LONDON CITY NIGHTS

There are few finer feelings than skipping out of your front door right into a street party. Now in its fifth year, the Whitecross Street Party is one of the highlights of my calendar and cements why this is my favourite street in London. Admittedly, living here is pretty ace the other 363 days of the year, but for this weekend the neighbourhood pops on its glad rags and shows off, strutting about with a spring in its step.

But first the weather. After a week long heatwave papers were warning of "the storm to end all storms". I awoke early Saturday morning to a grim scene; lightning was tickling the City skyscrapers and thunder was wobbling my windowpanes. Ah shit, this doesn't look particularly great. Someone must have made a sacrifice to the God of Weather though, because as people turned up the weather kept getting more and more lovely, and largely stayed that way for the entire weekend.

As far as I'm concerned it just isn't right to have a party like this without a spot of sun. Bright pools of primary colours dot the drab Victorian brickwork up and down the street, glowing in the noon haze. This is the yearly exhibition entitled The Rise of the Non-Conformists. Strapped up to the walls is a motley collection of pop-inflected street art, most of it playfully political. They remain for the rest of the summer, continuing to improve everyone's lives even after the rest of the Party has long since disappeared into hungover memory.

My favourites this year were Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy's striking portrait of a woman with a couple of wrenches jammed through her cheeks. Rendered in clean-lined comic book style there's something wickedly funny about the deadpan expression on her face that seems to read: "Oh great, not this shit again." Similarly neat is the black and white sign reading "Your mind is crazy and tells you lies.". It reminds me of the Rowdy Roddy Piper/John Carpenter classic They Live, where the truth behind advertising is revealed by wearing special sunglasses.

Also brill are the this-weekend-only sculptures situated up and the street. Funniest was a remote-controlled wheelie bin courtesy of the Bureau of Silly Ideas. With the pilot casually observing from a safe distance, the bin appears to be possessed by a malicious artificial intelligence, whirring across the road to block pedestrians, honking at them and even, my favourite, spraying them with a blast of water. Most people take it with good spirit (every child loves it) but there's a sadistic side of me that most enjoys it when adults get genuinely annoyed - it's impossible to keep your dignity when you're scowling at an apparently sentient bin.

Similarly neat is the striking visual of an apparently dead body lying inside a giant birdcage. On close inspection it's a mannequin, but at a glance it looks disconcertingly lifelike. This helpless, somehow injured body, surrounded by people looking in other directions made me think of the 'Bystander Effect'; namely the larger the crowd, the greater the diffusion of responsibility. So if we see someone laying in the street and we're the only person about we might stop and check whether they're alright. If there's a hundred of us, we'll figure "eh, someone else will sort them out".

Next to that is the segmented graffiti wall. The air is thick with the acrid yet comforting smell of spray paint, discarded stencils lie on the ground and all about the artists scurry around making their mark. I particularly like Leeks' giant Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan. Jerusalem is a futuristic Hunter S Thompson, and here we see him booting down the door of a corrupt politician. "I don't have to put up with this shabby crap!" he yells, and below someone has written "So I'm going to Whitecross St!" - a surefire way of appealing to my sense of community pride.

For all the art on display, it's the performers that inject the street with that distinctive carnival atmosphere. Special mention has to go to this child I happened to catch playing a piano in the middle of the street. An enraptured, hushed crowd listened as he picked his way through some standards, making me feel like a talentless sausage-fingered bum.

Also fun to watch was regular Whitecross Street Party attendees, Bramble FM. Parents watched in quiet confusion as, to Motörhead's Ace of Spades, a dinosaur women and a mostly naked man clutching a bone wrestled with each other amongst the crowd, before splatting down into a tub of bubbly water.

All that said, the best performer I saw all weekend was also the last. Babsical Babs and Punkture Sluts were absolutely tearing it up on Garrett Street. With woozy bass beats filling the road she stomped up and down like she owned the place. She blazes with charisma, winning the audience over pretty much from the word go. Her outfit makes her look like a punk rock commander and her reflexive thrusts and wiggles injecting a bit of sexy/ramshackle anarchy into her set. The crowd really gets into it; one particularly statuesque woman conducting a singlehanded stage invasion - bossing a bemused Babs about and at one point demanding the microphone for an impromptu verse. "I've gotten to the point in my career where I need security"Babs quips. Even a percussion band parading up and down the street doesn't throw her off - this woman is way past cool (and I've made a note to track down her next gig).

It was, as always, a lovely weekend and I'm hugely grateful to the organisers for putting together the event. I don't think it was the best this party has ever been - there was no monumentally amazing sculpture like the inflatable tentacles, last year's giant black skull, or Wreckage International's Triceratops from a couple of years ago but hey, I'm not going to pick holes. Already looking forward to the next one.

