LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Baseball and cinema make a weirdly compelling combination. I've never seen a truly astonishing American football or ice hockey film, and the only classic basketball film is a documentary (maybe there's an argument for Space Jam). But there's something different about baseball, some mystic weight that's all to easy to find in the sport. The Kevin Costner baseball duo Field of Dreams and Bull Durham are essentially baseball as a path to Zen enlightenment, and Robert Redford's The Natural weaves the sport into the fabric of Americana. I even have a soft spot for A League of Their Own.

Can Disney's Million Dollar Arm scale these lofty heights? Well, no. Not really. In fact, for a film about baseball, there's actually very little baseball in the film - the sport itself more of a background noise. Instead what we get is a movie where a busy, single urban professional in his 40s learns the importance of family and responsibility. I strongly suspect that, deep in the cellars of the Magic Kingdom, there's a machine churning out doggerel like this by the yard.

Our stressed, deal-hungry professional (with a Blackberry bolted onto the side of this head) is JB (Jon Hamm), struggling sports agent. He used to be a big shot, but after making the decision to go it alone his business is struggling - unable to attract any big stars to his management service. The spark of creativity still flickers within him and he's sure he can find some hot young, unexploited talent. But where?

In a bizarre sequence we see a depressed JB late-night channel-surfing, beer in hand. He flicks onto a cricket game. In boredom he flips the channel. It's Susan Boyle singing I Dreamed a Dream on Britain's Got Talent. JB grimaces. Back to the cricket. Grimace. Flip back to Boyle. Ant n Dec grin madly at the camera. Grimace. Cricket. Flip. Boyle. Flip. Dec. Grimace. Flip. Cricket. Boyle. Ant. Cricket. SUSAN BOYLE! ANT! DEC! CRICKET!

EUREKA! (he jumps to his feet)

"I'm going to set up a pan-Indian televised talent show to discover new pitching talent and pay a million dollars to the original! And I'll call it... Million Dollar Arm".

Before we know it he's on a plane to a India to ferret out hopeful kids who can throw a baseball real fast. He winds up with Dinesh (Madhur Mittal) and Rinku (Suraj Sharma), two kids from poverty (though a sanitised Disney kinda poverty) and flies them back to the US. Hijinks ensue. They don't know what pizza is. They don't understand how a lift works. You get the picture.

Everyone ends up living in Jon Hamm's house where he gradually assumes a paternal role for these kids, all the while gradually growing closer to sexy medical student tenant Brenda (Lake Bell). Blah blah some stuff goes down, there's a bit of mild misery and doubt, and then a big triumphant moment where they throw a ball real fast, Jon Hamm smooches Lake Bell and we go home happy.

Problem is that this sports story bullshit is so damn hokey and the film is so utterly drained of anything interesting that it's difficult to care. This is a movie obviously produced to a strict template; from the plot to the casting right down to the visual style and score. What's left is processed cinematic junk food - competently produced junk food - but lacking anything interesting.

Watching Jon Hamm working his way through a film that requires him to sit behind desks, make pitches to clients and wear smart suits unavoidably brings Mad Men's Don Draper to mind. Consequently, this feels like the shittiest Mad Men episode ever. The vague similarities in tone mean you get frustratingly anaesthetised flashes of what Hamm is best at; presenting a calm, collected surface persona while he's going crazy inside. But with a script this bland Hamm quickly defaults to autopilot - I hope he at least got a nice holiday in India out of it.

Visually Gillespie sticks like glue to the live action Disney visual style; all subtly over-saturated colours, conventional cinematography and grain-free superslick digitalism. To be fair the India scenes are a huge step above everything else in the film, but it's the Taj Mahal rather than Gillespie that's doing the real leg-work here. That said the wide-shots of the Indian countryside and cityscapes crammed with life are at minimum competently executed. Everything else is cinema by numbers: a sludgy, semi-invisible rhythm of vaguely pretty LA locations populated by pretty people.

The word I've been avoiding all review is boring. But hell, tiptoeing around it isn't going to help matters. Million Dollar Arm is a boring, overlong slog of a movie; you don't care about the stakes, everybody has a simple A-B character progression and it's all couched in Disney's trademark mildly pleasant quasi-humour. It's difficult to see who this is going to appeal to; it's too slow-paced for children (they were ignoring the film and playing in the aisles), and way too simplistic for an adult audience.

This is the kind of movie that you end up watching on a long haul flight when you've exhausted every other option. Not awful. Just super bland.

★★

Million Dollar Arm is released August 29th

Lucy is the dumbest film about being smart ever. Working from the discredited (many, many times over) pseudoscientific myth about humans only using 10% of their brain at any time, this film imagines where we might go if we used more. Super-awareness? Telekinesis? Mind control? Manipulating electronics? Being able to drive a car really really well? The resulting film is an eyebrow-raising catalogue of barminess, a film stuffed to the gills with tiny little idiosyncracies and half-baked philosophising that left me (and much of the audience I saw it with) giggling in bemusement.

Our heroine, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), is a student living in Taipei. We meet her being pestered by her boyfriend to deliver a mysterious package on his behalf. Suspicious, she declines - but the point is rendered moot when he forcibly handcuffs a briefcase to her wrist and sends her into a den of vicious Taiwanese mobsters. The package turns out to contain a new type of clubbing drug and Lucy is subsequently pressganged into muling it to Europe. The package implanted into her abdomen, soon splits - sending the substance careening around her nervous system and giving her superpowers. (The questionable profitability of turning clubbers into superpowered god-beings is unfortunately not explored).

The rest of Lucy is split between her accessing ever more of her brain's potential (helpfully indicated by title cards reading 50%, 70% etc) and Morgan Freeman delivering a hilariously clumsily-written lecture cut together with stock footage of cheetah's eating antelops, 1920s footage of clowns and wild pigs fucking. Freeman deserves a medal for being able to deliver this crap with a straight face, perhaps the only actor working today with the gravitas to pull off exposition this ridiculous.

Oh hey it's a bit like the Matrix.

Lucy is a patchwork quilt sewn from a thousand different influences. One minute there's a prehistoric CG landscape that echoes The Tree of Life, the next we're pulling imagery straight from Akira or action sequences reminiscent of The Matrix. It's difficult to accuse Besson of theft, there's real love in these homages. The biggest lift comes from a very unlikely place; the narrative free cinema of Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy and Ron Fricke's Baraka and Samsara. The quickfire, time-shifted shots of traffic and food preparation mirror Koyaanisqatsi and Besson goes so far as to transplant actual footage from Fricke's films into his montages.

Given that many of these films rank in my all time favourites, theoretically Lucy should be onto a winner with me. Problem is, all those films are incredibly intelligently constructed pieces of cinema with oodles of considered philosophy behind them and Lucy is dumb as a box of rocks.

This magic brain drug looks like a lot of fun.

Intentionally or not, one of the central planks of Lucy is that mind altering drugs are fucking amazing. Notably, the crystalline drug that causes this raise in consciousness looks an awful lot like MDMA (albeit bright blue). There's a decent argument that Lucy's experience mirrors that of someone trying the drug for the first time. As she hits her high she feels totally connected to the world, able to perceive the heartbeats and moods of those around her. She even calls her Mum in the middle of the night to tell her she loves her! At this point I half expected the rest of the film to be Scarlett Johansson gurning her face off, reaching for laser beams and waving glow-sticks in people's faces.

The effect of this druggy psychedelia combined with half-assed cosmological pondering is a wonderfully accurate simulation of being trapped by a wide-eyed sweaty clubber in a chill-out room while they spout absolute bollocks. Thankfully, just as it's difficult to genuinely dislike a 6am amphetamine mystic, it's difficult to genuinely dislike Lucy. It's so adorably sincere about its nonsense, so willing to go the extra crazy mile and so damn unpredictable that it just about works as an exercise in curiosity. You watch because you want to find out where the hell Besson is going with all this.

Lucy is a movie that seriously postulates that a really really smart person can grow extra hands.

This curiosity is fortunate, because narratively Lucy doesn't work at all. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Taiwanese gangsters hunting Lucy down while she in turn hunts down the smugglers holding onto the drug. Problem is, about 25 minutes into the film Lucy stops being a character and turns into a robot. With Johansson in emotionless killer mode comparisons to Under The Skin are inevitable, but the same act doesn't really work in an action film. There's no emotional hook to get us rooting for Lucy and her quick onset of invulnerability makes every fight or chase sequence completely tension free.

The visual effects go some way to picking up the slack. There's some genuinely imaginative visualisations of what it's like to be able to perceive the whole electromagnetic spectrum, see through people's skin or burrow into a person's memories. The highlight is the climactic psychedelic trip-out sequence (I love these) that kinetically zips us around time and space, taking in Victorian Times Square, some confused American Indians, a vicious dinosaur, outer space and finally re-enacting Michelangelo’s The Creation Of Adam with a dodgy looking CG monkey-woman. None of this makes much sense, but at least it looks nice.

God only knows what Besson is actually trying to say in Lucy. Is he going for an action-film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon? Trying to bring the philosophies of Koyaaniqatsi to a blockbuster audience? Has he had a life-changing drug experience that he really wanted to share it with us? We may never know. What is certain is that Besson really thinks he's actually saying something profound. He's really not, but he's so confident that he is that it's almost endearing.

Lucy is really really far from being a 'good' film, but it's certainly an interesting one. Real stupid, but at least it's not boring.

★★★

Lucy is out now.

"Britain, 1984. Times are troubled. Burrowed away in her Downing Street lair, Thatcher regards mining communities with suspicious eyes. In the 1970s, the powerful National Union of Mineworkers called a series of devastatingly successful strikes, ultimately bringing down the government. In Thatcher’s mind, union power was anathema: an anti-democratic, anti-capitalist threat to bottom lines and the power of the state.

So she hatched a plan: force the miners into a strike and then target their weak spots with surgical precision. She mobilized the media, militarized the police and granted sops to smaller unions (preventing them from joining the miners in solidarity), leaving mining communities isolated and embattled."

Read the rest of my review at We Got This Covered.

★★★★

Pride is released 12th September

The Killers once asked “are we human or are we dancer?” Kenneth Elvebakk's Ballet Boys answers by demonstrating that you can be one or the other – but not both. His documentary, following three Norwegian boys with hopes of being professional ballet dancers, shows the determination, skill and good luck needed to succeed in a cut-throat world that demands perfection.

Our three young Baryshnikovs are Torgier, Syvert and Lukas, all of whom range in talent and motivation. Lukas looks as if he's been genetically bred for dance success, all boy band blue eyes and confident grace. He's Terminator-like in his determination to make it as a ballet dancer, and skilled to the point that he outshines everyone in the film. His superhuman skill is impressive, but makes him a bit unrelatable - the heart of the film lies with Syvert and Torgeir (but mainly Syvert).

In an early scene Syvert bemoans his East Asian ethnicity, explaining that he wishes he was white Norwegian. Right away we recognise that he's nursing an inferiority complex next to the easy-going Torgier and dance commando Lukas. There's a meaty psychological paradox at play in a boy who considers himself innately 'out of place' trying to climb the peaks of physical and mental perfection: transforming his body into a direct tool for artistic expression.

