Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales on Nintendo Switch review: Gwent is back and it’s never felt so good February 17, 2020 Gwent, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. The Witcher 3 is one of the truly great open-world games, mind-boggling in its scope and masterful in its execution. But there were times when it felt like elaborate padding around the in-game pastime, Gwent. I clocked over 300 hours in this [...]
Working Lunch: Jason Atherton’s Grosvenor Square restaurant The Betterment February 17, 2020 The best places in London to wine and dine your important clients. What is it? The Betterment is not, as the name suggests, an austere Swiss wellness centre, nor is it a cool new cult you can join. It is in fact the latest restaurant by Jason Atherton, who appears to have run out of [...]
The best luxury resorts in the Alps – where to stay and where to ski February 17, 2020 Tap your ski pass, perch on our comfortable chairlift and let City A.M. take you for a tour of the Alps’ best new (or newish) hotels. We’ve had the enviable task of spending the early part of this winter season reviewing the peaks of high-end hospitality and the black runs of flashy facilities; a blizzard [...]
Steve McQueen at Tate Modern review: Dramatic retrospective muses on what it means to be human February 14, 2020 I’m not sure anybody has perfected the art of translating video installations into blockbuster gallery retrospectives, but the Tate Modern comes pretty darned close. Having Steve McQueen as your subject helps, of course. He’s the man with the Midas touch, a Turner-prize winning artist turned Oscar-winning director. The Tate collects pieces from after his 1999 [...]
Nora: A Doll’s House review: Elaborate reworking doesn’t do Ibsen’s classic justice February 14, 2020 The works of Ibsen are perennial candidates for a thorough reimagining, his quietly devastating studies of class struggle and women’s rights depressingly relevant for each subsequent generation since he started writing in the mid-19th century. A 2018 production of The Wild Duck at the Almeida, for instance, featured actors speaking as “themselves” as it explored [...]
Death of England review: Rafe Spall dazzles in this timely portrait of the resurgent far-right February 14, 2020 Rafe Spall asserts his credentials as one of the finest stage actors around in this percussive, often hilarious one-man play about working class racism. He plays Michael, an Essex flower-seller whose oily patter masks a vast well of toxic emotion. He’s the guy in the pub who’s all smiles until he’s kicking the life out [...]
Want to buy art but don’t know where to start? Try Collect, the more accessible design fair February 14, 2020 Kicking off the calendar of high-end art fairs of 2020, Collect is still London’s only fair of contemporary craft and design presented by gallerists. This year, it’s moved from the Saatchi Gallery to its new home in the softer and more decorative venue of Somerset House, swapping stark white walls for the charm of 18th-century [...]
Sonic the Hedgehog review: Everyone’s second favourite videogame mascot’s gotta go faster than this February 14, 2020 There’s a point about halfway through the Sonic the Hedgehog movie in which Sonic farts unexpectedly, forcing the viewer to reckon with the notion that he has a functioning anus. I’m no prude – farts are one of the most sophisticated forms of humour there is – but being made to conceptualise the sphincter of [...]
Far Away review: Chilling Caryl Churchill drama staged in 45 minutes is a breath of fresh air February 14, 2020 In our current theatrical landscape, where three-hour plays are the norm and two-part, seven-hour epics are the height of sophistication, there’s something thrilling, almost transgressive about the sentence “45 minutes, straight through”. Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away is a poster-child for short-form story telling, trimming every ounce of fat, wasting not a single word. [...]
Emma film review: Stylish Austen adaptation is lacking in substance February 14, 2020 Not unlike a cabinet reshuffle, Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma follows a group of largely unlikeable people being shunted around in different permutations, at the whim of an aristocratic blonde who’s used to getting their own way. In this case it’s in the pursuit of matchmaking, something in which the titular character, 21-year-old provincial heiress [...]