The best pantos in London 2024-2025, from Robin Hood to Aladdin November 27, 2024 We’re well into the festive season now and that means it’s time to book your annual panto – here are the best London has to offer. Robin Hood, Palladium If you see one panto this year – or any year to be quite honest with you – it should be this camp as Christmas extravaganza [...]
Bread and Roses: Jennifer Lawrence doc is a troubling success November 22, 2024 Produced by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, Bread and Roses is a documentary that captures a modern crisis happening right now. It analyses modern Afghanistan, and the effects of the 2021 offensive that saw The Taliban seize control. The film focuses on the effect it has had on women, whose rights to work, education, and privacy [...]
Wicked film review: Ariana Grande helps this musical really fly November 22, 2024 More than two decades after the production was first staged, Wicked makes it to the big screen in the first of a two-part adaptation. Arriving on a tornado of publicity, expectations are high for the Broadway favourite, but can it be just as popular on film? For the uninitiated, Wicked presents an alternative history behind [...]
Silent Hill 2 is back and it’s more horrible than ever November 14, 2024 Meet me at our special place,” reads the cryptic note from protagonist James’ dead wife. That special place is Silent Hill, a Maine town lifted from the Stephen King playbook that may once have been picturesque but is now a festering slum shrouded in deathly fog. Passing through the miasma, you can just about make [...]
Emilia Perez is an early tip for all the top awards October 25, 2024 As we approach awards season, Emilia Perez, the new film from director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Sisters Brothers), will hope its joyful and jagged tale rightly captures the imagination of judges. Set in Mexico City, Zoe Saldaña plays Rita, a brilliant but frustrated lawyer working to keep the guilty from prison. Feared cartel leader [...]
The Apprentice film review: A gloriously dark origin story for Trump October 17, 2024 As we near the US Presidential election, The Apprentice has attracted much controversy from one of the candidates. This early-days biopic of Donald Trump has been denounced by the 45th President, who sent a cease-and-desist letter causing the film to have trouble finding a distributor. But is it worth the fuss? Starting in the early [...]
The Other Place: Life is terrible, the play! October 11, 2024 Greek tragedies revel in stories of rape and incest and trauma and abuse but we’re at least partly shielded from these horrors by 2000 years of distance and the prism of epic heroes and demigods. Transplant those same themes into a modern family home and, well, it hits different. The Other Place is playwright Alexander [...]
How our news reporter fell into the world of Dungeons & Dragons October 11, 2024 Our gnome bard was attempting to woo the lord of the manor when it happened. A banshee had exploded out of the floor, sending guards fleeing and instantly petrifying my pet direwolf. Our orc barbarian was drunk at the time, leaving him utterly useless, so it all fell on me to calm the banshee or, [...]
Timestalker is the saucy, grizzly anti-romance British cinema needs October 10, 2024 Having spent much of her acting career in cult favourites such as TV comedy Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place and 2012 indie film Sightseers, Alice Lowe broke through as a director with her 2016 comedy slasher Prevenge. She follows up that success with her second directorial effort, high concept comedy Timestalker. She plays Agnes, a woman [...]
Salem’s Lot review: Dreary HBO Max vampire horror lacks bite October 10, 2024 The work of Stephen King has been adapted for TV and film consistently since the author began writing. Some result in classics – The Shawshank Redemption and IT – while other fail to capture the spirit of the story and are forgotten. The latest adaptation of King’s second novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, seems destined for the latter [...]