Onwards and upwards Whitecross Street!

Set in a perpetually overcast Hackney, Lilting is a delicately painted argument that the most fundamental human emotions exist somewhere beyond language. In this case it's grief, loss and depression that provides the fuel for an unlikely, fractious friendship between two people; Richard (Ben Whishaw) and Junn (Pei-pei Cheng). Richard is a....

...hang on a minute....

Pei-pei Cheng? THE Pei-pei Cheng? The Lady of Steel? The Iron Princess? THE QUEEN OF SWORDS?! This Pei-pei Cheng?

Wow! Alright where was I?

Oh yeah. So Richard is the epitome of metropolitan life; he's trendy, fashionable, hangs out in all the right coffee shops and has a beautifully tasteful run-down house in what looks like Cambridge Heath. Junn is an elderly Cambodian immigrant living a depressed life in an old people's home. She speaks very little English, looks isolated and apparently spends her days counting down the hours until the Grim Reaper comes a-knockin'.

Bringing them together is the character of Kai. He's Junn's beloved son, responsible for her being in the UK and obsessed with making sure she's provided for. As the film opens we see them happily making small-talk about the minutia of their lives. Their mutual love is palpable, though there's an undercurrent of unhappiness from the mother at being 'abandoned' in a nursing home. As conversation rambles on a nurse suddenly enters the room and, in a perfectly executed panning shot, we realise that Junn has been talking to herself.

Kai is dead. Hit by a car. Now, left alone, her only regular visitor is Richard, Kai's best friend. But of course he's not his best friend, he's Kai's bereaved partner. Unable to out Kai to his mother even in death, he feels responsible towards her - though she's confused as to why Richard cares so much. Eventually he hires an interpreter that allows them to converse, and the two very gradually form an uneasy bond.

Kai and Richard

Lilting is a purposefully slow, desaturated and flatly shot piece of cinema. Khaou clearly understands the psychic numbness that comes with loss, endeavouring to make his cinematic world as muted as possible. Everything from the hideous 1960s wallpaper in the nursing home to the alabaster white skin of Richard and Kai as they lie in bed together combines to create a rather depressing vision of a world where all hope is lost.

The few bright spots in the story come from Alan (Peter Bowles) and Vann (Naomi Christie). Alan and Junn are a rather cute couple in the nursing home, getting on well even though they can't communicate directly with each other. Richard decides the best way to cheer up Junn is to hire an interpretor, Vann, to translate. Bowles gives the role a great deal curmudgeonly charm, making this geriatric romance rather sweet and uplifting in the middle of all this gloom.

As Vann becomes increasingly involved in the drama between Richard and Junn, she translates more and more. The cinematic result of that is quite interesting, breaking up the rhythm of a normal movie conversation. It's a way of clearly delineating reaction from response, the gap necessitated by translation allowing us to focus on the actor's physical and not what they're saying. Both Whishaw and Cheng exploit this dynamic beautifully, the method adding a ton of tension to the fraught final scenes.

That wallpaper is just awful.

Lilting is very much an actor's movie - one of ponderous conversations, revelations and gradual character development. Whishaw in particular embodies that stage in a man's life where he realises, once and for all, that he is no longer officially young. In his grief he's shouldered some very mature burdens; and with the death of his partner he has nowhere to direct his newfound desire for responsibility - Junn being the most obvious and worthwhile outlet.

Meanwhile Cheng's Junn bears the burden of constantly lying to herself. You're never quite sure whether she secretly knows her dead son is gay or if she really is naive to the whole deal. I'd like to give the character the benefit of the doubt - her performance is infused with a weird, naked truth that indicates she'd hate to lie to herself. My favourite moments in the film are all her - when she nods in approval as she notices Richard frying bacon with chopsticks, or her sharply felt shock and anger at being denied her son's ashes.

I had no idea Cheng has transitioned so smoothly into straight dramatic roles and though a small part of me was hoping for her to break into an orgy of bloody swordfighting, she fills the screen with the same ironclad inner strength that made her so compelling as a basher of heads and slicer-offer of limbs.

Hong Khaou's style is the cinematic equivalent of a rainy, hungover Sunday afternoon. Lilting is often a bit of a downer, but it's a sensitive movie that has the confidence to proceed at its own pace. I suspect that for some audiences the stately, melancholy drama will translate into straight-up boredom, but I was enthralled from start to finish. It's an unassuming little movie, yet what Khaou has to say about the universal nature of grieving, and how bonds form regardless of cultural or language barriers rings true.