Torgeir is a different kettle of fish, though what kind of fish is anyone's guess. He's the Collins to Lukas and Syvert's Armstrong and Aldrin. Mainly he's an amiable sort of guy, floating around in the background of scenes cracking jokes and stretching. Though we peer into Syvert and Lukas' home lives, Torgeir remains an unknown quantity, a victim, I suspect, of brief run time.

At a mere 72 minutes Elvebakk's film mirrors the bodies of its subjects; lean, pacey and with zero percent fat. On one hand I appreciate brevity in cinema, optimistically treating it as a sign of a confident, concise director. On the other how much justice can a documentary do to his subjects and the art of ballet in such a short amount of time?

Unfortunately this is more the latter than the former. Ballet Boys bears more than a passing resemblance to Steve James' 1994 classic Hoop Dreams. Both follow boys with big ambitions; one set to become professional ballet dancers, the other to compete in the NBA. Both show the emotional and physical toll it takes on the subjects, exacerbated by the weight of ambition and the knowledge that only a tiny minority ever make it. Hoop Dreams follows just two boys, is nearly three hours long and is about as comprehensive a study you could feasibly get of its subject. By comparison Ballet Boys barely skims the surface.

Another flaw is that other than the knowledge that they want to turn professional, Elvebakk never lays out the milestones they need to achieve to do it. We jump haphazardly from auditions to audition with little idea of the stakes. Late in the film we learn, almost as a postscript, that Lukas triumphed over nearly 1200 other applicants to get a place in a top ballet school, a fact that would have immeasurably upped the tension of the preceding scenes.

Also absent is any explanation of why they started dancing in the first place. We meet them in the middle of their training and while some attention is paid to why they want to continue, we've got no idea how they began. Ballet Boys recognises that being a teenage male ballet enthusiast is somewhat peculiar, so knowing what initially attracted these very different boys to this world would add a splodge of character to proceedings.

But the worst consequence of the short run time is that we don't get to see the boys properly dance. Sure, we get a few jauntily edited clips of them doing the odd move to a dubstep beat (presumably intended to show that ballet's hip, cool and with it yeah?) and a few seconds here and there from various contests, but I was craving a couple of unbroken minutes of footage demonstrating what each of these boys can do.

Presumably the potential audience for a ballet documentary must, at minimum, enjoy watching people dance, so why the need to chop up their moves into MTV inflected quick cuts? This robs us of that Billy Elliot moment when we finally understand why they're pushing themselves so hard in pursuit of a distant aesthetic goal.

It's a pity because there's a lot of potential in these boy's stories. I found myself craving more and more information as the film went on; what were their parent's reactions to their child deciding to go pro-dancer? What do their non-ballet friends think of the whole affair? What, exactly do they want to achieve if they do make it? All of this goes answered. What's left is anorexic, as if Elvebakk doesn't think this subject and these boys are going to hold our attention.

The film has its moments – nearly all of them arising from the casual camaraderie between these three remarkable young men. We sense the bond forged between them and they succeed in making us care about their success: we want to see them achieve their dreams. To the film's credit it does go some way to outlining the downsides to ballet; a destroyed body and retirement by the age of 40; the sacrifice of a 'normal' social life in favour of intensive training; the simple risk of a random career ending injury.

These moments of illumination raise Ballet Boys from the humdrum, but it's just too slight to give us any real insight into the weird, high-stakes world of ballet.

★★

Ballet Boys is released September 12th.

Two slightly hungover men in their late twenties/early thirties attending a Bank Holiday show "suitable for children aged 5-11" raises a few eyebrows. With no child in tow and let's face it, no obvious reason to be there (other than curiosity) we cut a slightly awkward duo. Fortunately the show also insists that it's also suitable for "everyone who loves great stories". I love great stories! At any rate, being sat in a warm theatre beats trudging through the gloomy, wet streets in danger of receiving a day-ruining bus-based puddle splash.

First impressions are sobering; this isn't a show targeted equally at adults and children like Matilda or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this is firmly for children. A one woman show, Danyah Miller takes us through a didactic story based on the importance of reading and imagination. She plays the a village librarian and, surrounded by piles of books, she tells us the story of a young boy named Tomas.

Tomas likes to play in the mountains, imagining himself as all kinds of adventurers as he treks alone through the wilderness. Much to the displeasure of his mother he hates reading - and anyway, he isn't particularly good at it. His father doesn't see the point either, referring to books as "sissy stuff" and explaining that you can learn more in a day alone in the wilderness than you can with a month of reading. But gradually the librarian wears him down until he finally appreciates just how awesome reading is.

The simple, carefully pronounced syllables, constant gesticulation and the achingly wholesome pro-reading message put me in mind of those high-wire insomnia fuelled nights. The hidden hours of 4 and 5am tick by, birds incessantly tweet and the bastard sun rises over the horizon. The shops won't open for an hour or two, nobody else is about and unconsciousness is simultaneously so near and so so far. So you flip on the TV and in an anoxic daze, settle for children's TV - dispassionately observing the chirpy presenters through aching, red-lidded eyes.

Swaddled in material that requires no brain power to enjoy, just a vague unfocussed attention on what's going in the rough 180° degrees in front of you, I was settling into a dozy rhythm.

And then the Nazis showed up.

It's fair to say that one of the last things I was expecting in this cosy little children's lesson was the arrival of brown-shirted, jackbooted, fascists, but then I suppose they are the natural enemy of books. The show takes a pretty dark turn as the Nazis proceed to drive the terrified villagers into the woods, destroy all the houses and incinerate the library in hellfire.

The children quietened down. I think I even heard a few traumatised sobs. Thankfully this is a play with a happy end - involving Tomas proving his love of books by entering the burning library and emerging with handfuls of books, then instructing the villagers to do the same. Entertainingly we become the villagers - boxfuls of books being distributed at the back of the theatre which we pass forward towards the stage. By end of the performance we finally realise that, yeah - reading is pretty good isn't it?

All that's just the A-story though and appropriately for a show that fills the stage with books there's a ton of miniature stories nestled within. Highlights are a quick retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's The Nightingale, an improvised story based on suggestions by the audience that features Jaws swallowing the rain in Australia and burping it out onto London and, my favourite, an imaginative retelling of Noah's Ark that explains what happened to unicorns during the flood (spoiler: they turned into narwhals).

Throughout every one of these stories there's a repeated visual metaphor of objects emerging from books. Miller draws objects big and small from them: pop up houses, golden eggs, ladders - even the sea itself. It's a clever device, and the young audience obviously adores anticipating what's going to emerge next. Best received is a kite that mischievously hops from book to book, changing size and drifting up above the stage and a Matryoshka series of books within books. That last one brought the house down, and I made a mental note that apparently the key to entertaining children is to produce a series of consecutively smaller items from one another.

Also keeping things visually dynamic are a series of projections onto the stage. These are carefully judged, so Miller moves a parasol in time with a bird flying across the stage, or we see Tomas running through the pages of a book. Most affecting is the sequence in which the village burns to the ground. The house lights darken and one by one the tiny pop-up book houses on stage are consumed by fire, until huge flames dominate the stage.

The only disappointing aspect is that the top half of the stage is occupied by acrobatic equipment and ladders. I think the show shares its set with Jacqueline Wilson's Hetty Feather, and that Miller ignores them goes noticed by children around me. But based on the reactions of the children around me the show went down like gangbusters. One of the useful things about watching a show surrounded by children is that they're not afraid of making boredom, and though collective attention wandered once or twice, they were engaged and happy throughout.

This is far from the most complex and thoughtful piece of theatre I've seen lately but then it's not supposed to be. I Believe in Unicorns has a noble heart, a surfeit of goodwill - I can't imagine that children won't enjoy the hell out of it. It's only on until the end of the week so if you want to keep your son or daughter occupied for an hour or so until term starts there's few better options.

I Believe in Unicorns is at the Vaudeville Theatre until 31st August. Tickets here.

The core premise of Adam Wingard's The Guest is a rumination on what it would be like if Captain America was a total dick. The answer is a bundle of silliness and over-the-top gore wrapped in a slick coating of beautiful synth music. After the excellent You're Next and the V/H/S films Wingard is carving out a space for himself as the heir to John Carpenter's crown. Like Carpenter's best, these films mischievously screw with audience expectations and take an unashamed thrill in the dishing out of outrageous death.

Taking a bit of a detour from Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens plays David, a US veteran who turns up on a bereaved family's doorstep. He claims to have been best friends with their dead son, and gradually wins their respect and admiration - moving in as the titular guest. We quickly sense that not everything is right with David. For one he's the smuggest arsehole you could ever hope to meet and for another he seems to solve every problem with brutal head smashing .

Stevens deploys a smirk so powerful it could sink battleships, all the while behaving like an enormous cock to everyone around him. Paradoxically he's such a colossal prick that we end up sort of respecting him for it. After all, he's the one providing the entirety of the entertainment in the film and the feckless family that takes him probably have it coming. Steven's is pretty magnificent here, clearly relishing playing an unhinged nutter after so long trapped in buttoned down period drama garbage like Summer in February.

Our noble men in uniform turn out be complete monsters. Didn't see that coming.

Quickly, similarities to Captain America mount up. Everything from David's hairstyle to the costuming to his grotesquely muscled build to the nice-guy normality echoes Chris Evans' performance in the Marvel movies. By the time Lance Reddick is running around as a Special Operations Unit commander, wearing a black, knee-length leather coat (practically in Nick Fury cosplay) it's pretty clear what they're going for. If Marvel's Captain America is how the USA wishes it was, then The Guest presents the awful reality of a modern American Supersoldier.

He kills indiscriminately, exploits the weak and blows up buildings at a whim - with a bashful aw shucks smile on his lips and a baby-blue eyes stare. Even as he goes berserk and takes out practically the entire cast we still find it hard to dislike David - but then a charismatic sociopath is always fun to watch.

Bubbling under this are a few playful potshots at Refn's Drive. I loved Drive, but there's a slight hypocrisy that The Guest picks up on. We're supposed to condemn the violence in Drive as ugly and horrifying - the film criticising us for finding Ryan Gosling's lonely, emotionally stunted antihero attractive while couching him in the coolest of cool aesthetics. The Guest shrugs its shoulders and says "So what? Blood and guts are awesome." Both films share a exploitation, B-movie vibe, both share a predilection for bathing the frame in primary coloured light and both revel in faux-1980s synths - but they fork drastically in one crucial regard. Drive is trying to be more than exploitation, The Guest is a B-movie and proud of it.

And boy do I love a good B-movie. I had a stupid grin plastered over my face as the plot lurched in increasingly bizarre directions. By the time the characters are trapped in a 'Halloween Maze', full of fake zombies, grim reapers and sinister clowns I was in hog's head. I figured there was no place other than down from that high - then we enter an Enter the Dragonesque hall of mirrors. Right then and there Adam Wingard entered my directorial hall of heroes.

