Art review: Anish Kapoor at the Lisson Gallery March 27, 2015 Lisson Gallery | Until 9 May This new solo show by one of Britain’s most famous sculptors marks his return to painted works. A triptych of silicon and resin pieces dominates one room; raised red and burgundy bringing to mind torn flesh. The works are in part a continuation of Kapoor’s long-term fascination with [...]
Film review: Blind is divisive but gripping March 27, 2015 Cert 18 | ★★★★☆ Films about the blind, like films about the deaf, are faced with a formal problem: how do you convey the subjective experience of blindness without showing the viewer a blank screen for two hours? Compellingly, the Sundance-winning Blind gets around the problem by focusing on the flights of imagination that can [...]
Film review: Get Hard is a technically well-tooled comedy March 27, 2015 Cert 15 | ★★★☆☆ In Get Hard, James King (Will Ferrell) is a rich, clueless trader whose life falls apart when he’s convicted of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin State Prison. With 30 days to get his affairs in order James hires Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart), the manager of his local [...]
Is economic growth stimulated by tech platforms? Amazon’s UK boss believes so March 24, 2015 Thirty years after the first dot com website was registered, one of the most exciting developments in the internet revolution is the way technology platforms are enabling entrepreneurs of every type and size. Technology platforms are all around us. Retail platforms like Amazon Marketplace, eBay and Not on the High Street enable brands and sellers [...]
Theatre review: The Broken Heart ensnares gut and mind March 20, 2015 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse | ★★★☆☆ What a piece of work the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is. In little over a year, it has become a priceless gem in London’s theatre crown. While the Globe deftly cycles through crowd-pleasing Shakespeare, the Playhouse breathes life into his relatively neglected contemporaries and successors, writers who often vocalise present day concerns [...]
Art review: Borderlands March 20, 2015 Gallery for Russian Arts and Design | ★★★★☆ Contemporary Russian and Ukrainian artists come together to reflect on the military conflict in eastern Ukraine and what it might mean for the future of the region. Artists from Kiev and Moscow have used video, photography and sculpture – including a brick rendering of the recently redrawn border of [...]
Film review: Mommy March 20, 2015 Cert 15 | ★★★★☆ Consider this sequence in Mommy. Steve, a hyperactive teen fresh out of a correctional facility, walks sulkily down a corridor behind his mother Diane. Cut to a point-of-view shot – presumably Steve’s – of Diane’s bum wiggling as she sashays along. In one neat edit we learn many things about this [...]
Theatre review: Stevie is too bloated, too stiff and too long March 20, 2015 Hampstead Theatre | ★★☆☆☆ At the end of the Piccadilly Line, in a spindly fortress made of words, sat Stevie Smith; poet, secretary, inscrutable figure on the peripheries of the literary establishment. Smith lived her entire life within the confines of a padded melancholy. She was comfortable there, and productive, producing over twenty volumes of [...]
Theatre review: Antigone starring Juliette Binoche March 13, 2015 Barbican | ★★☆☆☆ A new translation of Sophocles’ ever-resonant Antigone by poet Anne Carson is one thing, but add cinematic icon Juliette Binoche and director du jour Ivo van Hove – whose rapturously received A View From The Bridge recently transferred to the West End – and you have what sounds like a guaranteed success. [...]
Art review: RCA Secret March 13, 2015 Royal College of Art | ★★★★☆ Want to get your hands on a Grayson Perry for £55? Head down to RCA Secret, the annual exhibition of postcard-sized drawings, collages and photographs by the world’s leading artists. Now in its 21st year, the show is so-called because the 250 postcards are signed on the back, [...]
