The Angry Birds Movie is a story for children about a collection of rare birds violently catapulted into shoddily built towers May 12, 2016 In a post-Battleship world, it seems no premise or product is too remote to base a film on. Step in Angry Birds, the mobile game that was the saviour of long commutes everywhere when it burst on to the scene in 2009. The spin-off movie was met with incredulity but hopes have quietly risen given [...]
George Shaw brings his haunting My Back to Nature series of paintings to the National Gallery May 12, 2016 George Shaw is best known for his highly detailed renditions of high streets and urban scenes from middle England, favouring enamel paint more commonly used for Airfix models. These deliberately unspectacular, eerie images reached their widest audiences following his nomination for the Turner Prize in 2011. It is fascinating, then, to see how this traditional [...]
How do you create a sex-heavy unreality for an unshockable twenty-first century audience? May 12, 2016 Diarist Samuel Pepys saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream – for the first and last time – in 1662, describing it as the most “ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life” despite “some good dancing and some handsome women”. Centuries later, can the sex-fuelled plot still baffle a contemporary audience? Emma Rice takes a stab in her first production as [...]
These Final Hours review: Plus our pick of the best films showing this weekend May 5, 2016 These Final Hours (15) Dir. Zak Hilditch | ★★★★☆ A low-budget Australian drama about a young man struggling to get to a party to celebrate the end of the world, and the young girl he meets along the way. Setting out boldly into this well-worn territory, These Final Hours is a smart film that loses its [...]
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. [...]