★★★★

Lilting is released August 8th

"There aren’t many things less likely to inspire passion than the words “directed by Brett Ratner.” Say what you want about crowd pleasing blockbuster factories like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder or Justin Lin, but at least their work has a clearly defined style and inspires debate. Not Brett Ratner. Renowned as a workmanlike director, his main claim to fame is his ability to bring a project in on time and under budget. So the prospect of a new addition to the Ratner filmography wasn’t exactly setting my world on fire. Adding an additional note of sourness to proceedings is the widely publicized artist-led boycott of the film on the basis that the studio has bilked the late Steve Moore, (author of the comic books that this version of Hercules is based on), out of every penny he was due through sneaky contractual finagling."

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

Summarising Boyhood is a fool's errand. How can you fit a film like this into a couple of paragraphs? Individual superlatives spring to mind; wonderful, touching, amazing, beautiful and so on, but even they fail to quite convey the gobsmacking majesty of the movie. No film quite like Boyhood has ever come to cinemas before. No film quite like Boyhood will again.

Boiled down, Boyhood is a gimmick movie, but goddamn what a gimmick. In 2002 Linklater began shooting a film starring six-year old Ellar Coltrane. Twelve years later he wrapped. The innocent six-year old has been replaced by an independent 18 year old man. This film is about what happens along the way to this journey. Perplexingly, there's not even much of a narrative; the film functioning as a window into a normal life free from dramatic pretense and 'big problems', confident that merely exploring geological shifts in relationships will keep us engaged.

Coltrane plays Mason Jr, living a humdrum life in suburban Texas with his mother (Patricia Arquette) and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). His often-absent father (Ethan Hawke) rolls up in a cool-as-hell muscle car every couple of weekends on visitation rights. As the years swim by we're introduced to a cavalcade of friends, family, houses and haircuts, and just as we get used to them it's all change - onto the next phase.

Linklater's directorial ability to make the mundane so gripping is straight-up superhuman. He's working some crazy alchemy here; no flashy camera work, no supercool dialogue and no show-offy grandstanding performances. So what exactly keeps us interested? Linklater has excavated an aspect of humanity in cinema that we rarely to get to experience; kindling real love in us as we watch Mason grow.

As Linklater cuts between the years we feel mild disorientation; just as we've become accustomed to Mason at one age we have to deal with his changes. It's with surprise that we realise his voice has broken between scenes, he's experienced a sudden growth spurt, developed an interest in girls or grown a cool new haircut. This progression puts us in the same shoes as Mason's father, stopping off every so often and having to deal with what's taken place in our absence.

Very quickly we get attached to Mason. He's a likeable enough boy at every stage of his development whether he's disappointed to realise that there's no such things as elves in the world, going on a classically Linklaterian ramble about conspiracies or ingesting psychedelics with friends. I began to feel like a ghost or guardian angel, a disembodied presence in his life silently observing and wishing the best for him - I've rarely felt so protective towards a character in a movie before. This sensation is so strong because deep down in our bones we know that we're really watching this person grow up.

Importantly, we're not just watching Mason grow up, we're not just watching his family wrinkle up - we're silently watching ourselves grow up too. Boyhood is a record of what the early years of the 21st century; characters smoking indoors, fiddling around with iMacs and playing splitscreen Halo 2. Linklater has an uncanny knack for capturing precise elements of particular moments in time; the fact that the scenes are filmed in those years means, by definition, they're entirely free of anachronisms.

There's a marvellous scene where a young, excited Mason attends a midnight book shop opening for the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Your first instinct is to marvel at how beautifully Linklater has recreated it - then you realise that he probably filmed it at a real midnight Harry Potter opening. You get similar feelings watching technology gradually developing around our character; the progression from dumbphones to the ubiquity of iPhones; the rise of social networking and pop progressing from the Britney to the Gaga era.

This steady march through time underlines how quickly the world changes and how invisible these changes seem while you're living them. Most of all it makes you feel old; a miasma of melancholy enveloping you as watch a 6 year Mason playing a GameBoy Advance SP and realising - holy shit - I was just starting university when that came out! Realisations like this reveal that it's time itself that's the real villain of Boyhood, a cruel master whipping us onwards - never allowing us to stand still, even for a moment.

Time chisels away at our characters like waves beating against a cliff. We watch Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette softly slide into middle-age; their features softening as they wrinkle and grey. We see people degenerate into alcoholism and bitterness. Divisions growing between couples like weeds through paving stones. Towards the end of the film there's a quiet, touching moment where its bemoaned that time passes too fast: the clichéd parental moan "they grow up so fast". By this point Linklater has more than earned a dab of cliché, and it's deeply, sincerely felt by both characters and audience.

