Art review: Tracey Emin, The Last Great Adventure Is You October 9, 2014 ★★☆☆☆ The title of Tracey Emin’s latest exhibition – The Last Great Adventure is You – is misleading in two ways. Firstly, by “you” she means “me”; once again, Emin is her own muse. Secondly, it’s less of a “great adventure” and more of a casual skip around the parameters of the self. Manifest [...]
Film review: Gone Girl October 3, 2014 ★★★☆☆ We know from Zodiac that David Fincher has a feel for tense procedural thrillers; we know from Se7en that he has an eye for macabre detail; we know from The Social Network that he has an ear for cleverer-than-thou comic banter. In Gone Girl, an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s pulpy crime novel of the [...]
Film review: The Equalizer September 26, 2014 It must be hard work running an international crime syndicate when so many members of the public have a background in killing people. Lately, it seems every man and his dog is in possession of a very particular set of skills, acquired over a long career, that make him a nightmare for prospective mega-villains. In [...]
Film review: Ida September 26, 2014 Ida is a young apprentice nun in 1960s Poland, a chill landscape in every sense of the word, depicted with a stark stillness in black and white by native director Pawel Pawlikowski. His Ida, played by striking newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is about to take her vows and goes in search of the parents she never [...]
Art review: Anselm Kiefer, The Royal Academy September 26, 2014 ★★★★★ A distant, solitary figure stands before the sea, arm raised in a Nazi salute. The title of the painting: Heroic Symbol. Ironic? Well, yes and no. For though Anselm Kiefer was no Nazi, there is genuine heroism in depicting this image, in recalling the past from the chasm of silence into which Germany fell [...]
Theatre review: Teh Internet is Serious Business, The Royal Court September 26, 2014 IT’S HARD to know what the greying grandees of London theatre criticism would have made of Teh Internet is Serious Business, a play that revels in an online world of memes and trolls, cheeseburger-demanding cats, socially awkward penguins and condescending Willy Wonkas. But what appears as incomprehensible nonsense to most, makes perfect sense to a [...]
Theatre Review: Billie Piper stars in Great Britain at the National September 18, 2014 ★★★★★ With inquiries, investigations, MP select committees and dodgy dealings between opaque institutions, phone-hacking was a very broadsheet kind of scandal. Sex was there, but it was in the background: at root, this was a story about people being in each other’s pockets, not beds. Great Britain gives phone-hacking the tabloid treatment. It ratchets up [...]
Film Review: They Came Together September 4, 2014 ★★ The curtains pull back and swing jazz rolls over the opening credits: white serif font on black background. Enter two couples sat chatting in a plush New York restaurant. A scene in which they discuss the relative merits of the broadsheet newspapers gives way to sweeping aerial shots of the Manhattan skyline. We might [...]
Film Review: Before I Go To Sleep September 4, 2014 ★★ It’s always the same. She awakes startled in what she thinks is a stranger’s bed, creeps into the bathroom and looks in the mirror. The face she sees is hers, but different: lined, framed by hair that’s thinning, a little dry with middle-age. She screams and runs from the bathroom back into the bedroom [...]
Theatre review: Little Revolution September 4, 2014 ★★★★ Is there anything left to say about the riots? Despite the avalanche of think-pieces chewing over possible causes – from the left: poverty, racism, a lack of opportunities; from the right: irresponsibility bred by welfarism and failures in state education – no one provided a wholly satisfactory diagnosis. The riots were simply too big, [...]