Miss Atomic Bomb is an explosive night out that will make the audience fallout of the theatre in a glow March 17, 2016 St James Theatre | ★★★☆☆ Miss Atomic Bomb has suffered from theatre critics’ love of mean-spirited puns, with some suggesting it failed to detonate and others, less inventively, just saying it bombed. These assessments are overly harsh; though nobody would call it a blast, there’s a critical mass of enjoyable material here, such that after it [...]
Jane Horrocks’ love letter to post punk and new wave is a brilliant vanity project March 17, 2016 Young Vic | ★★★★☆ Jane Horrocks’ If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me is the kind of midlife crisis I hope I have one day. The star of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice and Absolutely Fabulous has been recording music with producer Kipper, because why the hell not? And why not perform it at [...]
Tom Hiddleston shines in High Rise, a stylish adaptation of JG Ballard’s architectural dystopia March 17, 2016 Dir. Ben Wheatley | ★★★★☆ "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” The opening sentence of JG Ballard’s High Rise is up there with the English literary canon’s very best. It’s all [...]
10 Cloverfield Lane review: a pared-back, genre-hopping success March 17, 2016 Cloverfield was a lurching, visceral monster movie that played on our post-911 fears of sudden, inexplicable horror occurring in our cities, its grainy hand-held footage recalling the language of 24-hour news channels. Eight years later its follow-up – “stable-mate” might be a better term – is every bit as skin-crawling, but for very different reasons. [...]
Bill Murray’s film Rock the Kasbah is ill-conceived, poorly-executed March 17, 2016 In Rock the Kasbah’s universe, all we need to do to end the troubles in the Middle East is send Bill Murray out there to tell them all what’s what. Murray essentially plays himself playing a struggling talent manager, whose paltry existence on the periphery of the industry is propped up by hustling X-Factor wannabes. [...]
Motown the Musical’s songs deliver, but the lack of story lets it down March 17, 2016 Shaftesbury Theatre | ★★☆☆☆ If you don’t like at least one song released on the Motown label between 1960 and 1975, you’re utterly joyless and there’s something wrong with you. Berry Gordy’s hugely successful label discovered a young Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson among literally hundreds of others. Many of their hits [...]
The Royal Academy’s In the Age of Giorgione promotes a little known but pivotal painter of the Italian Renaissance March 9, 2016 Royal Academy | ★★★★☆ In the Age of Giorgione argues that this elusive painter, of whom little is known and to whom only a handful of surviving paintings have been definitively attributed, was a pivotal figure in Venetian art in the 16th century. It says, “his influence was profoundly felt by contemporaries”, yet the show is [...]
Akhnaten by the ENO is a brilliantly inventive collision of art forms that hovers between the sublime and the ridiculous March 9, 2016 Royal Opera House | ★★★★☆ More high art burlesque than opera, this spectacular new production of Akhnaten hovers somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous, and often it’s hard to tell where. There hasn’t been a full production in the UK for almost three decades and a heady sense of anticipation means that Akhnaten is already [...]
Anomalisa’s puppetry is more powerful than most live action human dramas March 9, 2016 Anomalisa (PG) | Dirs. Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman ★★★★★ It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Charlie Kaufman. Having spent much of the 2000s writing films that became instant classics (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind) he capped off the decade with his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, which divided critics, but to many [...]
I See You review: A tense exploration of identity, race and language in post-apartheid South Africa March 8, 2016 Royal Court | ★★★☆☆ Language is all tangled up in history and identity, a thick linguistic rope wound tight around an ancestral flagpole. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, I See You considers what happens when that rope breaks and a language is lost, and asks whether it’s what you speak, rather than what you say, [...]