This is an incredibly important, enormously ambitious film and it is obviously - obviously - going to go down in cinematic history as a stone cold classic. There's a thousand beautiful observations within it; ranging from that we use gifts to mould people into what we want them to be, to appreciating the love in your life while you have it and so on - a fractal, infinite glimpse into humanity: life itself, captured on film.

Boyhood has got to be Linklater's magnum opus and with it he's undeniably entered the highest panethon of directors. If you have the slightest interest in cinema as a medium you need to see it. If you have the slightest interest in people you need to see it.

★★★★★

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is indisputably the smartest film in cinema history that features a chimpanzee wielding two assault rifles (while jumping a horse over a burning car in slow motion). There's something quietly bonkers about a series of films that sincerely explores the idea of humanity being conquered by a race of super-intelligent apes - let alone one where the narrative focus is on the apes.

Nobody (least of all me) expected 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, to be any good. As it rolled down the blockbuster production line everyone assumed that it was just another tired old Hollywood reboot, not to mention that it was directed by someone whose prior experience was on Hollyoaks. Yet, on release you could practically hear gasps emanating from cinemas up and down the land as critics and audiences realised: "whoa, this is great!". From the stunning ape CG (earning a commendation from PETA for never using real animals), to the touching performance of John Lithgow to the jaw-droppingly effective scene where an ape first speaks it came together beautifully.

That film ended with a group of smart apes led by genius ape Caesar (Andy Serkis) vanishing into a California redwood forest. Meanwhile a deadly flu has been inadvertently released, which spreads worldwide over the credits. Dawn picks up ten years later. The virus has wiped out 99.8% of the human race, leaving a desperate band of human survivors eking out a life in urban ruins. Meanwhile, free from humans bothering them, Caesar's apes are prospering in a commune atop a former hydroelectric dam.

Koba is an ape of action.

Ape life seems happy enough under Caesar's reign, where the only commandment "ape shall never kill ape"holds a mutually supportive society together. Wielding spears they hop from tree to tree, hunting deer, while teacher apes instruct the young in language and thinking. It's an idyllic life - but one soon to be disrupted. The humans, under the command of Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) need power, the only remaining source being the dam on which the apes live.

And so the stage is set for war. Despite the best efforts of Caesar and ape-sympathetic human Malcolm (Jason Clarke), both species become slowly more antagonistic until everything erupts in a full on ape vs human maelstrom. Much of this is due to the machinations of Koba, an ape with a big chip on his hairy shoulder. He bears the scars of animal testing and, with a grudge against all humans, kicks off a coup, seizing control of the ape army and leading the apes to war.

This is all utterly ridiculous, yet the immaculate CGI work of the apes means it's next to impossible not to take this seriously. Andy Serkis and the crack team of animators at WETA Digital are at the bleeding edge of digital performances, making Caesar both effortlessly realistic and smothered in big heaving dollops of empathy. The film opens and closes with a tight close-up of Caesar's eyes, burning with intelligence and understanding. From minute one we're on side and the film doesn't disappoint.

It is hard to not want to see a movie with a shotgun wielding superintelligent ape in it.

Every moment we spend with the apes is well spent. Aside from being a technical marvel, they behave precisely like you'd imagine very intelligent animals to - not quite human, but not quite animal either. The film is refreshingly happy to stick to subtitled sign language, meaning the first 15 minutes or so is a brilliantly scored, dialogue free sequence where we watch the apes hunt. In a clever touch, Michael Giacchino's score (which has excellently pun-tastic song titles) quotes György Ligeti's Requiem, famously used in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - another film about evolved apes learning to use tools.

Frankly I would have been happy watching the apes potter about for an hour or two, but the humans have to stick their big ugly noses into proceedings. It's here that the quality takes a bit of a dip. Quite simply, compared to the apes the humans are dull, underwritten and not particularly well acted. There's a TV movieish quality to their scenes that even Gary Oldman can't quite save. Adding to this is a troubling disregard for every woman in the film - the hero's wife is supposedly a doctor, though she gets a derisory amount of things to do and remains a cipher through much of the movie (though, to be fair the lady apes get the same treatment).

We're drumming our fingers in annoyance during these human bits, desperate to get back to the far more interesting inter-ape conflict. It's worth it, Koba and Caesar's battle to lead the nascent ape rulers proves once and for all that if you let an infinite number of monkeys try long enough they actually do produce something vaguely Shakespearian.

