I didn’t cry when my own father died but I will mourn the end of the Resident Evil franchise of terrible films February 2, 2017 There’s a point early on in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter – around the time when Milla Jovovich is riding along a motorway in her zombie-proof battle tank – where the film reaches critical levels of schlock, a sort of self-aware tipping point after which the rest of this mad ordeal makes a strange kind [...]
T2 Trainspotting review: lashings of nostalgia carry this long-overdue sequel, with Ewan McGregor and Johnny Lee Miller at their magnetic best January 27, 2017 It’s 21 years since Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting became every teenage boy’s favourite movie. His meditation on wasted youth was bleak, but also tinged with an optimism that reflected the national mood. Sure, there was addiction and poverty and death and despair, but Blair was about to be elected and Britpop was playing on radios across [...]
Denial review: A cast of top notch character actors lend heft to this gripping courtroom drama January 26, 2017 Once, TV used to aspire to film, but TV has got so good lately that we might have come full circle. Denial from Mick Jackson, a director primarily known for his TV work – and The Bodyguard, incongruously – has stripped this courtroom saga back to its mahogany rafters until it resembles a gripping Sunday [...]
Dirty Great Love Story review: This loved-up play is a little too on the nose January 26, 2017 We all know how it goes – boy meets girl, boy screws girl, boy and girl variously fall in love and drift apart before finally ending up together. It’s a story as old as the monetisation of human intimacy. Dirty Great Love Story tells it without any flash – our boy is Richard, a lovable [...]
Sing is an utterly charmless and joke-free comedy about some singing animals January 26, 2017 Matthew McConaughey voices a koala in this charmless children’s film about animals singing covers of pop songs. There really isn’t a whole lot more to unpack. Just farmyard karaoke cut with a thin plot about a theatre going out of business. No allegory, no fable, subtext nor message to decipher beyond “a pig in a [...]
Us/Them review: two-person show about the Beslan hostage atrocity is a minor revelation January 26, 2017 This two-person show explores the incomprehensible horror of terrorism in the eyes of a child. A pair of unnamed teenagers begin by recounting a normal day at school, bragging about how their town, Beslan, is superior to nearby Chechnya, where the women all have moustaches. Their tale darkens as the infamous hostage situation unfolds, with [...]
Christine film review: Rebecca Hall shines in a film that peers behind the gruesome headlines of the Christine Chubbuck case January 26, 2017 “If It Bleeds, It Leads” is the darkly prophetic slogan at the centre of this drama, about real life TV reporter Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall) whose work pressures and mental health issues led her to commit suicide on camera in 1974. Even a cursory search for Chubbuck’s name makes for unpleasant reading, the stuff of [...]
Resident Evil 7 review: A gruesome return to form for the horror series January 25, 2017 Were it physically possible for a human skeleton to crawl out of a body through the mouth so that all the flesh peeled down to form a bloody skirt made of guts, and for that skeleton to run around the room getting tangled up in bunting and pulling bookshelves down on itself, then Resident Evil [...]
Jackie review: Natalie Portman leads an outstanding production about the creation of a political myth January 20, 2017 In Jackie, blood clings to the First Lady like it does to Lady Macbeth. It stains her powder-pink skirt-suit, congeals in her hair, splashes onto her face like tears. It horrifies and fascinates her; she wears it like war-paint, with something approaching pride. But no matter how many times she tries to scrub it off, [...]
Promises, Promises at Southwark Playhouse review: a badly dated comedy that’s a gilded celebration of lechery January 20, 2017 I can’t think of a more appropriate start to the Trump era than revisiting Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s 1968 Broadway hit – a breezy chronicle of workplace sexism in which Boys Will Be Boys, whatever the cost, and women are either brutalised angels awaiting Mr Right or mouthy broads lounging in the clutches of [...]