Akhnaten by the ENO is a brilliantly inventive collision of art forms that hovers between the sublime and the ridiculous March 9, 2016 Royal Opera House | ★★★★☆ More high art burlesque than opera, this spectacular new production of Akhnaten hovers somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous, and often it’s hard to tell where. There hasn’t been a full production in the UK for almost three decades and a heady sense of anticipation means that Akhnaten is already [...]
Anomalisa’s puppetry is more powerful than most live action human dramas March 9, 2016 Anomalisa (PG) | Dirs. Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman ★★★★★ It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Charlie Kaufman. Having spent much of the 2000s writing films that became instant classics (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind) he capped off the decade with his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, which divided critics, but to many [...]
I See You review: A tense exploration of identity, race and language in post-apartheid South Africa March 8, 2016 Royal Court | ★★★☆☆ Language is all tangled up in history and identity, a thick linguistic rope wound tight around an ancestral flagpole. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, I See You considers what happens when that rope breaks and a language is lost, and asks whether it’s what you speak, rather than what you say, [...]
London Has Fallen film review and other big releases this weekend March 4, 2016 London Has Fallen (15) | Dir. Babak Najafi ★★☆☆☆ Olympus Has Fallen was a surprise hit three years ago thanks to some old school plotting and a tailor made action hero in Gerard Butler. He returns as CIA Agent Mike Banning, who must protect the President (Aaron Eckhart) when the funeral of the British PM is [...]
This wildly reimagined A Midsummer Night’s Dream is riotously fun March 3, 2016 Hammersmith Lyric | ★★★★☆ There are few things more tragic than Shakespeare’s comedies. The plots are silly, the pacing is woeful, and what jokes there are are usually buried in such antiquated language and stale cultural references that you need a degree in early modern literature to have a chance of properly appreciating them. But Filter [...]
Hail, Caesar! is a witty love letter to Hollywood’s Golden era March 3, 2016 Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen | ★★★★☆ "Squint! Squint into the grandeur!” a film director yells as George Clooney, in a swinging leather skirt and scabbard, peers earnestly into the camera. He looks ridiculous, but then who wouldn’t? This image is the Coen brothers’ latest star-studded comedy in a nutshell, and thanks to their particular [...]
Botticelli Reimagined is a blockbuster show full of ideas and insights March 3, 2016 V&A | ★★★★★ When an exhibition says it will focus on an artist’s “influence”, it’s often a signal that it hasn’t got enough of his or her work to show. The Royal Academy’s disastrous Rubens and His Legacy and the National Gallery’s Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art are cases in point, both containing far [...]
Grimsby review, plus the rest of this week’s biggest cinema releases February 26, 2016 Grimsby (15) Dir. Louis Leterrier ★☆☆☆☆ Ten years after shocking the world with Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen returns as Nobby, a slow-witted Grimsbarian who discovers he’s the long lost brother of a secret agent (Mark Strong), and as such must help save the world from a sinister plot. Occasional sparks of humour and some impressive [...]
Cleansed at the National Theatre and A Girl Is a Half Formed Thing at the Young Vic reviewed February 25, 2016 Cleansed Dorfman (National Theatre) | ★★★☆☆ I was going to start this review by saying Sarah Kane’s Cleansed has lost a little of its shock value in the 18 years since it premiered. In this time the phrase “torture porn” has entered the popular vernacular and even your mum has probably seen The Human Centipede. [...]
Delacroix at the National Gallery does this magnificent painter a disservice February 19, 2016 The National Gallery | ★★☆☆☆ Measuring the influence of one artist on another is no easy task, and the National Gallery fails to pull it off convincingly in this muddled and problematic exhibition. Curators attempt to trace the influence of Delacroix – best known as the romantic painter of the iconic Liberty Leading the People – [...]