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 [...]
Transformers One is the best film in this franchise. Here’s why… October 10, 2024 For 17 years the Transformers franchise has proven bafflingly successful. The four Michael Bay-directed movies, spanning from 2007 to 2017, became a byword for shallow spectacle, while the prequels Bumblebee (2018) and Rise of The Beasts (2023) were at best a marginal improvement. The series now moves into animated territory with the star-studded family film [...]
Mire Lee at the Tate Modern is the Turbine Hall at its very best October 10, 2024 Wander into the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you will be met by the unsettling sight of what look like flayed, bloodied skins hanging from heavy industrial chains overhead. Dozens of them, all a sickly pink, each one stretched over rusting wires. As you progress through the hall you discover the source of these grotesque [...]
Coldplay Moon Music review: Could this be perfect pop? October 8, 2024 Every now and then I find myself considering the fine margins between major and minor success. I remember, for instance, a gig I attended at the turn of the millennium at the Nottingham Arena performed by the band Travis. In those days, like their rivals Coldplay, they could easily fill a stadium of 10,000 people. [...]
A Different Man review: Expertly observed dissection of image October 8, 2024 A Different Man | Dir. Aaron Schimberg | ★★★★☆ Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a lonely New Yorker with Neurofibromatosis, a series of tumours on the face that make him feel disconnected from the outside world. He undergoes miracle surgery to cure the condition, and begins a new life with the name Guy, finding renewed professional [...]
The dirty, dangerous and ‘obsessive’ world of mudlarking October 8, 2024 Once the domain of Victorian street urchins, the art of mudlarking has gone mainstream. Lucy Kenningham investigates
Children of The Cult review: Cult documentary charts abuse October 7, 2024 Children of The Cult | Dir Maroesja Perizonius & Alice McShane | ★★★★☆ Documentaries about cults have become sensationalist streaming fodder in recent years, but Children of The Cult strips away the headlines and brings you face to face with victims and their stories. It’s an investigation into the Rajneesh Movement, a cult that had [...]
Joker: Folie à Deux review – a strange, dark musical October 7, 2024 Joker was a fascinating outlier in modern cinema. The violent, Scorsese-inspired psychodrama was a huge risk, whisking the Clown Prince of Crime away from the world of comic books and placing him in a grimy 1980s Gotham City that resembled nothing more than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The gamble paid off, with an Oscar for [...]
What does it take to be the best… at Karaoke? October 7, 2024 Barging past a swarm of small children jostling upwards from the seafront, I arrive at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. It is, with the best will in the world, an ugly building, like a bingo hall had sex with a secondary school. Inside is a different story. Its intestines are a marbled maze of tiles and [...]
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at Tate Modern – a house of horrors October 3, 2024 Were you to stumble upon the works of Mike Kelley in, say, an abandoned warehouse rather than the galleries of the Tate Modern, you would fear for your safety, if not your sanity. Strolling through works collected from the late 1970s up until Kelley’s suicide in 2012 is like happening upon the headquarters of some [...]