START Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery is a weekend exhibition highlighting emerging artists from around the globe September 14, 2018 Launched in 2014 to highlight and promote emerging contemporary artists from around the globe, START Art Fair celebrates its fifth edition at the Saatchi Gallery this weekend. More than 50 artists from over 20 countries – including performance artists, painters and photographers – are exhibiting their work across the gallery’s three floors, giving art collectors [...]
Heathers: The Musical at Theatre Royal Haymarket review – one of the best new musicals in years September 14, 2018 It’s almost 30 years since every teenage girl fell in love with Christian Slater in pitch-black highschool comedy Heathers. Director Michael Lehmann picked up a shelfful of awards for his deliciously twisted tale of a student killing off his cooler-than-thou classmates, and it continues to spawn a legion of imitators. Given the film’s cult status [...]
Heathers: The Musical at Theatre Royal Haymarket review – one of the best new musicals in years September 14, 2018 It’s almost 30 years since every teenage girl fell in love with Christian Slater in pitch-black highschool comedy Heathers. Director Michael Lehmann picked up a shelfful of awards for his deliciously twisted tale of a student killing off his cooler-than-thou classmates, and it continues to spawn a legion of imitators. Given the film’s cult status [...]
Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A review: A fascinating deep dive into videogame design and culture September 7, 2018 Exhibitions about videogames frequently land wide of the mark. Either they’re bogged down in dusty arcade nostalgia – that decades old aesthetic of Pac-Man pixel art and bleepy chiptunes that just won’t go away – or they have the desperate air of a culturally sidelined medium crying out to be taken seriously by art critics. [...]
American Animals review: An audacious and twisting heist movie September 7, 2018 Director Bart Layton is the man behind 2012’s audacious docu-thriller The Imposter, about a French con artist who bamboozles a Texan family into believing he is their long lost son. The film braided fact and fiction into a chunky dramatic rope, drawing on talking head testimony from the real world players, interspersed with very credible [...]
Marvel’s Spider-Man review: Insomniac’s web-slinging open world brawler is Spidey at his absolute best September 5, 2018 There’s a very simple recipe for making a decent Spider-Man game, or at least there seems like there is to people who think that making games is simple. First, it needs to be open world. Not even open world, just open Manhattan, a city that has been accurately recreated in games so many times now [...]
Donut County review: A charming and bizarre physics puzzler about a mysterious hole August 29, 2018 Ben Esposito is an indie games developer whose previous works include mysterious-house-in-the-woods simulator What Remains of Edith Finch. A rising star in the industry, he seems drawn towards the abstract. In 2012 he worked on The Unfinished Swan, a PlayStation exclusive in which you exist in a blank white world that only reveals itself as [...]
Dinosaur World Live is a chilling prophecy of climate disaster, or it might just be a fun kids’ show about some cool dino-puppets August 23, 2018 Ostensibly a 50-minute long children’s show in which a series of realistically animated and life-size dinosaur puppets stomp around on stage, Dinosaur World Live at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is, beneath the veneer of Jurassic spectacle, an unflinching treatise on the irreversible effects of climate change, and the energy industry’s plundering of the remaining [...]
The Spy Who Dumped Me review: Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon star in this surprisingly violent spy-spoof comedy August 23, 2018 A spy-spoof action-comedy starring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon, The Spy Who Dumped Me is way more violent and funny than the lazy, mid-90s punning title would suggest. But the pair work remarkably well together on screen, making for an unexpectedly sparky and entertaining duo in a movie that swings madly from some actually-very-good gunfights [...]
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy review: The return of the series’ winning formula disguises a lack of new ambition August 23, 2018 You would think that by this point, about half a dozen games into the Uncharted series, we’d have explored every tomb that ever was. That we’d have plundered every haunted crypt filled with swinging blades and little piles of dusty skulls, pillaged the very last mausoleum’s worth of goblets and swiped the world’s only [...]