Dear Hollywood. More mirror mazes in films pls.

The cherry on top of this scrumptious cake is the outstanding score and soundtrack. I'm going to hazard a guess that Wingard played and loved Hotline Miami, a brutally violent, retro-styled 2D indie videogame. He's poached the best of the artists from its synth-drenched soundtrack - from F.O.O.L.to the mighty Perturbator. No opportunity is passed up to cue up the synths by characters or director - the climax of the film even begins with our antihero/villain in a DJ booth cueing up a supercool track to finish the film with (on a dry-iced, disco-lit dancefloor).

What's particularly wonderful about The Guest is that it avoids so many of the pitfalls films fall into when trying to emulate the 1980s trash film aesthetic. Many directors trying to pull this kind of thing off throw in a few winks and nods, reassuring the audience that the film secretly knows that it's rubbish. Alternatively they use it as an excuse to turn out a substandard product, able to fall back on a defence that "it's supposed to be crap!". But Wingard's palpable love for his cinematic influences shines brightly: he doesn't look down on trash, he tries his best to live up to it.

I honestly wasn't expecting to enjoy The Guest as much as I did but it had me hooked from frame one. Though this isn't a big, important movie it's quietly and effectively satirical in dissecting the modern blockbuster hero: you can examine everyone from Jason Bourne, to Craig's James Bond, to Gosling's Driver and, most obviously, Chris Evans' Captain America through the prism of The Guest. I thoroughly enjoyed every single second of this movie - and if we're keyed into the same sensibilities, so will you.

★★★★★

The Guest opens in the UK on 5th September

I'm a bit late to the party in writing about Lucy Sparrow's Cornershop. Everyone from The Guardian to Buzzfeed to Time Out has been enthusiastically singing its praises. Even The Daily Mailhas given it a nod of approval, which is either horrifying or deeply impressive.

The idea is to recreate the entire contents of a generic cornershop from felt; from beer cans to crisps to sandwiches to newspapers to cigarettes to chewing gum. Even the till is felt! I've written about Sparrow twice before; at the 2013 Whitecross Street Festival where she was standing next to her felt Warholised portrait of serial killer Rose West, and again at POP MODERNlater that year, where she was exhibiting felt-based hardcore pornography.

So does Cornershop mark the point where the artist transforms from punkish enfant terrible to cosy mainstream kitsch? After all, having your smiling picture appear in The Daily Mail is a wallop to anyone's subversive credentials. If you just looked at pictures of Cornershop you'd be forgiven to thinking this is the case. Tiny smiling vegetables peek out from wire racks, looking for all the world like something a Japanese schoolgirl might tote around Shibuya. The objects are individually impressive as a slavish recreation of corporate branding, but is it just an exercise in cutesey "Omg so random!"?

Actually visiting Cornershop is a different kettle of fish. As soon as you walk through the door there's an unexpected air of oppressive. The location must have been abandoned for years previous, the space filled with the cool smell of organic rot. A heavy silence hangs in the air, as if the outside world had been blotted out completely. On the rainy day I was there, a fat drip of water fell on my shoulder from a swollen, sodden ceiling.

These sights, sounds and smells dredged up memories of breaking into abandoned buildings, bending back wooden slats and sneaking through somewhere I shouldn't be - praying that the "Dogs Patrol Here"signs were bluffs. They reminded me of illegal raves in office buildings where commerce was a decade dead, picking my way through the leftover detritus of 1990s officeware, feeling like a forensic archaeologist.

The upshot of is that the felt objects within are infused with a slightly uneasy aura. To understand why this is, I'm going to go via Baudrillard. His famous treatise Simulacra and Simulation interrogates the distinction between symbols, signs and how they relate to contemporaneity. Sparrow's felt objects (and the performance of running of the shop over a month) fall into the simulation category; "the imitation of the operation of a real-world object, process or system over time".

It's worth picking over the similarities and differences between, for example, a can of Stella Artois and its simulated felt doppelgänger. The original can is a commercial commodity, a disposable object with a clear use. It's a temporary metal object that passes through our lives without comment, coldly gripped between meaty fingers, glugged down and summarily disposed of.

The felt can is also a commodity (on sale for £20) but shorn of its use value it comes to represent something more sinister. This is Baudrillard's "perversion of reality": in opposition to its real-life cousin the felt can is soft and pliable, its status as art according it permanence rather than disposability, the hand-crafted nature divorcing it from impersonal mass-production. Baudrillard's conclusion as to the consequences of unfaithful simulation are that the copy "masks and denatures" reality - the felt can nudging us towards a different view of the simulated subject.

Zooming out from this individual can to consider Cornershop as a whole, it functions as a lens through which the blizzard of branded consumer goods is distorted. We're one step removed from normality and the knowledge that the felt goods have no 'use value' allows us to consider the world around in an unnerving new way.

This, coupled with the damp, slightly run-down surroundings gave me an idea of what it'd be like to have an alien perspective on modern consumerism. Imagine if a normal cornershop underwent some kind of Pompeii-like thousand year sealing. What would future generations make of these logos, designs and and colours? "Who the hell was Alberto Balsam?"

We can get a taste of how quickly the familiar transitions into the alien by examining the case of 'the shop that time forgot'. After just forty years the familiar transforms into the strange; the common becomes bizarre - you can feel the foundations of normality shifting under your feet. It's a queasy sensation, one that Cornershop accurately creates.

It's not a seismic shift in perception, as effective as Cornershop is in lifting the curtain of consumerism and letting us peek behind the curtain, Sparrow is kicking back against the fundamentals of capitalism. But the lingering effects last for some time - venturing into a Tesco later that day to buy some dinner the products glowered down at me from the shelves, logos frantically bleating "buy me" like lost sheep. For a split second the whole artifice was obviously ridiculous, then, inexorably, the illusion descended once more as I pondered whether I preferred a four cheese or spinach and ricotta pizza.

Cornershop is awesome in the most literal sense of the word - art that's both epic and totally humdrum at the same time has to be by definition. The time and sweat that's gone into this is palpable, but effort alone doesn't make things worthwhile. What does is that Cornershop pierces the veil of everyday for just a moment, letting us briefly see the clicking, grinding cogs that power our brains, our bodies, our economies and our wallets.

Cornershop is at 19 Wellington Row E2 7BB until August 31st.

Nine years passed. Nine years. Nine. The years creaked by like a rusty car door tortured by an inclement, cold wind. We forgot Sin City, preferred to pretend it was all a bad dream. Noir is dead, its remains splattered all over the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting. A crazed deep howl in the night. I glance up, last night's whiskey a virtuoso soprano hitting high notes behind my bloodshot eyes. A blinding light at the end of a tunnel. It's getting bigger. Screaming towards me like a bat out of hell was the resurrection of Sin City: the whores, the blood, the booze, the beatings, the uh.. more whores (possibly in Nazi uniforms I dunno). But now it's back. The monster is loose! The wolf is out of the cage! Etc.

Yup - after a long hiatus this individualistic, disturbing and visually stylish world finally has a sequel. Confession time: as a 22 year old student I absolutely adored 2005's Sin City. It sat at a unique crucial intersection of violence, warped sexuality and cinematic beauty that I lapped up. The cherry on top was that I'd been reading the comics since I was a teenager and was thrilled to see them perfectly realised on the big screen. But as I broadened my political, ethical and cultural horizons I felt faintly embarrassed that I'd enjoyed it so much.

After all, it was a load of misogynistic, crypto-fascist hogwash right? A world where every woman is a prostitute and every man of worth is a square-jawed crusader who battles against corrupt plutocrats (who are probably Democrats) and solves all his problems with "his mitts". Not helping matters was that author Frank Miller, who had previously just been vaguely fascist, went completely off the deep end and (among other things) released Holy Terror, a book in which a Batman analogue takes on al-Qaeda by way of an racist, frothing rant that straightforwardly argues that every single Muslim is secretly a bloodthirsty terrorist.

And it's not like Robert Rodriguez has been producing much of worth lately either.

So it was with some reservations that I sat down to watch A Dame to Kill For. About five minutes in, as Mickey Rourke's Marv was dismembering some stuck-up college kids (who are probably liberals too), I was straight back in the Sin City zone. I was enjoying the film in precisely the same way as I enjoyed the first; the only difference was now I felt vaguely guilty about it.

Finding myself enjoying something that every intellectual bone in my body tells me not to - a film where of black and white morality, where gender roles are carved into granite and where might indisputably makes right - is a strange and not particularly pleasant sensation. Fundamentally, Sin City appeals to the same base, reptile part of the human brain as fascist propaganda. It boils down complex issues to their most base level; presenting us with (literal) crudely sketched bastards and broads who spell out their motivations in torturous, simile-packed internal monologues and villainous stereotypes to hate.

The material is entirely constructed around goodies and baddies, plutocrat villains motivated entirely by power and sadism. These are bad guys with zero depth other than that they are evil, they love to cause pain and they will squash anyone that defies them. Pitted against them are Miller's trademark semi-reluctant heroes - noble men forced into extreme violence (usually to protect a helpless woman). Nobody smells of roses in Sin City, but the torture, dismemberment and death dealt by our heroes is celebrated, while the villain's is demonised.

The stylised look of Sin City; all chiaroscuro computer-generated precision, presents blood as aesthetically tolerable splashes of white, while blotting out emotion under silhouette and gobs of latex plastered to the actor's faces. This is violence as fetish; something dark and sexual a few steps removed from reality. But pointing out that the violence in Sin City is fetishised feels like pointing out that the sky is blue.

Everything in Sin City is fetishised; from the ridiculous leather and latex BDSM gear sported by every single woman in the film, to the classic 50s sports cars, to the whiskey, the cigarettes, the sex, the money, the weapons. It's like viewing the world through an omni-perverts eyes - every single goddamn thing framed with the same demented, lascivious, boner-inducing gaze.

Eva Green gets this worst than most. She spends large portions of the film entirely naked, posing like a Greek statue. In one memorable sequence she swims nude across the screen in slow motion; the imagery apparently taking direct inspiration from Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 Olympia (seriously, compare this and this). It looks great, but these are visuals lifted from Nazi cinema, expressly designed to inculcate nationalistic pride and promote ideas of eugenic perfection (it's notable that the only black person in the film is a servile, hulking brute).

Vexingly, even recognising these incredibly seamy undertones (overtones?) I still couldn't help enjoying myself. Sure there's about three too many scenes where our heroes assault guarded fortresses and if you did a shot every time someone crashes through a window you'd end up with alcohol poisoning, but the film is too weird not to be entertaining. I can at least respect a film that does ridiculous things like throw in a repulsive, entirely unexplained toad-man and has a plot-point of our hero having massive plastic surgery to change his identity, which appears to amount to a new haircut.

I don't particularly like Frank Miller or Sin City much anymore, this is unambiguously fascist cinema, from the aesthetics, morality and message. But I can't help enjoy getting sucked into this pitch-black mire, the sickest part of me taking vicarious pleasure in wallowing through Frank Miller's ruinously broken psyche.

