone Tomahawk, and his gut-wrenchingly violent second feature Brawl in Cell Block 99, starring a beefed-up Vince Vaughn as a jailbird blackmailed into carrying out a hit. Running [...]
The Sisters Brothers film review: A beautiful, surreal road trip across the wild west April 5, 2019 The Sisters Brothers is so entrenched in the look and feel and smell of 1851 America that it’s like leafing through a series of dusty wild west lithographs. There’s a plot – a pair of hired guns hunt their next mark – but director Jacques Audiard is more interested in the ride than the destination. [...]
Shazam! film review: The DC Comics character has its heart in the right place and its tongue firmly in its cheek April 4, 2019 They say there’s a hero in all of us. Shazam! runs with that concept, punches it in the gut then kicks it off a skyscraper. It follows fourteen year old foster kid Billy Batson, who finds he can instantly transform into a fully-grown, practically invincible superhero when he says the magic word “Shazam!” Comic aficionados [...]
Romeo & Juliet: Kenneth MacMillan’s notoriously tricky take on Shakespeare’s classic is brutally beautiful March 29, 2019 Romeo and Juliet Royal Opera House Shakespeare famously trailed his tragic romance with ‘there never was a story of more woe / than this of Juliet and her Romeo”. Big words, Bill. But they hold up in this brutal, speechless version by The Royal Ballet. The Bolshoi Ballet first brought Romeo & Juliet to the [...]
Dumbo review: Tim Burton turns a family favourite into an animal rights advocacy project March 29, 2019 In case you’ve forgotten – it did come out in 1941 – the animated Disney film Dumbo is deeply odd and wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for a live action remake. There are barely any humans in it, for a start, then there’s Dumbo himself, a doe-eyed, speechless pachyderm who gets bullied for 70 per [...]
At Eternity’s Gate review: A dreamlike and impressionistic portrait of Van Gogh March 28, 2019 In this dreamlike journey through the artist’s later years, American painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel frames the artist as the director wants to see him, keeping his drunkenness, violence and bouts of psychosis somewhere just off-screen. The film presents a fragmented and impressionistic series of vignettes filmed in a drunken POV aspect, as though the [...]