This is a story of revolution, and in an Animal Farmish twist the two competing apes have clear parallels in Soviet history. Koba,named for one of the aliases of Joseph Stalin, is consumed by the desire to purge the earth of both the humans, who he sees as ideologically incompatible with apekind and dissenters within his own ranks.

Caesar appears to be more of a representative of Vladimir Lenin, the brains behind the original push change. Caesar is a bourgeois chimpanzee, growing up in cosy middle-class security with a James Franco that loves him dearly, an upbringing that mirrors the wealthy upbringing of Lenin. This leads to suspicion from within the ape ranks that perhaps Caesar is too sympathetic to humans - leading to the ape power struggle. Confusingly there's also a bit of Jesus Christ in Caesar, the ape framed with religious reverence and 'resurrecting' after three days and also, obviously, Julius Caesar.

Gaze into the eyes of the new gods.

This knot of symbols and references is, to be charitable, a little confusing to unpick. Dawn is clearly pregnant with meaning, but this initial promise eventually dissolves away in a blur of somewhat silly (but well shot) action sequences featuring apes with machine guns, apes in tanks and ape prison camps.

Dawn never dips below eminently watchable, the ape-only sequences are fantastic cinema and Serkis gives a masterclass in digital performance. But it never comes together as well as Rise, a far more streamlined and consistent piece of cinema. For all the bombastic drama of Dawn, by the final sequences the apes are in much the same place as they were at the end of the last film, poised to take over the world while humanity sticks around like a bad fart, the apes patiently waiting for it to waft away into the breeze.

This stalling for time makes the film narratively inconsequential. What is the worth of a film about revolution that ends in the same place it starts? Koba was right. The humans had their chance and screwed up everything. Compromise is pointless, it's in humanity's nature to torture, exploit and lie. They deserve to be mercilessly wiped out and an ape utopia blossom from the ashes.

What we actually get is less a Planet of the Apes and more a San Francisco Bay Area of the Apes, and that's just not good enough.

Down with the bourgeois, liberal Caesar! Viva Koba!

★★★

It's with a sneaking sense of shame that I confess I'd assumed this was going to be an adaptation of Richard III by men in drag. The clue as to what it is actually about is in the title 'Drag King' Richard III. This is a less-told story, the marginalised even within the marginalised: female to male transition.

The play, written by Dr Terri Power, is an examination of the transition of her friend Laurie/Laurence (Anne Zander) in the late 80s and early 90s. Told from the lesbian perspective 'La Femme' (Bonnie Adair), we see two characters explore gender roles; one with blush, lipstick and dresses, the other with hormones, scalpels and surgery. Framing all this is Shakespeare's paragon of self-loathing, Richard III. Power treats Richard's twisted, deformed husk of a body as a literary reflection of the 'wrongness' that compels transgender people towards transitioning.

With just two actors and a sparse set, the play has a tinge of the experimental. Though the underlying narrative of Laurence's thrums away in the background, we frequently digress into fragments of performance art, which slides back into a slice of Shakespeare for a couple of minutes before returning to a two personal confessional. The upshot is that you're never sure of your footing, the constant cycling through different modes, moods and intensities keeping us engaged. Consequentially, the shifting, occasionally fractured, dramatic structure reflects the themes of transition and metamorphosis inherent to the subject matter.

La Femme - Bonnie Adair

At the heart of Drag King Richard III is the concept of gender as a social construct rather than innate biology. The idea of an intrinsic masculinity or femininity is an illusion; roles prescribed by societal conditioning as opposed to preordained by 'nature'. Power initially plays this in a minor key by showing her stage surrogate, usually dressed down in ripped jeans and a loose-fitting vest top, going 'femme' for a night out.

A woman putting on a dress, tights and a bit of make-up isn't exactly rocking the boat, yet even this subtle transformation gains power from the context. In pretty plain terms, we're shown how even adopting conventional gender norms sends out a complex tangle of social signals: she's up for it, she wants attention, she's looking for fun etc. If doing something as simple as this causes ripples, how does changing ones gender completely?

Given the depiction of Laurence it's like tossing hand grenades at your friends and family. The late 80s setting means that none of the characters have any idea how to approach the idea of a woman transitioning to a man, no support groups, existing advice to follow and no internet to consult. Further wrinkling things are that this is all taking place in Georgia - a state not exactly renowned for it's progressive stances.

Laurie/Laurence - Anne Zander

So Laurence's parents, having just about managed to tolerate her coming out as gay, disown her altogether. Even her gay friends find the notion disconcerting - with the straightforward and fascinating observation that if they love a woman that becomes a man, does that make them heterosexual? It feels like everything is spinning outwards into recriminations and mutual suspicions, Laurence erecting barriers between himself, his friends, family and society in general, cauterising the amputated stump of her old gender by signing up to the US Military to take out his frustrations on the Middle East.