★★★

The sign on the wall read "Performances may contain traces of nudity, violence, strobe effects, limited visibility and bodily fluids." My kinda night! Nestled underground in the cellars of the the old Bermondsey biscuit factory, Trispace Gallery is a friendly, snug space with the pleasant bonus of having a charming, chubby pug waddling happily around it. That would turn out to be the cutest thing about an evening that descended into freaky-deaky weirdness pretty damn fast. Maybe best not to read this article at work.

IMPURITANS is the 2nd LAUNCH⇪PAD event, organised by the lovely people at CLUSTER BOMB [collective]. It's a performance art showcase and flitting around the room are faces both familiar and new, but all determined to kick back against accepted morality and modes of thinking. What happened was a weirdly erotic cocktail, all winking arseholes, convulsive thrashing and dirt-eating.

Silvereley Allen

Things started charmingly enough, with a couple of songs by Silvereley Allen. With just a keyboard and her voice, she took us through a few of her own numbers and TV on the Radio cover. It was decent enough stuff, and Allen's intricate keyboard skills certainly set the crowd all a-flicker. Her Easier Said Than Done was an obvious highlight, with some neat polyrhythms at play that look tricky as hell to pull off.

Things took a step towards the extreme from here, with Andre Verissimo leading us into a dimly-lit space at the back and giving us Gut Twilight. Cloaked in darkness and clad in a fetching aquamarine skirt he instructed us to scream as loud as we could. We did. Following this he lay down on the floor and pulled up his skirt to reveal that he'd stuck a doll's head on his cock and balls, which he angled around the room as if it was looking at us. Then he jabbed a hypodermic needle into his cock and engaged in a bit of the old winking arsehole routine at the audience, before wrapping things up with a light bit of harmonica-scored shadow play.

Andre Verissimo

It's a testament to the audience they took being stared at by the triple-eyed dolls head/anus hybrid entirely in stride. As for me, while I could appreciate the bizarro genderfucked birth imagery at play in having a baby's head appear from a man's genitalia, all I could think was that I was experiencing a John Waters film in real time (in particular the famous 'singing asshole' scene from Pink Flamingos). Applying concrete meaning to a sight like this is missing the point a bit, what's best to grip onto is the sensations you feel staring at a sight like this; shock, disgust, confusion and the growing urge to giggle.

Emma Louvelle

Following this was You are Drunk Frozen Snowflake; by Emma Louvelle. After having written a message on a large piece of paper she leapt into a wild dance. Her movements are obviously carefully choreographed, yet they look like her muscles are being involuntarily jerked by a sadistic puppetmaster - like on-stage electro-convulsive therapy. She's all jabbing elbows, whip-crack neck movements and fierce kicks, a grimly determined expression on her face. It's so intense that it crosses into intimidation - and being a tiny bit scared that she's going to shoot this aggression out into the audience is an interesting sensation.

Robert John Foster

Simmering under all this were two durational performances by Robert John Foster and Skew Wiff. Foster spent the entire night standing motionless in the corner with a lampshade on his head. Credit where credit's due - doing this for three hours takes a hell of a lot of patience and physical effort. It was interesting how quickly I began treating him as furniture rather than a person. I was happily having chats with friends right next to him, constantly forgetting that there was a real person underneath.

Skew Wiff

Skew Wiff's performance TOI (Tale of the Invisible) appeared to be some kind of night-long cathartic expunging of the artist's psychological trauma. At various times he was dipping his head in a bucket of murky water, discordantly playing an accordion or simply catatonically crouching naked in the corner. I noticed he'd written "I peed on the floor"on the wall, so I suppose he did that too at some point. Though it looked interesting enough, this regression into a primal state of madness stuff isn't really my kettle of fish - always reminding a bit of Brian from Spaced. Still, this sort of thing works nicely enough as a durational performance, and when you're waiting in between the other acts it's nice to pop over and see what he's up to: "Oh, he's writhing in agony while covered in black goo. Neat."

Matt Goodmith

I initially figured Matt Goodsmith's Tertiary was hitting another of my performance art turnoffs, namely being extremely boring on purpose. With two chairs on stage, he and another artist moved between them in patterns, moving between sitting and standing next to each other. Hyper-conceptual pattern-based repetition drives me up the wall, but thankfully things evolved pretty quickly towards something more interesting. They established two games with simple rules and invited the crowd to participate. Very quickly, the crowd worked out ways to bend these rules, and little systems and movements sprang up from some very simple building blocks. There was some nice adversarial confrontation between artist and audience here - each trying to outwit the other.

Next on was Jasmine Pytelová with Love Your Mother - which took the form of an intense magical ritual. She took the stage in a red dress, a red and white cross drawn on her face and feathers in her hair.. Ripping the dress off revealed that the red line carried on down her torso, over her belly and all the way to her left foot. Naked she slowly ground herself into a pile of soil at her feet, the room quickly filling with a warm, earthy smell. She rubbed it all over her body, even eating some of it. The sight of her staring out at us, blackened soil-stained lips was crazy powerful - giving me a good old-fashioned case of the cold shivers.

Jasmine Pytelova

It perhaps goes without saying that this ecosexual communion was powerfully and primally erotic. As she writhed atop the dirt, pressing it into herself, the boundaries between human and environment being broken down piece by piece until they were one. The frank sexuality, pagan imagery and ecological bent of the piece hearkened back to sixties hippie performance artists, who were themselves referencing rituals from around the world, a continuity stretching back through ages. So it's appropriate that Pytelová concluded by wrapping a string around the audience's necks and connecting that to a small plant she'd planted in the mound, thus linking us all in one big sexy circle of life - our atavistic desire to spread our genes desire literally to mud, bacteria and foliage.

I thought it was dead good.

Annamaria Pinaka & Jennifer Picken

Rounding out the evening was Annamaria Pinaka and Jennifer Picken's drag king reworking of Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round. Despite the three red-dress wearing dancers at the rear pulling 60s doo-wop shapes, the tone is pretty damn far from glamorous. These personae the kind of smelly men you get stuck in line next to at the Post Office - all bad breath, deeply questionable personal hygiene and stained clothing. With underpants bulging and lascivious expressions on their faces they slowly dance like a clinically depressed uncle at a wedding, revolving like they don't give a fuck. It's a creepshow sight, and the perfect capper to a fascinating night.

My other option for the evening was to watch a film in which Helen Mirren opens a curryhouse in Paris. Looks like I made the right call.

In Neil LaBute's Autobahn a car interior becomes torture chamber, confessional booth and psychiatrist's couch. Divided into seven monologues and conversations, we meet characters in various states of emotional turmoil, trapped within the glass and steel of their cars, whistling down endless highways.

The only scenery is the skeletonised frontage of a BMW 3 Series. Scooped up from a junkyard, the car's paint is sloughing away, the headlights scooped out leaving a blank, corpse-like stare. Sat front-row centre with my nose to the radiator I felt an ominous sensation that the car was bearing down upon me; dusty old bones of steel, chrome and plastic about to reanimate into carburettor-throbbing, tyre screeching, petrol-fuming life.

The four bolts of lightning set to reanimate this beast are Zoë Swenson-Graham, Sharon Maughan, Tom Slatter and Henry Everett. They take it in turns to switch characters; driver / passenger; aggressor / victim; silent sphinx / blabbermouth. LaBute's cast of characters ranges from a self-destructive teenage smackhead, to a psychotic girlfriend from hell right through to a neurotic cuckold and a pair of grossly pathetic paedophiles.

These are horrible people; venal, self-involved abusers, masochists and the generally deranged. LaBute spins out his tales with jet-black gallows humour, gradually teasing out the horrible truth behind the situation. For example; we meet an overly cheery, spectacled man on a roadtrip with a young girl. At first we assume that she's his daughter, but their dialogue gradually reveals that he's her teacher, he's abducted her from school and he's driving her to a distant forest to sexually abuse her.

So not exactly "ha-ha"funny. This is the kind of humour that curls in the pit of your stomach, LaBute poking fun at both the dippy innocence of the child victim, and the mindless small-talk of the paedophile as he engages in fast food small-talk while furtively tucking his boner into his waistband.

Theoretically pitch-dark humour delivered by a gaggle of grotesques should be very much up my street. Some of my favourite comedy wades neck deep through the extremes of human behaviour; Chris Morris'Blue Jam, Todd Solondz's Happiness or Takashi Miike's Visitor Q, Ichi the Killer et al. These comedies shine a lizght into the cellar of the human soul, judging the worst of humanity as pathetic and bizarre - you laugh, but you feel guilty as you do so. This is what Neil LaBute is going for in Autobahn, but unfortunately he never quite gets there.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and various characters sitting a car for two hours or so rapidly gets a bit dull. Not helping is that each of the seven vignettes follows roughly the same dramatic structure; layers of an onion gradually being peeled back to reveal the truth. Problem is once you understand this it's not particularly hard to figure out the 'twists' to the scenes way in advance, robbing them of much of their dramatic vitality.

Not helping matters is the dramatic device of having one character deliver a monologue to another, silent character. At first this feels like a brave move; the opening scene is Swenson-Graham's teenage addict delivering an increasingly abusive tirade to her traumatised, silent mother, played by Maughan. Shorn of dialogue every facial tic, sideways glance and sip of coffee is pregnant with meaning and significance, a masterclass in subtle, physical acting that beautifully ratchets up the tension. Then LaBute pulls the same silent character trick over and over again, each time to lesser effect.

Dialogue-wise LaBute works from the same sprawling steam-of-consciousness style that Richard Linklater and his indie ilk mine so well. Words flow like water from the character's mouths, people so desperate to avoid silence that they blather out a constant stream of digressions. It's from this information soup of information that we have to strain out the meaningful chunks of information - quietly playing detective. This tactic works gangbusters in the best vignettes (the drug-addict and date-from-hell ones), and largely annoys in the worst (a dull rant about getting a "game system" back from an ex girlfriend).

Somewhat salvaging even the worst segments are the cast, who all demonstrate a chameleonic ability, cycling between personae like they're shuffling a deck of cards. I was particularly impressed by their tiny shifts in body language, their posture and non-verbal communication going almost as far to establish their characters as what they say. With that in mind, Swenson-Graham is an obvious stand-out, switching from spiky insouciance to goofy psychopathy to virginal victim as effortlessly as putting on a fresh jacket. Also of note is Henry Everett, who impresses with the quantity rather than the quality of his acting. He's all bug-eyes, bobbing head, beads of sweat and flailing arms - a student of the school of 'mega-acting'. The effect is rather like a neverending drum solo at a concert, technically impressive but a tiny bit numbing.

Autobahn is ultimately an experiment in limitations, how much drama can be mined from two people in a car together? The claustrophobic surroundings hint towards a Ballardian atmosphere - showing us humanity imprisoned by it's own poisonous machinery, inexorably speeding upon an endless highway towards a foregone conclusion. It's an interesting experiment, but not a successful one - the weaker segments drag down the better ones and ending the play with two drawn-out, disturbing (and not particularly funny) scenes about the sexual abuse of children displays a weird tone-deafness.

