Daddy’s Home review: Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg in a miserable, gagless family comedy December 18, 2015 12A | Dir. Sean Anders and John Morris ★☆☆☆☆ It’s a well established fact that the coolest dads are the ones who wear leather jackets, ride motorcycles and abandon their families to pursue a life of skidding menacingly in circles around lesser fathers. Conversely, the absolute worst dads are the ones who wear ironed shirts, have [...]
Evening at the Talk House at National Theatre review December 18, 2015 National Theatre | ★★☆☆☆ Premiering this week at the National Theatre, Evening at the Talk House is a dissatisfying affair. Perhaps there was a warning in the title, which implies static, self-important blathering, but the opening monologue – twenty-minutes of a playwright-turned-screenwriter reflecting on the trajectory of his life – really sets the tone. Written by [...]
Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie review: A faithful rendering of the classic comic strip December 18, 2015 U | Dir. Steve Martino ★★★★☆ Like Elvis, apple pie and widespread gun ownership, Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” is woven into the fabric of American culture. The animated Christmas Special from the 60s has become part of the holiday tradition, and now the team behind 2011’s Rio are bringing the characters into the 21st century. [...]
Rose English at Camden Arts Centre brings together the north east and the far east December 18, 2015 Camden Arts Centre | ★★☆☆☆ Camden Arts Centre takes Rose English’s neat exploration of movement and fragility and spreads it incredibly thinly over two and a half rooms, resulting in a jumbled and at times baffling collection of sounds and objects. You enter into a blacked-out room to the sound of a grand 10-voice chamber [...]
Wonder.land at the National Theatre is a visual delight… but where are all the songs? December 18, 2015 National Theatre | ★★★☆☆ Wonder.land takes as its starting point that the world inside our smartphones, with its cat memes and its gaudy virtual worlds, is as mad as a hatter. Mad as the Hatter, in fact. The Alice in this production doesn’t tumble into a literal rabbit-hole: she falls into the world of chatrooms and [...]
Sleeping With Other People review: a mediocre rom-com with commitment problems December 18, 2015 15 | Dir. Leslye Headland ★★☆☆☆ Late bloomers Lainey (Community’s Alison Brie) and Jake (We’re The Millers’ Jason Sudeikis) play two shy students who lose their virginity to each other during a one night stand at Columbia University. Fast forward 12 years and they cross paths again, only this time, they’re both non-committal, serial cheaters. [...]
The Lorax at the Old Vic is a brilliant take on the Dr Seuss classic December 18, 2015 During the interval of The Lorax, Dr Seuss’s cautionary tale about the dangers of environmental destruction, I received a notification on my phone: “UK government approves fracking in national parks”, and I thought “I really hope all the kids in the audience are paying attention, because my generation seems to have forgotten the Lorax’s wise [...]
Sisters review: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s new comedy is our film of the week December 11, 2015 Sisters 15 | Dir. Jason Moore ★★★★☆ Only the comedy powerhouse that is Tina Fey and Amy Poehler could walk into a studio and get funding for a gross-out movie for divorced women in their 40s. The result is Sisters, in which Fey plays Kate, a partying single mum who can’t keep down a job, and Poehler is [...]
Hector and Grandma: This week’s new film releases reviewed December 11, 2015 Hector 15 | Dir. Jake Gavin ★★★★☆ Peter Mullan plays the title role in this British drama about a homeless man who travels from Glasgow to London to spend a few days at a Christmas shelter. With a big operation on the horizon, he uses the journey to revisit the events and broken relationships that drove [...]
Top theatre picks this week: A Christmas Carol, Macbeth and You For Me For You December 11, 2015 A Christmas Carol, Noel Coward Theatre ★★★★☆ If pantomime’s a bit too shouty and daft for your tastes but you’re still in the market for something festive, this flamboyant production of A Christmas Carol ticks all the right boxes. Jim Broadbent plays miser Ebenezer Scrooge with a twinkle in his eye and a skip in [...]