Knight of Cups review: Christian Bale stars as a traumatised Hollywood screenwriter in this faintly surreal movie May 5, 2016 Sporadic film maker Terence Malick is enjoying the most prolific period of his career, having made as many films in the last five years as he had in the previous thirty. His seventh film stars Christian Bale as Rick, a Hollywood screenwriter left hollow by success and tortured by family trauma, who embarks on a [...]
Florence Foster Jenkins review: Meryl Streep appears as the tone-deaf opera singer in this tender biopic May 5, 2016 Comedy can be a tough gig, even for Hollywood’s finest (just ask Robert De Niro). Nevertheless Meryl Streep has balanced comedic roles with more serious fare in recent years and, as with most things she does, made it look effortless. Her latest is based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York heiress [...]
Shit-Faced Shakespeare review: a hilarious, unpredictable and booze-fuelled remix of A Midsummer Night’s Dream May 5, 2016 In Shit-Faced Shakespeare, five actors attempt to rattle through a condensed version of the bard’s pixie-fuelled sex comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Each night however, one member of the cast gets catastrophically pissed before curtain call, drinking their way through a trolley of booze as showtime approaches. Audience members are armed with a gong and [...]
Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern is a visceral, intestinal revelation May 5, 2016 Tate Modern | ★★★★☆ More than 20 years after it first went on display, the inside of Mona Hatoum’s rectum is as impressive as ever. Housed in a darkened cylinder, the alien tunnels of the artist’s bowels are projected onto the ground, a surgeon’s colonoscopy camera delving through a gurgling pink landscape that looks like [...]
Artist Sarah Sze’s delicate towers question the nature of sculpture April 29, 2016 "When I think about sculpture, I’m thinking as much about the dispersal of objects as the agglomeration of objects, about the absence of form as much as the presence, about the decay of material as much as the construction of material.” This is a suitably elusive description by Sarah Sze of her large-scale installation pieces, [...]
My Inspiration: Classical pianist William Howard on the sheet music that inspired his latest project, Sixteen Love Songs April 29, 2016 I became very passionate about Czech music in the 1970s when I was a student. I went to Prague in 1984 during Communist times, and I’d go to second-hand music shops where you could pick up music phenomenally cheaply. I used to come home with piles of scores; lots of stuff I’d never heard of. [...]
Elegy is a haunting sci-fi tale about love, loss and memory April 28, 2016 At just over an hour, Elegy churns through an ocean of subject matter in a very short space of time. Its three characters tackle issues including marriage, death, the science of selfhood, shattered minds and lobotomised memories. It does all of this backwards too, with its handful of skilfully arranged scenes unfolding in reverse chronological [...]
A Comedy About a Bank Robbery is a triumph of physical comedy April 28, 2016 A Comedy About a Bank Robbery | ★★★★☆ | The Criterion First, there was The Play That Went Wrong, followed by Peter Pan Goes Wrong; now The Mischief Theatre Company – the improv outfit behind the surprise West End hits – is actually trying to do something well. The cast have taken the slapstick perfected in [...]
Jake Gyllenhaal destroying an expensive set of drawers with a mallet can’t save this unconvincingly surreal dramady April 28, 2016 Demolition | ★★☆☆☆ | Dir. Jean-Marc Vallé Jake Gyllenhaal plays Davis, a businessman who escapes unscathed from the car crash that killed his wife. His reaction is stunned. He disconnects from reality, listlessly ghosting about the place like a sad mannequin, forcing out tears in front of a bathroom mirror and trying to fake up [...]
Captain America: Civil War – a slick, fun blockbuster that’s happy to play the hits April 28, 2016 Captain America: Civil War | ★★★★☆ | Dir. Joe and Anthony Russo You can draw all kind of political parallels from Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War. Right vs left, libertarian vs statist, Stronger In vs Brexit. It boils down to this: are you on the side of the faceless bureaucrats who want to stifle our [...]