Not the worst thing LaBute's ever been involved with, but not especially great either.

Autobahn runs until 20th September at the King's Head Theatre, Upper Street. Tickets here.

Poor Life of Crime. It never really stood a chance. You adapt an Elmore Leonard twisty-turny tale of witty criminals, pack it with awful haircuts and fashion and put together a decent cast. Things are looking up! Then, once the movie is in the can the studio sits on it and waits for a suitable release date. And waits. And waits...

While the film goes unseen along comes American Hustle, which covers the exact thematic, tonal and aesthetic territory to far superior effect. And so we come to September 2014, the film being gently snuck into theatres for a short run before finding its natural in the bargain DVD bucket. Don't get me wrong, Life of Crime most definitely isn't some hidden gem, but it's certainly worthy of a smidge of sympathy.

The movie revolves around petty thieves Ordell (Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes) deciding to climb up the criminal food chain by moving into kidnapping. Their target: Mickey Dawson (Jennifer Aniston), trophy wife to property magnate Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins). While he's away on business in the Bahamas they intend to snatch her, imprison her in a Neo-Nazi co-conspirator's spare room and ransom her back to him for a princely $1 million.

Predictably, it all goes a bit wrong. There's a faintly Coen-esque quality to this farce, the narrative propelled by a series of misunderstandings, coincidences and plain old stupidity. The kidnapper's biggest problem is that Frank Dawson doesn't particularly want his wife back. He's been having an affair with the sexy and amoral Melanie (Isla Fisher), and had arranged to have his wife served with divorce papers.

With no money forthcoming the kidnappers bicker amongst themselves, trying to work out how to best squeeze some money out of their investment. Meanwhile Mickey, trapped in a miserable marriage, doesn't seem to mind being kidnapped too much, and is forming a close bond with one of the kidnappers. And so not only do they kidnap Mickey, they also, just perhaps kidnap... her heart?

There's nothing obviously wrong with this loosely knotted tale of double-crossing, but the end result is leaden and devoid of tension. Nobody, not the criminals, the victims, the police or the peripheral characters really displays much passion about what's happening, and this lack of interest leaches right through the screen and infects the audience. If they don't give a shit, why should we?

Mos Def does a lot of half-hearted shrugging in this.

The prime offender is, unfortunately, Jennifer Aniston. While it's nice to see her appearing in a film whose title isn't in bright red sans-serif capitals, she just doesn't have the range for this material. In the initial scenes she's decent enough as a put upon trophy wife, but once she's kidnapped she seems less terrified and more blase, reverting to a Rachel Greenish baseline ironic distance. Even when she overhears her kidnappers arguing whether they should chop off her fingers she appears more annoyed than terrified.

It feels a bit unfair to lay too much blame at Aniston's door, especially given that the core of the movie shows a woman being liberated from unhappiness by forced abduction and threats of rape. It's... well, it's an interesting perspective on character development, and in better hands might produce something worthwhile. In Life of Crime it's fumbled and half baked, the message apparently (intentional or otherwise) is that being kidnapped and imprisoned can be a totally fun and positive life experience.

Further sucking out any excitement is that there's no proper villain in the film, which means there's no danger whatsoever. Our criminals are all loveable rogues rather than baddies, which extends to the bizarre bumbling comedy Neo-Nazi, portrayed as a goofy Swastika-loving doofus.

The 'real' villain is the despicable husband, with Tim Robbins apparently taking direct cues from 'Bad Future Biff Tannen' in Back to the Future Part II. But even he's a moronic figure of fun, Robbins almost going pantomime-broad with this greasy, horny middle-aged lothario. What remains is the extraneous character played by Will Forte who spends the entirety of the film wandering around with a gormless expression on his face not doing anything.

Inaction is the default mode for these characters, all of whom act like they'd rather be anywhere else than involved in a crime caper. This means that even at a svelte 98 minute run-time the film quickly runs out of steam, eventually shuddering to a complete halt as the credits roll mid-scene with nothing resolved.

It's odd. The bones of a good film are here. There's a decent fetishisation of the 1970s; all clashing patterns, plaid, lots of smoking and stupid haircuts, and there's the usual soundtrack of cool, guitar-led 70s rock. The cast is all capable of turning in above average performances and while it's not going to turn any heads with stylish cinematography, it's certainly not a markedly ugly film.

But there's a palpable lack of passion, as if everyone involved has their next project in mind. This isn't a crime against cinema, but the best I can say about Life of Crime is that it exists, it's pretty short and doesn't ask a great deal of the audience.

★★

Life of Crime is released 5th September.

A ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex bares its jagged teeth on the poster. There's a quote describing it as "awe-inspiring". Perhaps that's why some hapless parent plumped to bring a gaggle of excited five year olds to Dinosaur 13. Unfortunately for her and the children, this is less a thrilling romp through the Mesozoic period and more a dry, analytical documentary about a complex legal battle, with a focus on the minutia of South Dakota land law.

Enjoyment of Dinosaur 13 hinges on two things. If you're interested in the commercial processes behind paleontology you're onto a winner. Similarly so if you like picking through legal logic puzzles. Fortunately I like both, so Dinosaur 13, though a pretty damn dry documentary, held my interest for the full two hours. The five-year olds lasted an hour, with one increasingly dismayed kid politely whispering "Mummy, when are the dinosaurs coming?"

The titular Dinosaur 13 is the most famous dinosaur fossil in the world; Sue. Discovered in the badlands of South Dakota in 1990 Sue is the thirteenth T.rex discovered, and the largest, most articulated and best preserved. A discovery like Sue is every paleontologist's fantasy and through grainy early 90s camcorder we track the excitement, amazement and sheer awe on the faces of those gently excavating her from the desert.

Peter Larson, Sue Hendrikson and Sue (and a dog).

Their leader is Peter Larson, fossil-mad since a child and infatuated with his discovery. He and his brother Neal co-founded the Black Hills Institute in 1974, a commercial paleontological company set up to unearth fossils and sell them to museums around the world. He speaks in movingly poetic terms about the thrill of his work, explaining that the light from the stars in the sky left their stars at the same time as the fossilised animal breathed its last, sandwiching him within hundreds of millions of years of history.

With Sue safely out of the ground and the landowner compensated the future was bright. Local spirits were high: children would regularly come to visit Sue and plans were afoot to raise money to construct a local museum to house her - a huge economic boost for this small town. Then, one day the FBI and the National Guard showed up, ordered everyone out of the offices, packed Sue into crates and bundled her into a dimly lit warehouse - her home for the the next four years.

The bulk of the film is devoted to the resulting legal battles between the US Government, Maurice Williams (the owner of the land Sue was found on) and the employees of the Black Hills Institute. Douglas is clearly on the side of Black Hills and the film treats the battle as an inherent perversion of the legal process; a tale replete with vindictive judges, hints of shadowy conspiracies and the overpowering bureaucracy of the US Government.

The mantra repeated throughout the film, whether it be in stock footage or talking heads, is "This the land of the free! How can this happen in America!?" This unified chorus against the depredations of 'big government' exposes the libertarianism embedded deep in Dinosaur 13, something best highlighted when the film uses a clip of Bill O'Reilly to support their case. Boiled to its core, Miller argues for the freedom of private enterprise; that a citizen should own the fruits of their labour and be able to dictate its commercial use.

Short shrift is given to the US Government's position that Sue, having been discovered on land held in trust for the Sioux tribe, legally belongs to them. There's a fascinating ruling midway through proceedings that dinosaur fossils are land. The paleontologists are unified in their indignance that Sue be regarded as "real estate". Ridiculous as that might seem it's a smart bit of legal reasoning: given that the original dinosaur bone has become mineralised over millions of years it is literally composed of 'land'. The crux of this is that in buying Sue, the Black Hill Institute was unknowingly negotiating for the purchase of land from Maurice Williams, land which he was legally unable to sell.

Dinosaur 13 never admits for a moment that its scrappy underdogs could be anything other than in the right - when the law defeats them they fall back on a position of moral superiority. Fortunately for Miller they can claim this ground much more successfully, with a subsequent criminal trial appearing to move into the realms of the genuinely vindictive.

It's a testament to the skills of Miller that, even though I'm opposed to the libertarian philosophy upon which Dinosaur 13 makes its case, I find it easy to sympathise with the people caught up in it. Peter Larson's devotion to Sue is hugely touching; their separation more reminiscent of a tragic love story than scientific endeavour. This passion gives the final shots of him striding purposefully back into the endless desert a great deal of gravitas.

On display to the public in Chicago.

But the heart of Dinosaur 13 is Sue. She is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, her enormous bones infused with regal dignity and a subtle sense of loss. When she's ultimately sold to the Field Museum in Chicago for a massive $8.4 million the paleontologists aren't surprised, saying "she's worth so much more". Sue is one of the most magnificent things ever drawn out from beneath the earth, beyond all the politics and law one thing is crystal clear: she was worth fighting for.

★★★

The Me Plays is like watching a dam burst in slow motion. Behind the façade of jokey, "whey lads!" banterish masculinity lies a miserable torrent of self-loathing, regret and misery. Over the course of two hour long monologues Andrew Maddock performs a ruthless self-autopsy, delving elbow deep into his psyche for our edification. The result is a magnetic piece of theatre that doesn't so much grab your attention as nail your eyes to the stage.

The night is divided into two halves. Junkie shows us modern man navigating the world of digital romance. With a polyphonic beep and vibrational hiss an iPhone lights up; Andrew has a Tinder match! She's a lovely looking girl named Tabitha and the two arrange a date the coming Friday night. But unbeknownst to Tabitha she's in competition with an army of anonymous YouPorn girls for Andrew's affections. This legion of gaping, wet orifices, plump collagen lips and understanding smiles glistens safely behind an iPad touchscreen, asking nothing of Andrew but self-pleasure and a handy sock.

How can Tabitha compete with that? We see a man locked into a cycle of self-hatred, tugging at his gut, bemoaning his "twisted skin"and projecting his hatred onto the skinny bearded hipsters adorning posters in Top Man. Andrew is hardly the Elephant Man, but he's no head-turner. His curse is being utterly average: an average upbringing, average looks, average personality and average smarts - and, as he argues, what self-respecting woman would settle for average?

The second half, Hi Life, I Win, begins with our author lying on a hospital bed, trying to take his mind off some impending biopsy results. He finds solace in the past, dialling back the clock to the mid 90s and reliving his rebellious teenage years. What follows is a catalogue of 1990s references familiar to anyone who's about 30. With a smile on his face he recalls how he used to be a pain in the arse to his teachers.

As he guides us through the past we touch upon his visit to a Christian camp for 'difficult' children, where he meets a tanned, guitar-wielding cool Christian named Arizona Dan. . These anarchic teenage years, with Dr Dre as role model and "smoke weed every day" as a motto are contrasted with his current situation; the days that felt like they'd never end versus the potential numbered days of a negative prognosis.