Kicking back against society's expectations of her as a woman, Laurence adopts hypermasculinity. He's angry, aggressively sexual and domineering - rasping through gritted teeth how he wants to "break" women. This is the weaponisation of gender, fashioning every expectation of of manhood into a club to beat us with. Zander is excellent casting for this role - her features are like a rack of razor blades, her blue eyes wide and confrontational, her body like a high tension cable. As she stalks the stage she makes eye contact with the audience - when she's locked on to you, you become a deer on a road at night transfixed by the car bearing down upon it.

Her command of Shakespeare is also deeply impressive, imbuing dialogue like "cheated of feature by dissembling nature / deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time / into this breathing world, scarce half made up"with spiky fervour, leaving us no doubts as to its relevance to the transgender experience. There's a clarity of vision to this performance, powerful confidence faintly leavened with a humanising tinge of self-doubt.

The a post-show discussion afterwards proved to be as fascinating as the play itself. Chaired by Del LaGrace Volcano, and featuring director Roz Hopkinson, the cast and Dr Powers they pick through what the meanings of contemporary gender. Volcano's mere presence is a perfect rebuttal to those with a deathgrip on the idea of gender as a strict binary, effortlessly straddling masculine and feminine.

The most illuminating part of the discussion was an explanation of why female-to-male transgendered people are marginalised compared to male-to-female. Volcano laid out that men like Eddie Izzard and Grayson Perry are considered 'brave' when they don feminine signifiers. The compelling argument was made that this bravery arises from the idea of consciously rejecting masculine privilege in favour of the 'lesser' femininity. Conversely, women seizing masculine privilege are seen as interlopers, unfairly occupying the positions of power. Zander explained that she saw this as a straightforward symptom of patriarchy - an analysis it's difficult to argue with.

As I left I had a mouthful of intellectual gristle to munch on. It's easy to march through life accepting that society is the way it is because it's the way it is. This is the unexamined life and it's boring as hell. Frolicking in fuzzy gender boundaries is a fantastic way to reveal your own ingrained prejudices, even if it is just donning a suit or a dress and heading out into the night. Drag King Richard III manages to do a hell of lot with very little time, telling a deeply felt personal story while getting into the nitty-gritty of wider gender issues. If you have an interest in trans rights, sociology or gender politics you should absolutely check it out.

Drag King Richard III is at Riverside Studios until 3rd August 2014. Tickets here.

All photography by Jamie Scott-Smith.

In James Gunn's excellent Guardians of the Galaxy the human race gets to be the coolest kid in the playground. Set in a universe populated by the moronic, the pompous and the self important (all with surreal haircuts) we come out looking like intergalactic Fonzies. Even better, is that our most effective weapons aren't guns and bombs, they're Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson and David motherfucking Bowie.

This is an old school space opera that's much more a 21st century evolution of Flash Gordon than any po-faced hard science fictioning, the kind of setting where a few blobs of latex and a bit of facepaint on an extra and they're a whole new species. This blob of weirdness set within the same filmic universe as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, but this is a clean slate in every sense of the word. Gone is the desaturated dullness of The Winter Soldier and the atrocious flattened cinematography of The Avengers. In its place is a riot of colour and imagination, shot with an eye for the epic and a desire to embrace comicbook ridiculousness.

That Marvel are willing to release a tentpole summer blockbuster starring a talking raccoon, a tree man that only says three words and an obscure-to-everyone-but-ultra-geeks supporting cast of comic book space dudes says an awful lot about their current level of confidence. I consider myself relatively up on comics - I know my Stilt Man from my Hypno-Hustler - but even I drew a blank on what the hell the Guardians of the Galaxy's deal was.

Drink in that lovely colour. Mmmm.

The centre of the story is Peter Quill aka Starlord (Chris Pratt). Abducted by aliens as a young child he's grown up to become space Indiana Jones. His life consists to be zooming around the universe in a cool spaceship, stealing alien archaeological relics and living the Kirkian dream of banging multicoloured spacebabes. After tracking down one particularly important item he becomes involved in an intergalactic war, one side wreathed in darkness and flying around in a sinister ship that looks like a floating Castle Dracula and the other a miniskirted, greenery covered utopia run by a magnificently coiffed Glenn Close (you decide who the baddies are).

Space MacGuffin in tow, Quill is suddenly the focus of a lot of attention. Courtsey of some impressively organic screenwriting he's soon the leader of a fractious group of losers bound together by either psychoses or greed. They are; green skinned assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), gun-wielding smartass raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the childlike tree man Groot (Vin Diesel) and hulking moron Drax (Dave Bautista).

