Dishonored 2: This first-person assassin game by Arkane is a glorious steampunk wonderland November 23, 2016 Dishonored 2 feels reassuringly familiar. The action may have shifted from plague-ridden, Dickensian squalor to sun-baked, equatorial squalor, but the constituent parts remain: it looks the same, it plays the same, it almost smells the same. Thank goodness, because Dishonored is at the very apex of video-game design, dense and textured, beautiful despite the muck [...]
Hidden in plain sight: A visually confounding art piece questions our relationship with social media November 23, 2016 Before the invention of radar technology, warships would disguise their true shape and heading using patterns and colour. Zig-zagging lines, high contrast and sharp angles would confuse gunners, who struggled to accurately determine the distance and speed of their targets. “Dazzle camouflage” drew inspiration from the natural world – zebra herds use this kind of [...]
From Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Renzo Piano: how top architects have helped to reinvent the chair November 23, 2016 Architects have been adding chairs and other items of furniture to their design repertoire since the beginning of the 19th century. The relationships and similarities are often surprising, and raise some interesting questions. What is it that distinguishes a chair designed by an architect, rather than a furniture designer? Why would an architect want to [...]
My House: Preston Fitzgerald, an art and antiques collector who’s turned his home into a pop-up exhibition space for young artists November 23, 2016 I’ve been living in London with my partner for 21 years now, having moved here from New York City. I had come from a sales background, but left that behind when I went back to school to get my postgraduate degree in art history. When I began working at Sotheby’s in furniture and contemporary design, [...]
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them review: a full-on Christmas blockbuster that’s bursting with imagination November 17, 2016 No more, JK Rowling vowed as the Harry Potter series – her magnum opus that took 17 years to write – finally came to an end. And she’s largely kept her word, apart from the studio tour, the theme park and the play that’s currently in the West End. Oh, and a website she runs [...]
An Inspector Calls at the Playhouse theatre: good, cosy fun, but lacking spleen November 17, 2016 An Inspector Calls returns once again to the London stage. A whodunnit in which a police officer investigates the causes of a young woman’s suicide should be an excoriating critique of the indifference of the upper-middle classes, but here it is repackaged as cosy entertainment for the descendants of the very people it originally sought [...]
King Lear at the Barbican review: Antony Sher shows a very different Lear to Glenda Jackson November 17, 2016 The benefit of seeing two top-tier productions of King Lear in the space of a week – first the Old Vic’s version with Glenda Jackson, the second at the Barbican starring Antony Sher – is that all of its myriad quirks, masterstrokes and flaws come into sharp focus. Perhaps the flaws most of all. While [...]
Gimme Danger review: This documentary charting the success of The Stooges is a tribute to true outsiders November 17, 2016 Jim Jarmusch directs this portrait of The Stooges, told through animated archive footage and interviews with the remaining members. It explores the notorious live gigs, frontman Iggy Pop’s counter-culture mystique, and their eventual acceptance as music pioneers. Rockumentaries tread a thin line between celebration and investigation; too critical, and you risk losing the fan base [...]
Indignation review: A moody but glacially slow Philip Roth adaptation November 17, 2016 The normally wide-eyed young actor Logan Lerman gets cynical for this 50s drama. He plays Marcus, a gifted but self-isolating college student from Newark dealing with life and relationships against the backdrop of the Korean War. Like last week's American Pastoral, Indignation is an adaptation of a Phillip Roth novel made by a first time [...]
The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography at the Tate Modern review: Elton John’s personal photography collection is astonishing November 11, 2016 In a moment of irony at this exhibition of Elton John’s personal photography collection, a security guard berated a woman for taking a picture on her iPhone. It was a neat reminder of how saturated and disposable this medium has become in the 21st century, clogging up social media feeds, propped up by technology that [...]