I don't know anything about Andrew Maddock other than what I've seen on stage last night. Given the naked emotion on stage I figure there's two possibilities. Either he's a stupendously great actor; able to conjure up these two characters, both of whom bristle with nuance and dead-on physical presence, or these are two slightly fictionalised versions of himself.

I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. On one hand it seems a touch unlikely that he could do a performance this raw without drawing from personal experience. But considering he's performing a one-man show it seems unlikely that he's as crippled by self-doubt and shame as his characters. Part of what makes Maddock's material so compelling is that everyone in the audience is able to spot the less attractive, less confident parts of themselves in these monologues. You cringe in recognition as he expertly outlines some dark, private part of the human condition that you'd prefer to be kept behind closed curtains; the dark nights of the soul boldly thrown into the spotlight.

I'm aware that I'm making this all sound a bit grim, but aside from all the incisive confessions The Me Plays is also really, really damn funny. The torrent of memories and regrets is layered with oodles of witty asides and observations as pinpoint accurate as a laser-guided missile. Maddock's best weapon is a tonal pendulum constantly swinging between humour and pathos. So after a particularly gruelling confession we get a gag that acts as a pressure valve, released a relieved gale of laughter from the audience. Conversely we can be caught mid-laugh by a tiny, diamond-hard nugget of depression, a personal observation so cutting that your guffaw is halted mid-larynx.

Maddock's rapid-fire delivery lands somewhere between stand-up comedy, poetry and rapping - an neverending flow of tightly enunciated, precise rhymes. This firmly defines the monologues as a performance, which gives us a much needed emotional buffer in the middle of this raw confessional. Anyway, leaving aside the material for a moment, simply delivering two lengthy, fast-paced monologue with nary a stammer nor hesitation is a high-wire act worthy of praise, not to mention the physical performing going on throughout.

You can probably tell by now that I was seriously impressed with this. The entire two hours I was completely wrapped up in what's going on on stage to the exclusion of all else in the world. For Maddock to put himself on a mostly empty stage and hope to command our attention with something that's not quite stand-up, not quite theatre and not quite poetry is a brave but ultimately successful move. The Me Plays is sometimes painful, sometimes genuinely hilarious but always - always - fascinating.

The Me Plays is at The Old Red Lion, Tues-Sat 7.30pm, matinees Sat 2pm, Sun 3pm until 20th September. Tickets here.

I was a little restless by the time the interval arrived in this musical adaptation of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. Events so far were a touch too Mills & Boon for my taste; a romance story revolving around curiously specific amnesia has a suspiciously cheddarish odour. But from unpromising roots grows a pleasantly knotty bit of drama, one that if nothing else offers a largely unheard perspective on The Great War

At the centre is the fractured mind of Christopher Baldry, a Captain returning from the Western Front. Hospitalised after suffering a head injury in a shell strike which killed his comrades, he's sent back home to convalesce. On his return his family are delighted that he's in one piece and apparently in good spirits. But while his body is intact his mind isn't.

More specifically he's completely forgotten Jenny, his wife of many years and is fixated on Margaret, a past girlfriend and his first love. She was a simple country barmaid when Christopher swept her off her feet and the two embarked on a passionate summertime romance, to be eventually separated by class divisions. But now, with the dormant fires of love stoked to life, he falls madly back in love with her.

He's happy. Margaret is happy. Christopher's wife Jenny less so. Ditto Margaret's husband William. And so we begin unpicking his mental trauma, the material gradually transitioning into a debate between the relative merits of miserable reality and happy delusion, with the wrinkle that if Christopher regains his 'sanity' he'll be summarily tossed back into the meatgrinder of the Western Front.

The key to appreciating The Return of the Soldier is to keep it's date of publication firmly in mind. The novel was written during the war, so isn't bound up in traditional historical narratives of what the Great War signifies. One notable difference is that this is a story from a feminine perspective; shorn of the traditional iconography of trench warfare, mustard gas and poppies - ratherinformed by the worries, paranoia and fear of what misery is taking place a hundred or so miles over the channel.

That the material is very much of its time has its downsides too. Freudian psychotherapy was very much en vogue, and West's book treats mental illness and trauma as if the brain is a piece of faulty plumbing with blockages that need to be cleared. The central plot device of amnesia is painfully cliché in 2014, and the eventual treatments quaintly straightforward to modern audiences.

Regardless of the source material's qualities, it at least works well as a musical. This is a fat-free staging, with a cast of just five, a sparsely decorated stage and keyboard led score,. By necessity this means events are tightly locked onto personal drama rather than straying into the epic. Even within the small cast, emotional focus is zeroed in on the two women battling for Christopher's love; both of whom are at minimum three-dimensional characters with their own fears, hopes and passions.

The production is no slouch in musical terms either. The refrain of the title echoes throughout the songbook, varying into from triumph to sadness. The musical progression dovetails nicely with our evolving understanding of the meaning of 'the return of the soldier', whether it be the physical return of Christopher at the beginning of play or the psychiatric resurrection of a soldiering mentality. Furthering this musical thematic development is the frequent close-harmonising of the three women , nudging the audience towards recognising the erosion of class boundaries caused by the war.

As far as individual performances, the obvious stand-out is Michael Matus''end of the pier' song about the joys of psychiatry; of putting men's minds back together and bundling them back off to war. Cane in hand and straw boater on head he cuts a sinister sight as he stalks across the stage, delivering an upbeat, jaunty number. Though leavened with ominous undertones it's a moment of levity and energy - just the ticket in a musical largely about heartache.

There's a lot to like in The Return of the Soldier and by the time the curtain fell I was surprised how much my opinion of the show had improved. Obvious care has gone into translating West's novel into a musical form, the fruits of that labour clear to see. Most of the flaws lie largely with the dated structure of the novel, though that it's very much a product of its time is a boon as well as a curse.

In a centenary year replete with puffed-up politicians and mawkish displays of sentimentality it's refreshing to see a production that refuses to make grand pronouncements on the morality of the Great War. In this regard it's largely a success. Though dated, a touch cheesy and a bit melodramatic, this is a fascinating time capsule of 1918 sensibilities.

The Return of the Soldier is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 20 September 2014. Tickets £16 on sale here.

You'd think we were lambs being led to the slaughter. After an hour's wait in a Hackney back street we're urged down a concrete ramp towards a dark cellar. Our phones are stripped from us and bouncers systematically rifle through our pockets for recording devices. Finally we emerge into a ill-lit cement basement. The remains of a 1960s paintjob peel from the walls and old industrial fossils rustily jut from the ceiling.

It's moody, creepy and slightly oppressive. The perfect spot to experience new Aphex Twin then. Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin, aka AFX, aka Polygon Window, aka The Tuss etc etc) is the mystery King of electronic music: the Mozart of mixers, the Beethoven of the breakbeat, the Shostakovich of sampling, the uh.. Kirchner of the Korg PS-3300. He's the guy playing chess while his contemporaries are still struck on whack-a-mole. James inhabits a mist of pseudonyms, half-truths and urban legends, more than happy to let bizarre stories about his reclusive life and behaviour spread like wildfire - the enigma made ironic by constantly using his own sinisterly grinning face as a visual motif.

Much hype surrounds Syro being his first album in 13 years - as if James had been sitting around twiddling his thumbs since the 2001 release of Drukqs. Frankly his output over this period diminishes the importance of the 'traditional' album release, including the monumental Analord series (four and a half hours of music over 11 EPs), his anonymous work as 'Brian and Karen Tregaskin', a (likely fictional) couple collaborating under the pseudonym 'The Tuss' and, apparently, ten completed and unreleased albums he doesn't feel ready to release yet.

This is a good way of announcing an album.

But the subject of tonight's event, Syro, described by James as his "most accessible"record yet is very much ready to go. 'Accessible' is like a slight misnomer when it comes to Aphex Twin; his brand of insanely complex, sometimes aggressive and idiosyncratic dance music makes no concessions to commercial musical trends. But it is accessible in that, unlike most high-falutin' experimental music, you can rave your tits off to it.

As the crowd finishes filing in, we stand, lit only by the soft yellow/green glow of a projector. Then, *whump* minipops 67 kicks in. I'd listened to it earlier in the day on headphones at home, but standing next to the speaker the initial beats are like taking a blow to the gut. The volume is ear-splittingly intense, the bass rattles my bones, the jelly of my brain wobbles away to the beat. This is a good way to hear music for the first time.

As we progress through the album we quickly hear that unmistakable Aphex sound - the skeleton of the music a beat thudding away in the background while infinitely varied synth melodies, drum flourishes and distorted samples frolic away in the gaps. I hate the genre description 'intelligent dance music' (as James quite rightly pointed out it snootily implies "this is intelligent and everything else is stupid"), but after hearing music like this I can't help but think there's at least something to the description.

His arrhythmic tangles of sounds, somehow both chaotic and ordered tease and cajole the brain. There's just so much going on; the joy of hearing gossamer-light synthesiser melodies flitting into view like a butterflies before vanishing back into the beat. Tiny snare rat-a-tats appear and run away, cheekily pulsating for a few seconds as if in opposition to the thumping bass. Its not so much that this is dance music for intelligent people; more that you get more out of it the more you focus in on it, the music most beautiful in those brief moments where your brainwaves synchronise with what's you're hearing, the sensation of being able to divine order in chaos.

Or you can just let it sweep you away on a blissful amphetamine haze. Listening to an album for the first time is usually a solitary affair for me; going out for a run or lying in bed with headphones on. Experiencing it in a basement full of dancing bodies is a different story altogether. Smiles, whoops and happy claps fill the room when things get dead virtuoso, the mood enhanced by appearance of distorted Aphex logos projected on the wall and the deployment of a very powerful strobe when things get real heavy. At the front of the room an insanely happy, very sweaty fat man is going bananas, stomping and screaming like a caveman that's brought down a mammoth - his presence immeasurably adding to my enjoyment of the music.

This is what James means when he says that Syro is accessible. This is experimental, bold and technically outstanding music, but it's music you can dance to. In a 1995 article in The Wire magazine, they sent an Aphex Twin sampler to experimental music luminary Karlheinz Stockhausen for his opinion. He loftily pronounced that James should "immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions". James responded: "he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine ... then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."

It's this inclusive, raver friendly ethos that powers Syro, an album utterly unashamed of being dance music. The sway of hips to the beat, the shuffle of feet on the floor and palms shining upwards to the sky aren't something to be embarrassed about, they're the essence of the genre; the irresistible effect on the body of a crazy/fun beat. To deny this is to miss the point. And so, tucked away within the tracks are sonic quotes of twenty years of dance: the music crammed with strangely familiar beats and samples, dredging up memories of 6am sweatboxes, the frantic chewing of gum and pinpoint pupils.

Closing out the album is the beautiful aisatsana, departing from thumping bass for soft, slow, reflective piano repetitions. Birdsong samples waft gently throughout the piece, conjuring up happy times of wandering home from a club in the early morning with promise of a hot cup of tea on arrival, reflecting on all the night. It's the kind of song you wish could go on forever, James apparently never running out of minute pitch shifts and variations on the basic melody. It's lovely.

