Queenies are a blast from the past for Mark Hix, who recommends baking them in herbs October 5, 2016 When I was at primary school my mate Mark Hawker’s dad had a fishing boat, and from it I would watch the local ships come in piled high with sacks of queen scallops fished from the reefs. Sadly, over-trawling put an end to all that, and you rarely see them fished in Lyme bay any [...]
Will Superman and Batman meet their match in this new series by former Alexander McQueen artist Jacky Tsai? October 3, 2016 You might have wondered who would win between Superman and Batman (Superman, obviously), or Captain America and Iron Man (#TeamCap), but what about your favourite comic heroes against figures from Chinese mythology? Well, in Jacky Tsai’s striking lacquer carvings, Superman and Captain America seem to have met their match… “Welcome Refugees” depicts the Man of [...]
Simon Stålenhag’s haunting painted stories in Things From the Flood are science fiction at its most beautiful October 3, 2016 Dystopian science fiction is often filled with explosions and sirens, chaos and pain. But the Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag’s work captures a different face of the future. His work is characterised by stillness and melancholy, a sense of good things having passed. His astonishingly good Tales From the Loop, published last year, imagined an alternate [...]
The Machine at Barbican is a darkly funny immersive theatre experience with added circus tricks October 3, 2016 Immersive theatre often promises more than it can deliver, held back not by the imagination of the production but the temperament of the audience. The most effective ones – Secret Cinema, Punch Drunk Theatre – tend to be hours long, giving the audience time to let their guard down. The Machine instead attempts to turn [...]
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children review: Tim Burton returns to form with this surprisingly visceral adventure September 30, 2016 Tim Burton returns to big budget studio films with this Narnia-esque story. Asa Butterfield plays a young man who discovers a school of supernatural children whom he must protect from a vicious evil. Visually sumptuous and surprisingly grisly, the film’s flourishes gloss over a story that doesn’t go anywhere unexpected. Eva Green’s ornate, pipe-smoking title [...]
The Free State of Jones review: This overly long and indecisive war flick goes nowhere and amounts to little September 30, 2016 Matthew McConaughey’s Free State of Jones was one of the surprise disappointments of the summer over in the US. The Oscar winner plays Newton Knight, a disillusioned Confederate soldier in the American Civil War who returns home and rebels against his former comrades, creating a “Free State”. Coming in at a two hours and 20 [...]
Deepwater Horizon review: A relentless onslaught of explosions and grease that will leave you feeling knackered September 30, 2016 For better or worse, Hollywood has always been the ledger of record for America’s historical events, the silvery notebook in which the country’s worst tragedies are catalogued and parsed, not in studious documentary form, but in personal and heroic tales of human survival. A slew of films chronicle the events of 9/11, of Benghazi and [...]
Bedwyr Williams’ The Gulch at The Barbican is brilliantly weird September 29, 2016 You’re greeted at the entrance of the Barbican’s Curve gallery with a polite warning: “If you want to perform – sing, dance, that kind of thing – please be respectful of other visitors”. I wasn’t tempted to burst into song, but it’s a suitably surreal way to enter this brilliantly weird exhibition. This site-specific installation [...]
The Libertine at Theatre Royal Haymarket starring Dominic Cooper fails to deliver on its salacious promises September 29, 2016 The Libertine begins with a promise. Dominic Cooper, as Restoration rake the Earl of Rochester, delivers a swaggering prologue, directly informing the audience that although they may like some of what he does, they will not like him. This speech is an implicit bargain; that he will behave appallingly, and the audience will be thrilled [...]
Floyd Collins at Wilton’s Music Hall review: clever staging and a strong cast can’t mask this poor musical September 29, 2016 Floyd Collins is a musical about a man stuck in a hole, and there were moments during this production that I felt like I was down there with him, waiting interminably in the darkness for the sweet release of death. Despite a strong cast and clever staging, exceptionally poor pacing makes Adam Guettel’s musical – [...]