They've got to band together to keep the space whatsit from falling into the hands of the evil Kree Empire led by the sinister Ronan, his cybernetic half-sister Nebula and their muscle Korath who all serve the Darkseid ripoff Thanos who wants nothing more than to master the Infinity Gems and blah blah blah.... you know what? None of that rubbish matters in the slightest.

Here's 'yer baddie. He's a bit pantomime.

Refreshingly the entire intergalactic conflict takes a backseat to well constructed set pieces, cracklingly good dialogue and excellent music. This whole science fiction universe is one ginormous straight man to our everyman hero as he bounces from one ridiculous situation to another with only his sense of comic timing saving him from disaster. By the end you've realised the less seriously Quill treats the plot the more success he has.

Highlights are passing off the Kevin Bacon classic Footloose as one of Earth's epic tales, an inpromptu dance-off in the face of certain death, a perfectly timed jizz-joke, Drax's inability to comprehend metaphor, a Simpsonsesque foreground vs background gag involving Groot and the confident, logical assertion that no person can truly be "a 100% dick". Gunn essentially treats the Marvel space comics like his personal playground, fitting in more idiosyncrasies and bizarre elements than anyone could ever have expected Marvel would allow.

Underscoring all that is a firm vision of epic adventure. Cinematographer Ben Davis frames his glittering space vistas with a care and attention to detail that'd make Jack Kirby blush. Everything is vibrant and alive, frames are packed with miniature details that bring the world to life and crucial imagery is composed with an artist's eye for drawing the eye through a frame. Great blooms of colour fill the screen during the action sequences, purples, red and yellow flames blossoming around the characters to stunning effect. For the first time in a Marvel film even the 3D is worthwhile, the fruit of Gunn taking an active interest in the post-conversion process.

^ this is good shit ^

On top of all that is the genius idea to soundtrack the film with hits from the 70s. The conceit is that when Quill was abducted in 1988 one of his few possessions was a cassette Walkman loaded with a mix of his mother's favourite tunes. The music makes the film accessible, the familiarity of the songs giving audiences a foothold in an this alien universe. Not to mention that the careful chosen songs all kick ass - as characters plan out their next move to the snarling howls of Joan Jett it's difficult not to get keyed up.

Guardians of the Galaxy ends up feeling like a sharply delivered riposte to critics (and I include myself in this) who've written off Marvel Studios movies as unimaginatively formulaic and stylistically bland. This is light years beyond garbage like Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 2 and The Avengers; if Marvel really are trying to figure out a formula to stick to they could do a hell of a lot worse than making their subsequent films more like this. This is brimming over with things I enjoy - imagination, good nature and the most ridiculous hairdos this side of The Fifth Element.

★★★★

Guardians of the Galaxy is released on the 31st of July.

My latest appearance on the ~~Screen Robot~~ Tea and Crumpets Filmcast (please know that I actively fought against this name). We're now on We Got This Covered - so have extended our audience to a whole other continent!

Containing reviews of Earth to Echo, Joe, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Purge: Anarchy and much much more.

Listen to it here!

A West End musical about slavery is a risky proposition. The notion of an all-singing depiction of Southern States brings to mind Song of the South, the Disney film they'd rather we forgot. That notion of actors dressed in slave costumes dancing about the stage for (a let's face it, predominantly white) audience's entertainment gives me cringing quivers. So it's with relief that, by and large, Dessa Rose avoids most of these pitfalls. Most of them anyway.

The core of the story is the relationship between two women, the titular Dessa Rose, a 16 year old black slave and Ruth, a young white Southern belle. Dessa is pregnant by her boyfriend Kaine, though after an altercation with an overseer he's perfunctorily murdered. Enraged, Dessa attacks the overseer. She's subsequently sold to the cruel Trader Wilson, who joins to a "coffle", marching her and others in shackles across the South to be sold. On this march Dessa befriends Nathan and Harker, both of whom are quickly impressed by her defiance and courage.

Following an abortive and impromptu uprising, Dessa is to be executed, referred to as "devil woman". Fortunately her compatriots bust her out of prison, and the group escape to Ruth's farm, who quickly sympathises with their condition. From there we examine the fractious nature of privilege, ownership and segregation as the fugitives desperately head North to a safe state.

Studio 2 of Trafalgar Studios isn't the ideal place to stage a musical. It's small, cramped and in this weather, pretty hot. As the cast process onto stage during the opening number, they look like sardines in a tin. But what could have been a disadvantage quickly turns into a boon - this drama works best when it's up close and personal. Under the baking stage lights the performers glisten with a sweaty sheen, nicely conveying the suffocating heat of the South.