I sense that musicologists are still going to be listening to, unpicking and appreciating Richard D James a century from now. I just hope they still know how to dance.

Syro is released 19th September on Warp Records.

My theory was that a documentary that sounded so dull on paper simply had to be gripping on screen. The subject: the Grande Raccordo Anulare or GRA, Rome's equivalent of London's M25 ring-road. I figured that for a film-maker to pack up his equipment and devote a decent chunk of his time to documenting this life, then this must be the most goddamn fascinating urban traffic management project in the world. It really isn't - but that's not the point.

Rosi's Rome is shorn of history; absent are Roman ruins and lofty views of St Peter's Basilica; replacing them are dowdy public housing projects, car parks, half-dead industrial ruins and examples of half-assed architectural modernism. Stumbling around these spaces are an curious crew of society's dregs, centrifugally tossed outwards from the centre of the city.

As a fly on the wall we dispassionately observe the minutia of their lives; a laptop-fixated girl bickers with a bearded old man; women in a decrepit camper van eat mozzarella and discuss their charges for indecent exposure; an old man gets dressed up in a cape for some archaic ceremony; transsexual prostitutes haggle for prices on the pavement; a man chats to his senile mother; skeletal corpses are re-interred and so on. We drift between them as a ghostly, unacknowledged presence - taking in a random couple of minutes of their lives before moving on.

The film is shot on a cheap looking digital camera; I'd guess equipment chosen for portability rather than for cinematic aesthetics. Anyway, Rosi clearly isn't interested in trying to reveal the beauty of these grotty locations; rather to exacerbate their normality. The entire film is shot in perfect digital focus, the effect being a flattening of background, foreground and subject into one image. With an reliance on pre-existing lighting, colours become desaturated and shadows bleed into one another. This all adds up to a film that looks as if it might have been shot on an iPhone.

So what is Rosi trying to achieve here? He's made a purposefully ugly film, stuffed it with a gaggle of disconnected no-hopers who appear to be ticking off the days until they're tossed into the ground. The GRA road, always bustling away in the background, audible if not seen, becomes a symbol of economic activity. A thousand headlights swoop around Rome, creating a ring of light - described in the opening credits as "like Saturn's ring". Yet the people who co-exist with this monumental road are forgotten, living a nomadic, forgotten existence.

This juxtaposition of dynamic economic power and depressive static failure leads us down an irresistibly political path. Sacro GRA is a snapshot of a society teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Rome (and by extension Italy and presumably the whole civilised world) has become rotten, a decomposing edifice sustained only by the memory of past glories.

The views of tiny, strip-lit box-apartments, television sets illuminating stained mattresses recall Orwell's 1984; a society without joy, clinging grimly onto some half-remembered past. There's a visual progression that takes us from these human matchboxes straight to a mausoleum; apartments ebing mirrored with holes for stacked coffins. In creepy footage we see hazmat-suited workers dragging lead coffins from their holes, cutting them open and transferring these dry, papery skeletons to a pit on the outskirts of Rome, unceremoniously dumping them in the shadow of the GRA.

The conclusion of Rosi's argument uses palm weevils as a metaphor for these disparate Romans. The film-maker himself is reflected in one of his subjects; an eccentric scientist/gardener making his way through the palm garden with a microphone and sound recording device. He pokes the mic deep into the palm tree and amplifies the sounds inside, revealing a cacophony of chewing and squeaking - what he describes as "an orgy".

It's a none too subtle metaphor. The GRA becomes the bark of the palm tree, the innards Rome and so the citizens are insects locked into an apocalyptic cycle of consumption, reproduction and death. Not exactly the feel good experience of the year.

While there's more than enough intellectual meat to chew on in Sacra GRA, the actual task of watching the film isn't particularly enjoyable. The combination of deliberately uninspiring visuals and a ponderous pace meant that, while I appreciated the argument Rosi makes, frankly it was a bit difficult to keep my eyes open.

Sacro GRA is firmly experimental cinema, relying entirely on an audience approaching it intellectually rather than for entertainment purposes. It's reductive to describe it as "boring", but hell - it is boring. But this is a purposeful brand of boring - boring with a point. The closest point of comparison I can think of are Godard's 2010 Film Socialisme and Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's 1982 Trop tôt, trop tard. Both are similarly boring (and not hugely fun to watch) but in both you sense that careful reasoning has gone into showing an audience certain images, thus imploring you to analyse it as best you can.

Audience mileage for Sacro GRA largely depends on their tolerance for the avant-garde. Though enigmatic and fiercely idiosyncratic it's actually one of the more watchable examples of arty political cinema. That's not a huge compliment and (though I don't want to sound snooty) any mainstream audiences watching this will probably end up baffled and annoyed. It's difficult to assign a star rating to something this, but tellingly, writing about Sacro GRA was a hell of lot more fun than watching it.

Make of that what you will.

Sacro GRA is released in the UK on 7th November

It's a horrible feeling to realise you're going to hate something five minutes in. Your stomach clenches into a pressured ball as you glance furtively at the exit to the theatre, suddenly envious of every other human being on the planet on the other side. Wingman might have been tailor-made to rub me up the wrong way; a spiral of crap baby jokes and gloopily sentimental observations on life and family with all the social insight of a Hallmark card.

Wingman is the brainchild of Richard Marsh, playing what I hope is a heavily fictionalised version of himself: a paranoid emotional leech that can't see beyond the end of his own nose. The theme of the show is self-flagellation, a litany of Marsh bemoaning his personal worthlessness, his neurotic tendencies and his innate pettiness.

The show begins with cancer humour (oh joy). In rhyming couplets we hear how Marsh's mother has developed a tumour called "The Bastard". She dies soon afterwards, spending the rest of the play as ashes in a pink plastic tube. Then Len, Marsh's estranged Dad, shows up. Played by Jerome Wright in the mode of an eccentric relative from a mid-90s sitcom, he's all outrageous comments and extroversion. Marsh is incandescent with fury at his father for abandoning the family, exacerbated by his father's nerve in turning up at her deathbed and subsequent funeral. The two characters quickly fall into traditional comedy roles with Marsh as straight man to his Dad.

The repair of their relationship comprises the meat of Wingman, a healing process seen through the prism of an unplanned pregnancy. Marsh has gotten Brigitte, one of his co-workers pregnant. She subsequently gives birth to a son, and gradually grandfather, son grandson and Brigitte form an ersatz family unit and everyone skips away happy. This is primarily delivered as a semi-rhyming monologue from Marsh, somewhere between a poetry and stand-up comedy. It's remarkably similar in form to Andrew Maddock's The Me Plays(currently playing at The Old Red Lion), though the stage presence of his father gives the show a little more leeway to dabble in comedy sketches.

Fundamental to Wingman is the conceit that Richard Marsh is a terrible person. This is all too easy to believe; he's petulant, self-centred and genuinely unpleasant company for much of the play. Though we hear at length about how his father abandoned him, the Len we meet is a jocular, upbeat and sincere man who doesn't deserve the hatred heaped upon him by Marsh. The apparent intention is that Marsh's anger will slip away as he gains a new understanding of life.

Theoretically this allows for the arsehole we meet at the beginning to end the play as a well-rounded individual happy with his new responsibilities. But this is fatally undermined by the dramatic structure - namely that every other character exists purely as a vehicle for Marsh's personal development. Brigitte spends the entire play played by Marsh as a bad Welsh caricature (seemingly the product of a Gavin & Stacey marathon) and Len the baby is relegated to the status of crap joke machine. His father is more of a character in his own right, but even so every single action he makes is designed to further Marsh's awakening as a rounded human being.

It's a dramatic oxymoron to create a play where an analogue of yourself is the only important thing, then try to sell us on a moral message that living for others is the decent thing to do. This, coupled with excessively schmaltzy family drama sentimentality means Wingman quickly curdles in the mouth.

I could have forgiven a lot of that if Wingman was jam-packed with great gags. I smiled a grand total of twice, both at Jerome Wright's physical performance. Fatally, the show didn't wring a single genuine laugh from me (and the rest of the audience weren't exactly rolling in the aisles). Marsh's humour lies in the dully safe no-man's land of comedy occupied by the likes of Michael McIntyre and Alan Carr, gags revolving around the hilarity of men trying changing nappies and the like. This is comedy swaddled in cotton wool, the prickly edges of life filed away in an attempt to please everyone, the end result so bland it pleases no-one.

As the play ended I quickly exited the theatre, a queasy feeling burbling away in my stomach. I guess what Marsh is trying to do is create a universal story with something for everyone, but this isn't life as I recognise it. This is homogenised drama: a morass of cliches, false sentimentality and all-too-easy answers - ultimately and irrevocably dishonest theatre.

While The Me Plays, covering similar ground to far superior effect, plays in The Old Red Lion you'd be a fool to plump for Wingman.

Wingman is at the Soho Theatre until 20th September. Tickets available here.

(The Me Plays tickets here)

Forbidden Broadway is luvvie crack. Pricking pomposity is a rich seam of humour and there are few more puffed up targets than the West End. With half a billion pounds (!!!) spent on tickets to the London stage, the West End's collective ego has rarely been this bloated. Corporations hungrily jostle for a piece of the pie and budgets spiral off into infinity as audiences demand ever bigger spectacles. The knock-on effect is a minimisation of risk, theatres clogged with safe investments: safe adaptation translated the safest of safe ways.

These are ripe prospects for parody and Forbidden Broadway takes the stage with knives sharpened. The night functions as a 'roast' of the West End, parodying specific productions and personalities with a series of musical numbers. There's a big hurdle to overcome in parodying West End shows, namely that you really need some serious talent to cover the standard West End songbook.

So it's fortunate that Forbidden Broadway has one of the talented quartets you'll see in the West End right now, parody show or not. Christiano Bianco, Anna-Jane Casey, Damian Humbley and Ben Lewis display a frighteningly accurate talent for chameleonic transformation. One moment they're squeaking about the stage as Matilda Wormwood, the next they're raucous, yelling soldiers or a manic, sequin-encrusted Liza Minelli - their individual personalities shining through the myriad characters.

The success of Forbidden Broadway lies in its ability to make you laugh at references you don't get. To fully appreciate everything here you'd need an encyclopaedic knowledge of not only the current productions of the West End stage, but the professional culture humming away backstage and the last 50 years of musical theatre here and in New York. For example, there's a number devoted to the ego of producer Cameron Mackintosh, the radio gossip of Elaine Paige and the staging preferences of Trevor Nunn.

There is a knowledge barrier to entry, but it's set mercifully low. I go to the theatre in London a couple of times a week and at least a third of these gags went straight over my head - but I still laughed. A pinball fast ricochet momentum builds up, the cast pinging off each other and quickly achieving a gags-per-minute speed that beats damn near anything else on the London stage. Not all of them hit equally, but between the curtain's rise and fall you'll spend more time laughing than not.

