David Price: Dreamland May 8, 2015 Art First, Soho | ★★★★☆ Dreamland is the name of the abandoned amusement park in Margate where painter David Price moved his studio three years ago. It’s also the name of his latest exhibition, in which he reimagines Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of ancient Rome as a corrupted theme park. For Price, the [...]
Harry Cory Wright: Anglia – art review May 8, 2015 Eleven Gallery | ★★★★☆ East Anglia isn’t known for its magisterial landscape – endless flat, wild land is hardly the stuff of picture post-cards. What it does have is space: space for light to meld and dance. Space to explore. And as the work of Harry Cory Wright shows, there are rich pickings for [...]
Film review: Girlhood May 8, 2015 Cert 12a | ★★★★☆ Girlhood’s title has been changed for the English release – perhaps to cash in on the popularity of Boyhood – but the original French name, which translates as “gang of girls”, is more appropriate. For this is a film about the adolescent need to belong, and it’s one of the [...]
Theatre review: The Audience May 8, 2015 Cert 12a | ★★★☆☆ The Queen must be a hard act to follow. Not the monarch: the 2006 film about the Royal Family’s identity crisis following the death of Princess Diana. That film’s success was down to two people: writer Peter Morgan and Helen Mirren, who picked up a Best Actress Oscar for [...]
The Vote is a funny, touching love letter to the British democratic system May 7, 2015 Donmar Warehouse | ★★★☆☆ ”I only just wrote some of this… I hope it works out.” These aren’t the words you expect to hear from a playwright seconds before his latest work is performed, but The Vote is no ordinary play. It was broadcast in real-time on More4 last night as the final [...]
Something for the weekend May 7, 2015 SEW! REFASHION EAST A weekend of events promoting fashion upcycling in east London. Learn sewing skills and explore the area’s rich textile heritage with an east London walking tour beginning at the Whitechapel Gallery. Visit hubbub.org.uk. MUNCH! DUKE ON THE GREEN The well-loved gastro pub on the King’s Road is open again after a smart [...]
Unfriended is the first truly terrifying horror movie about the evils of the internet May 1, 2015 Unfriended opens with a truly harrowing sequence: grainy smartphone footage shows a girl clutching something at arm’s length. There are shrieks of panic from an unseen crowd and you realise she’s holding a gun. There’s a bang and she collapses backward; you’re watching a snuff video, and one that looks horribly authentic. As Unfriended’s protagonist, [...]
Photography review: Elliott Erwitt May 1, 2015 Beetles + Huxley | ★★★★☆ Photographer Elliott Erwitt bore witness to some of the 20th century’s most important events but some of his best loved images are of everyday moments lit up by flashes of passion and absurdity: lovers caught kissing in a rear-view mirror; an umbrella-wielding Parisian leaping over a puddle. Elliott [...]
Monsters: Dark Continent – film review May 1, 2015 Cert 15 | ★☆☆☆☆ War is always an ugly enterprise, but is it any uglier when aliens are involved? That’s the totally pointless question Monsters: Dark Continent asks. After sitting through it for two hours I can confirm that the answer is both “yes” and “who cares”. It’s a huge let-down, especially so [...]
Film review: Far from the Madding Crowd is rushed, but Carey Mulligan sparkles May 1, 2015 Cert 12a | ★★★☆☆ In 19th century England, the line between fancying someone and marrying them was terrifyingly thin. Or so you might think from Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, in which the twinkly Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) hurdles marriage proposals like a Victorian Colin Jackson. All [...]