Bad Times at the El Royale review: A strange but bewilderingly original chamber piece October 11, 2018 The premise of Bad Times at the El Royale sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: a priest, a cop, a hippie and a singer walk into a hotel lobby. Each has something to hide, as does the hotel itself, which straddles the California and Nevada border and is staffed by a single bumbling [...]
Poet in Da Corner at the Royal Court is the world’s first grime musical and it’s brilliant September 28, 2018 Royal Court, until 6 Oct UNMISSABLE Grime has come a long way in the past few years. Formed from a crucible of garage, jungle and dancehall music, it was until recently an entirely underground genre, mentioned by the press only in the context of rising knife crime. But at some point a broader audience started [...]
Darkest Hour film review: A fine performance by Gary Oldman, but still an exercise in cosy revisionist history January 11, 2018 Winston Churchill is curiously absent from the opening fifteen minutes of this new Joe Wright-directed study of the tumultuous first few weeks of his Premiership. Instead, we hear political colleagues murmur darkly about the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister in the wake of Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. It’s a clever manoeuvre; with Churchill (played by [...]
Why cinema is doomed: The picture house may think it has weathered the storms of piracy and streaming, but the real cliff edge is still to come October 5, 2017 In April of last year, AMC, on the verge of buying out Odeon and becoming the largest cinema chain in the world, announced it was considering allowing people to use their phones during screenings. Its CEO, Adam Aron, justified this by saying, “When you tell a 22- year-old to turn off their phone, they hear [...]
Lost for words: The indie bookshop has weathered many storms, from the rise of Amazon to rising rents. But its future has never looked so perilous September 7, 2017 Prospero’s Books stood on Crouch End Broadway for 10 years. I remember it, though not well. The bookshops of my childhood memories are all vaguely similar – they were places where I’d be both happy and bored. To hear locals tell it, there wasn’t any sign that Prospero’s was in trouble. It seemed to plod [...]
City of Ghosts film review: An important documentary held back by lumbering, artless direction July 21, 2017 In 2013, after ISIS took control of Raqqa, a group of citizen journalists began secretly recording and publishing their activities. Calling themselves Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), the group formed to counter ISIS’s slick propaganda machine, and deliver the truth about their atrocities to the world. Much of what we know about ISIS’s barbarism [...]
Dirty Great Love Story review: This loved-up play is a little too on the nose January 26, 2017 We all know how it goes – boy meets girl, boy screws girl, boy and girl variously fall in love and drift apart before finally ending up together. It’s a story as old as the monetisation of human intimacy. Dirty Great Love Story tells it without any flash – our boy is Richard, a lovable [...]
BU21 play review: London terror drama justifies transfer to Trafalgar Studios January 12, 2017 A plane explodes over West London. It’s been shot, we are told, by a handheld missile launched somewhere in Vauxhall. The wreckage kills hundreds, injures hundreds more, and reduces most of Fulham to rubble. Part of the force of Stuart Slade’s courageous, bitterly funny play comes from its plausibility – there is a sense, morbid [...]
The Shallows film review: Blake Lively stars in the spiritual successor to Jaws August 11, 2016 For decades – as anyone who sat through Sharknado will tell you – the open ocean has been where horror goes to die. Jaws’ phenomenal success in 1975 sired a thousand bastard offspring consisting of countless malformed sharks, some endowed with absurd and embarrassing dimensions (Shark Attack), others with weird animatronic bodies (Deep Blue Sea), [...]
Pete’s Dragon film review: a sweet-hearted Disney film that trades on nostalgia for the films of your childhood August 11, 2016 After the wildly successful Jungle Book remake comes Pete’s Dragon, itself a reboot of a little known Disney film from 1977, a strange, dated musical featuring a dragon who was half live-action and half animation, but mostly invisible. It wasn’t well reviewed, but a reheated Turkey is often easier to stomach than a remade classic. [...]