Personal highlights were a vicious piss-take of the zombie-like Miss Saigon, compressing the plot into a half-baked splodge of melodrama. It's here that Forbidden Broadway's skills are most keenly felt; the ability to peel away the layers of pretension to poke fun at the core of a musical, picking precise, perfect moments to parody. In mocking the questionable racial politics of the show it flies pretty close to the bone in terms of taste, but does so with enough confidence and verve to get away scot-free.

Another bright spot was a takedown of Once, a show I haven't even seen (but from what I've heard fully expect to despise). We get right to the heart of things from second one; the stage filling with cheeky, cheery accordion playing Irish folk types singing about potatoes and Lucky Charms. It's hardly the most cerebral attack, but the bluntness pays off. This is also the one point in the play where the cast crack up themselves, their enjoyment infectiously transmitting to the crowd.

There are a few moments where not knowing the subject of parody begins to affect the humour. Throughout the show there's playful caricatures of various divas - some of whom I was familiar with and some of whom I'd only vaguely heard of. See Me on a Monday jabs at the singing skills of Bernadette Peters and, to be honest, I don't know a huge amount about her other than that she's a famous Broadway star.

It's in numbers like these that the Broadway origins are exposed. Obvious care has been taken to pick sketches relevant to the London stage, but there's the odd exception that doesn't work as well as the others. A duet between two bitchy Spanish stars of West Side Story is more likely to confuse London audiences than entertain - I had no idea who either of these women were. On a similar bent there's precious little material here that's exclusively London focussed - I was craving takedowns of flops like From Here to Eternity, I Can't Sing! or Viva Forever! But these are quibbles rather than genuine complaints and it seems churlish to complain that my particular bugbears weren't catered for.

The key to Forbidden Broadway's success is that underneath all the acid wit and pitch-perfect comedy it's built on a bedrock of love the medium. It mocks because it wants the stage to improve and grow, the real bile reserved for mediocrity and neverending productions (mocking Les Miserables with Ten Years More!). The frequent insights into backstage politics, the process of prostituting your talent in crappy shows, and the simple boredom of being stuck backstage waiting for your part means the show attacks from a position of experience, insider authority always shines through.

Forbidden Broadway is deeply funny, whip-smart and superhumanly energetic. Honestly, my review could be as simple as this: "I laughed and laughed and laughed". Top stuff.

Forbidden Broadway is at the Vaudeville Theatre until 22 November. Tickets here.

You're Always With Me is a curious piece of theatre that often feels like it's fallen out of a time warp. Written by Soviet playwright Ilyas Afandyev in the early 60s it's a chewy chunk of social realism about factory workers, pokey flats, familial betrayal and love found in odd places. This is the the first English production of a play that seems to have made little cultural impact outside its native Azerbaijan - using Google as a metric, the only search results for the play link to this production and it merits but a passing mention on Wikipedia in Afandyev's bibliography.

So what have we been missing out on? This is of an unlikely love story of middle-aged factory owner Hesenzadé (Doug Devaney) and the teenage Mergilé (Stephanie Harte). Hesenzadé is a solitary widower, introduced happily chatting away to what turns out to be the ghost of his wife. Despite being eligible, financially secure and handsome he never remarried, transferring his paternal emotions onto his employees.

Meanwhile Mergilé is a girl desperately in need of a bit of kindness. Following the death of her father in World War II her mother, Mezaket (Zara Plessard) married the dastardly Faraj (Karl Niklas). He's a petty domestic tyrant, marching around the house hissing orders, terrorising the family, purposefully spilling orange juice on the floor and generally being a bit of a dick. Now he wants Mergilé gone, intending to convert her bedroom into his study. So, putting the clamps on Mezaket he demands she choose between her husband and her daughter. Goodbye Mergilé.

With Mergilé miserable, lonely and needing a job it's all too natural that she latches onto the fatherly Hesenzadé. As the two grow closer the town's collective eyebrow slowly raises and Mergilé's mother angrily tries to convince the two to knock if off. And thus drama is sown.

This is a curious love story. Mergilé is all over Hesenzadé like jam on bread, practically throwing herself at him in a series of clumsy flirtations. She cleans up his flat, makes him tea and pays him increasingly bizarre compliments. A highlight is when she calmly explains she's been secretly observing him through the window for years, in particular claiming that his hands have become powerful symbols of security and strength for her. Frankly if a girl said that to me I'd be nervously eyeing the door and worrying about the health of my pets.

But Hesenzadé apparently takes all this in his stride, spending most of the play calmly sitting on a sofa sipping tea. I never once got the impression that he was even a little bit romantically inclined towards Mergilé. Instead he treats her with affable politeness, offering up fatherly nuggets of wisdom and treating her romantic advances with polite tolerance.

I'm genuinely not sure if this total lack of romantic response from Hesenzadé is intentional or a flaw in the performance or translation. Confusingly in the final scenes he appears to undergoing some kind of teary heroic sacrifice by leaving Mergilé and setting her up with a younger man. Considering he's spent most of the play nonchalantly treating her as a semi-pleasant distraction this all feels a bit unwarranted.

The upshot of this is that Mergilé ends up looking increasing barmy, descending into dreamy romantic bliss over the most unlikely of candidates. She's a rather simple creature to psychologically diagnose: with "Daddy issues" written all over her. Her idolisation of her dead father, hatred of her stepfather and transference of these emotions onto Hesenzadé is bordering on dramatic cliche - especially when she apparently begins to properly crack up and begins seeing her wicked stepfather in every other man.

It's difficult to work out precisely why You're Always With Me never quite gels. Is it the translation? The performances? The direction? Is the play old-fashioned? Am I missing some 1960s Soviet allegory? Whatever it is, it's fair to say that there's something malfunctioning.

By and large the cast do a decent job with often clunky dialogue. Devaney and Harte don't even have a smidge of romantic chemistry, but their respective tranquillised/manic personalities at least make for a interesting combination of characters. Plessard as the angry, guilt-ridden mother makes a decent stab at combining the two emotions. Niklas ends up in Disney villain territory as Faraj, but throws in a much needed shot of comedy as harried factory supervisor Badal. Sadly there's not really much scope for anyone to really cut loose, especially as many potentially dramatic scenes are hamstrung by being conducted over telephone.

As the curtain fell my first thought was "is that it?" It's not that You're Always With Me is a particularly terrible production, but there's not a great deal to recommend about it. You can tell that this is a play with a point - what that point is is beyond me.

You're Always With Me is at the Lost Theatre until the 27th of September. Tickets here.

Despair looms large over A Most Wanted Man. As the last lead role of Philip Seymour Hoffman there's a pang of emotion as appears, every minute that ticks by one less until he'll never be in a new film again. But leaving such extratextual concerns aside, that this is a deeply bleak movie about broken people half-heartedly running through routines, and, given that this is an adaptation of a John le Carré novel, that routine is spycraft.

Set in modern Hamburg, the titular wanted man is Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin). He's a Chechen Muslim fleeing the wars in his home country. He's traumatised by his brutall tortured at the hands of Russian intelligence, his body a map of scars and cigarette burns. The Russians inform the Hamburg spy community that Karpov is a dangerous extremist, a one man terror threat.

The Hamburg spy community, still smarting with residual guilt that the 9/11 attacks were planned from the city, fixates upon Karpov, desperate to acquire him for their own ends. Prime among them is Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an veteran spy running a small-scale extrajudicial intelligence operation. Unbeholden to any state he does the tasks that the law prevents the other agencies doing.

Soon we're wrapped up in a knotty mess of various agencies jockeying for turf, planting bugs and cameras everywhere, clandestine meetings in smoky cafes and people being black-bagged off the street and bundled into vans. As in every le Carré adaptation the film all but demands close attention, lest you forget the differing motivations of the numerous shadowy groups of besuited figures.

At the core of A Most Wanted Man is an ethical battle between cinematic pleasure and real-world politics. Though reality is dialled up, Bachmann's spy team is still roughly analogous to Mission: Impossible (or any number of action movie spy crews). It's thrilling to watch them work; be they in a race against time to plant bugs and camera before their target becomes suspicious, exchanging under the table information through cigarette packets or stalking people through the busy Hamburg streets. Corbijn's spycraft is hardly sexy, but there's a Germanic care and precision to it that's easy to admire.

Taken in isolation the actions of our lead characters are pretty damn far from heroic: a litany of invasions of privacy, manipulations of trust and mental torture (backed by the subtle threat of physical torture). Yet by dint of the narrative focus these are nonetheless our heroes, audience identification with them cemented by our shared perception of the world through a camera lens, in their case security footage and bugs, in our case a cinema screen. This identification gives us a vicarious thrill. Wow, what if I was a spy? How cool would that be?

The notion of a secret world existing in parallel with our own is a seductive fictional device. Thus, A Most Wanted Man is essentially Harry Potter for grown-ups. Both exploit the same suspicion that there's something going on around us that we're not privy to, and both feature characters that become sucked into this secret world. Though cloaked in gritty reality, spycraft may as well be wizardry for all the relevance it has to the average viewer, andso despite our best efforts we end up rooting for this team.

Pushing back against that is the deepening realisation that our cool, sexy, interesting and smart protagonists are monsters. Corbijn and le Carré are at pains to emphasise that not only are our hero's methods ridiculously unethical, but ineffectual and without purpose. Spies are repeatedly quizzed as to why they're doing this, always falling back on the meaningless mantra that they're "making the world a safer place".

The intelligence community is thus exposed as simply going through the motions. They need to be seen to be doing something to justify their existence, and victimising traumatised asylum seekers and innocent members of the public is better than twiddling their thumbs. Their lack of ideological passion is contrasted with the focussed aims of their enemies, who are at least fighting for something they believe in. As Walter Sobchak said, "Dude, at least it's an ethos!".

Our hero's lack of focus suffuses the film with nihilism, expressed not only their actions but in Corbijn's desaturated visual style. Our heroes are constantly placed in boxes within boxes, whether it be in cramped basement headquarters, booths in cafes, glass meeting rooms within offices or vans in car parks. This, coupled with a repeated motif of characters being obscured: behind smoked glass, blocked by scenery or behind opaque plastic sheets works to separate these people from the 'real world', underlining their removal from reality as we know it.

When they do break into the real world it's presented as a chaotic, senseless mess. So, for example Bachmann's carefully ordered world completely breaks down when confronted by a packed, sweaty nightclub. The implication quickly becomes that these people are less fighting to make the world a safer place and more to construct a reality that justifies their continued existence.

The battleground for this debate takes place over the haggard, almost albino, features of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Chain-smoking, glugging booze by the bottleful and with lidded, rheumy red-eyes he looks desperately sick. These are the physical manifestations of his increasingly cynical view of his role in the world, something contrasted against his lint-free, perfectly coiffed CIA counterpart. It's not a career defining performance, but it's one hell of a swansong.

A Most Wanted Man isn't a perfect movie (Rachel McAdams is totally miscast), but it's got political, moral and ethical complexity baked into its DNA. Corbijn walks the tightrope between these poles with skill, aided by le Carré's rightly cynical tone. A quiet, sinister and darkly compelling piece of cinema.

★★★★

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'A Most Wanted Man' (2014) directed by Anton Corbijn