Top Gun: Maverick, a perfect blockbuster, is Tom Cruise at his finest May 23, 2022 Tom Cruise comes full circle, returning to the role that made him a megastar. While he had found success with Legend and Risky Business, it was 1986’s Top Gun that set the template for the biggest star in Hollywood. A couple of months shy of his 60th birthday, he feels the need for speed again [...]
Two Palestinians Go Dogging, review: Touching portrait of the tragedy of conflict May 23, 2022 Let’s be clear on this from the get-go: finding comedy in the Israel-Palestine crisis is an incredibly brave thing to do. Not only that, it requires incredibly astute writing. Sami Ibrahim has achieved both of these things with two Palestinians go dogging, a personal and political new play littered with thrillingly perverse laughs. If Ibrahim’s [...]
Anne-Marie Duff in fine form in The House of Shades at the Almeida May 23, 2022 Sometimes an ambitious failure is preferable to a safe success, but that’s sadly not the case with The House of Shades. Even the incredible Anne-Marie Duff – on fierce form – is unable to pull together the threads of a play that’s part state-of-the-nation polemic, part kitchen sink drama, part Greek tragedy and part surreal [...]
No disguising that it’s a kind of magic May 23, 2022 | Sponsored In her May 2020 hit ‘Daisies’, pop susperstar Katy Perry asked: “When did we all stop believing in magic?” For anyone who saw her memorable performance at the American Idol 2020 finale they would have been in no doubt that magic is actually real as they experienced the first major application of visual storytelling company [...]
VEXO’s X-POT – simple, sophisticated and reliable May 23, 2022 | Sponsored Not all great innovation need be complicated. That can necessarily be the case, of course, but sometimes the simplest ideas can be the most brilliant. As Leonardo da Vinci so succinctly put it: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. And no less an engineer/scientist than Edsger Dijkstra believed that “simplicity is the prerequisite for reliability.” And [...]
From local scrap metal merchant to international trade excellence May 23, 2022 | Sponsored Donald Ward Limited trading as Ward began in the 1940s from humble beginnings as a small scrap metal collector. Based in Ilkeston in Derbyshire, the company was incorporated in December 1976 and fast forward to 2022, it’s now a fourth-generation company that processes around a million tonnes of materials annually; recycling products such as metals, plastics, glass, [...]
How The Glass Menagerie landed Hollywood A-lister Amy Adams May 20, 2022 Hollywood star and six-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams is set to enchant the West End next week when she begins her run in a radically reimagined version of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. She will play Amanda Wingfield, an overbearing matriarch who, abandoned by her husband and bringing up her two children, longs for [...]
A Bed of Rosés: The story of Bon Jovi’s new fine wine May 19, 2022 “Real men drink pink” announces Jon Bon Jovi at the European launch of Hampton Water rosé, going on to explain that he used to refer to the wine as “pink juice” because “I didn’t want my children to know I drank it so much. I love wine and I love rosé”. Hampton Water is an [...]
ASMR you listening? Design Museum’s new exhibition brings ASMR IRL May 17, 2022 To give some idea of the seismic level of popularity around ASMR, the most-watched YouTube video on the topic has earned four times the amount of views as Netflix’s most-watched film ever. In it, performer Hongyu eats jellied sweets and the sound of her eating them has racked up 332m views. ASMR – short for [...]
Rare items from personal collection of legendary Radio1 DJ John Peel to be auctioned off May 17, 2022 Rare items from the extensive personal archive of pioneering DJ John Peel will be up for auction, including by John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and a hand-written note from Queen’s Freddie Mercury. The legendary BBC Radio 1 host, who died in 2004, had an enormous musical collection of 120,000 albums estimated to be [...]