The Lego Batman Movie review: This might be the best Batman film ever, watch your back Affleck February 9, 2017 Batfleck may have thus far been a mixed blessing for comic book fans, but there's no doubting the popularity of his smaller, Lego counterpart. Will Arnett's cocky Caped Crusader was the breakout star of The Lego Movie three years ago, earning his own solo adventure. Having saved Gotham again, Batman finds himself alone and without [...]
Revolution: Russian art 1917-1932 review: A dense and difficult exhibition that rewards those who look beyond the red flags February 9, 2017 Revolution: Russian Art marks the centenary of the momentous turning point in Russian history, the October Revolution of 1917, with a monumentally packed survey of the complicated, politically charged visual art up to the suppression of the Avante-Garde by Stalin in 1932. The bright red first room, filled with propaganda and state-sanctioned Social Realist painting, [...]
David Hockney at Tate Britain review: A Bigger Splash still makes a bigger splash than the artist’s weak newer works February 9, 2017 This major David Hockney retrospective, the first for 30 years, flits between brilliance and nonchalant mediocrity, with virtuoso paintings hanging metres away from self-cannibalising pastiches of the artist’s best work. Hockney is the nation’s favourite painter, a national treasure on a level with Alan Bennett, popular enough for The Sun to ask him to redesign [...]
The Robots exhibition at the Science Museum is a fascinating (and a little creepy) history of human-like automata February 9, 2017 Greeting you when you first enter the Robots exhibition at the Science Museum is an animatronic baby, pinned like some prized insect to a wall of pulsing lights. Commissioned especially for the exhibition and built by a special effects company, the mechanical baby repeats a series of pre-programmed animations, sneezing and wavings its arms and [...]
The bastard’s guide to business: How to grow a company the Ray Kroc way February 8, 2017 Ray Kroc may be the man who created arguably the western hemisphere's most recognisable symbol – but he wasn't always nice about it. In new movie The Founder, Michael Keaton stars as McDonald's founder Kroc, telling the story of his unlikely rise from small-time milkshake mixer salesman to big bucks entrepreneur after he was dazzled by Mac and Dick [...]
This curious series of matchbook prints pays homage to a lost Japanese advertising artform February 6, 2017 Today, the chances are you don’t even own a box of matches, let alone appreciate the lost artform that used to adorn them. But in the early to mid-20th century, Japanese advertisers created tiny wonders of graphic art on these pocket-sized canvases. As urban centres began to proliferate and the population was drawn away from [...]
Interiors: Pick up the perfect craft piece at Collect at the Saatchi Gallery this weekend February 3, 2017 Do you need a stunning centrepiece for the coffee table? Or a trio of pots for the console, or a stunning piece of art glass for a spot-lit plinth? This weekend the Collect fair at the Saatchi Gallery, the “Frieze” of the craft world, brings 37 galleries together from across the globe in a selling [...]
Fantastic Mr Fox at Hammersmith Lyric review: stage musical is good, dirty fun February 2, 2017 Roald Dahl’s fabulously lurid stories translate well to musical theatre, and since the runaway success of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Tim Minchin’s Matilda, we can no doubt look forward to a production line of singing Witches and Twits and Dirty Beasts. The latest to get the treatment is Fantastic Mr Fox, in a [...]
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 [...]