Man Group ends sponsorship of Booker Prize after 18 years January 27, 2019 Britain’s most high profile literary award, the Man Booker Prize, has lost its headline sponsor after Man Group announced on Sunday that it will end its 18 year partnership with the event. Man Group – an asset manager – has sponsored the prize since 2002, contributing £1.6m a year. Read more: Waterstones acquires Foyles bookshops as [...]
Vice movie review: Another Scorsese-esque epic from the maker of The Big Short January 25, 2019 In 2015, Adam McKay went from being known as the man who directed Will Ferrell movies to one of the most stylistically innovative filmmakers in Hollywood. Gigs overseeing Anchorman, Talladega Nights and The Other Guys, plus writing credits on films including Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Ant-Man, somehow gave way to The Big Short, [...]
When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other review: A play that somehow makes graphic S&M seem tedious January 25, 2019 Martin Crimp’s new play When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other opened to giddy reports of audience members fainting during previews. And this strange production does shock and appal, but not for its uncomfortable themes or graphic depictions of violence, but for its total lack of coherence and crawling tedium. Somehow director Katie Mitchell takes [...]
Showstopper! is an improvised musical of fast thinking comedians and off-the-cuff tunes January 24, 2019 The premise of Showstopper! seems almost impossible to pull off. Each night an improv comedy troupe creates a brand new musical from scratch, taking audience suggestions for settings, plot points and style. But they’ve been pulling it off for more than 11 years and 1,000 shows, spawning such spontaneous one-offs as Sinky Boots (set aboard [...]
Asphodel Meadows/The Two Pigeons review: A split evening of showcasing sharp contemporary Royal Ballet choreography and a sugary romcom January 24, 2019 This evening of two short productions is, as ballerina Laura Morera says in her programme notes, “everything the Royal Ballet is about.” The first part, Asphodel Meadows, was the first work by Royal Ballet artist in residence Liam Scarlett, originally staged in 2010 when he was just 24. Taking its title from the part of [...]
Beautiful Boy film review: Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet star in harrowing but flawed drug addiction memoir January 17, 2019 The drug movie is a tough genre to navigate. Go too far in one direction and it becomes preachy; too far in the other and you end up glamourising the fetid reality of addiction. Beautiful Boy is drawn from a pair of memoirs by the journalist David Sheff and his son Nicolas, and relates the [...]
The Raft review: A bizarre experiment to determine whether humans are naturally violent has predictably sexy consequences January 17, 2019 In 1973, Spanish-Mexican anthropologist and human behavioural psychologist Santiago Genoves stuck 11 strangers on a raft and sent them on a three-month voyage across the Atlantic. The ethically dubious experiment, which today sounds like the premise of a terrible reality TV show, is the subject of this gripping documentary, and was intended to determine whether [...]
Spyro Reignited Trilogy review: The purple dragon with attitude is back January 14, 2019 Back in the late 1990s Spyro, the purple dragon with a bad boy attitude, aspired to be the next Mario or Sonic. Though he never reached the same heights of mascot fame, he was beloved by fans and has at least done enough to earn this remastered edition for nostalgia junkies. With the Spyro Reignited [...]
Fallout 76 review : Bethesda fails to cram multiplayer into the long-running RPG series January 14, 2019 Fallout 76, the latest in the long-running series of RPGs, is the answer to a question no-one was asking: what if it was multiplayer? In the new release, you play as a member of a nuclear bomb shelter sent out to reclaim post-apocalyptic America. You explore Appalachia (a reimagined West Virginia) and scavenge the wasteland [...]
Colette review: Keira Knightley and Dominic West’s chemistry zings in this saucy biographical tale of French author January 11, 2019 To the unassuming trailer-watcher, Colette looks like a turn-of-the-century version of Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s 2014 film about Walter Keane, the American artist who claimed his wife’s paintings as his own. Colette is married to Henry Gauthier-Villars, a similar entrepreneurial fraud who passes off her novels as his own, but this film manages to be [...]