Car review: The Jaguar XE 3.0 V6 S is set to put British cars on top of the world again May 4, 2015 You know you’ve made it at work when you swap the keys of your bog-standard company car for a premium model better suited to the junior executive you’ve become, like a BMW, an Audi or a Mercedes-Benz. But if everyone is trading up, the brands risk losing the exclusivity that made them so appealing in [...]
Not convinced? May 4, 2015 CHECK OUT THESE ALTERNATIVES… MERCEDES-BENZ C 300 PHEV AMG LINE PRICE: £38,535 0-62MPH: 6.4 secs TOP SPEED: 152mph CO2 G/KM: 100g/km MPG COMBINED: 78.5mpg THE VERDICT: DESIGN Four Stars PERFORMANCE Three Stars PRACTICALITY Three Stars VALUE FOR MONEY Two Stars AUDI S4 PRICE: £39,615 0-62MPH: 5.0 secs TOP SPEED: 155mph CO2 G/KM: 178g/km MPG COMBINED: [...]
Unfriended is the first truly terrifying horror movie about the evils of the internet May 1, 2015 Unfriended opens with a truly harrowing sequence: grainy smartphone footage shows a girl clutching something at arm’s length. There are shrieks of panic from an unseen crowd and you realise she’s holding a gun. There’s a bang and she collapses backward; you’re watching a snuff video, and one that looks horribly authentic. As Unfriended’s protagonist, [...]
Photography review: Elliott Erwitt May 1, 2015 Beetles + Huxley | ★★★★☆ Photographer Elliott Erwitt bore witness to some of the 20th century’s most important events but some of his best loved images are of everyday moments lit up by flashes of passion and absurdity: lovers caught kissing in a rear-view mirror; an umbrella-wielding Parisian leaping over a puddle. Elliott [...]
Monsters: Dark Continent – film review May 1, 2015 Cert 15 | ★☆☆☆☆ War is always an ugly enterprise, but is it any uglier when aliens are involved? That’s the totally pointless question Monsters: Dark Continent asks. After sitting through it for two hours I can confirm that the answer is both “yes” and “who cares”. It’s a huge let-down, especially so [...]
Film review: Far from the Madding Crowd is rushed, but Carey Mulligan sparkles May 1, 2015 Cert 12a | ★★★☆☆ In 19th century England, the line between fancying someone and marrying them was terrifyingly thin. Or so you might think from Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, in which the twinkly Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) hurdles marriage proposals like a Victorian Colin Jackson. All [...]
Theatre review: Everyman is a thrilling, touching success April 30, 2015 Olivier Theatre | ★★★★☆ The first play directed by Rufus Norris since he took over as artistic director of the National Theatre is an ambitious, frenetic production that hints at exciting times ahead for the institution. Everyman is a 15th century morality play warning of the perils of pursuing bodily pleasures over the [...]
Something for the weekend April 30, 2015 SING! BILLY ELLIOT One of the best loved musicals of recent times celebrates its tenth birthday this May – as good a reason as any to book a ticket if you’re yet to see it. Tickets £20.70 – £68.70, call the box office on 0844 248 5000 CHEER! BRENTFORD VS WIGAN Head to west London [...]
Oh my god: A new book celebrates the finest in modern religious architecture April 30, 2015 German theologian Rudolf Otto popularized the idea of the “numinous”, a feeling of awestruck oneness with the Holy Other liable to induce fear, trembling, a widening of the eyes. Built in the right way, religious spaces can induce numinous feelings: from the towering, echoey symmetry of Salisbury Cathedral to the dizzying, hallucinatory tiled ceiling of [...]
Story time: Escape to the past with British painter Eleanor Watson April 30, 2015 Eleanor Watson paints light-dappled rooms full of frills, finery and baroque detailing. Sometimes shadowy, sometimes ablaze in brilliant oranges, her paintings have the texture and atmostphere of memories – passionate, randomly detailed and with the occasional blank spot. Working from photographs, she recreates idealised, dreamlike spaces that seem familiar from museums and period dramas. In [...]