They've been given lemons and they've made lemonade - they staging going a long way to making the subject matter palatable musical material. Staging this in a traditional theatre with proscenium arch would have the effect of dividing the audience from the performers, with the knock-on implication that their performance is for our benefit. Not so here, with the low ceilings and close proximity to the action we're physically involved in what's going on - able to examine every performative nuance.

Our closeness also allows us to get a great look at the minimalist set. Most if it is a perfunctory series of blocks, rearrange to make chairs, beds when needed. The centrepiece is an almost sculptural arrangement of chains rising up into a ceiling, tangled around the lighting equipment. As the actors move in around the chains they clink together, never letting us forget the racial bondage that underscores everything we see.

It's deeply refreshing to see a musical (or for that matter, anything at all) with a strong black woman as a protagonist and Cynthia Erivo gives Dessa an irreducible core of righteousness and dignity that goes a long, long way towards making this a worthwhile experience. Everything Dessa does is shot through with honest straightforwardness, making her ascension to the de facto leader of this motley crew of outlaws seem natural and obvious.

Cassidy Janson's Ruth is an inversion of Dessa, and a slightly more thankless role to play. She's privileged, spoilt and, though she means well, a little bit dim. Her innocence - for example when she sleeps with one of the slaves she doesn't seem to realise that while she'd face punishment if they were caught, the slave would be killed - runs the risk of being obnoxious, but Janson gradually wins us over. She palpably evolves in every scene, most memorably her shaken, guiltridden demeanour as realises she doesn't know her the real name of her beloved 'Mammy'.

Musically it's a bit of a mixed bag. Dessa Rose is easily at its best when the cast are all in full swing in the impressive We Are Descended that bookends the production, a bombastic number that glues the cast together with a powerful mission statement. Nothing else in the show comes near to that, the rest of the songbook ranging from light humour to Disneyesque balladeering. As we see happy characters singing upbeat songs about catching trout in an idyllic Southern summer the unwanted spectre of South of the South's Uncle Remus rears his head.

The prettier and more pleasant the music becomes, the more it undermines the seriousness of the play - coming dangerously close to painting the South as idyllic. In comparison to Steve McQueen's recent 12 Years a Slave(which has got to be at the forefront of every audience member's mind) Dessa Rose is sanitised and antiseptic. The sight of our characters happily bouncing around the South conning foolish slave-owners out of their money by pretending to sell themselves at auction feels like a ludicrous fantasy - it's a blizzard of factors like this that keep inching proceedings towards the realm of the tasteless.

Thankfully Dessa Rose never lapses into truly problematic territory, largely due to an excellent cast that's united in their desire to eke every fragment of emotion and energy out of their roles. Aside from the excellent Erivo and Janson I was particularly impressed by the jocular energy and commanding stage presence of Edward Baruwa as Nathan, an absolute pleasure to watch perform. The cast should be reassured that every flaw in the show arises from the script and songsheet which (though its heart is absolutely in the right place) doesn't do the history justice.

Dessa Rose is at Trafalgar Studio 2 until 30 August 2014. Tickets here.

Photography by Scott Rylander

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I bet your eyes just glazed over. Mine certainly did. How much of this deathly dull legalese do we skip through over the course of a week? Nobody reads them, nobody cares and I'm not even sure they're legally enforceable. But as we sign over our rights with a disinterested click of a mouse what are we agreeing to and what might the possible consequences be? Profile Picture by Mark Farid explores this hazy world of digital consent, showing us the consequences of signing over our personal information.

As you enter the gallery you come face to face with the Facebook login screen. A sign next to it commands: "Login to Facebook. Click Allow. Wait for the camera to take your picture automatically. Click confirm once you like the photograph and the image is uploaded to your Facebook. Continue to the exhibition upstairs." With twin lights illuminating your face it looks vaguely shrinelike and so, wanting to get the full experience for this article, I dutifully entered my login details.

There was a sensible part of me that was murmuring "what are you doing you idiot this computer could be virused up to the nines"but I've been to Arebyte loads of times and I suppose I trust them this much. Anyway, I very definitely made sure I was logged out before I left. No harm done, right?

On heading upstairs you're first confronted by your face projected onto the gallery stairs, then by a quick summary of your personal information, together with the last photo you'd uploaded. Listed is your name, age and other assorted personal information - your likes, dislikes and the last three links you've posted. It's slightly disconcerting, but hey, if people know I like watching movies and listening to bands who cares?

Someone else's profile information (anonymised)

Then you turn the corner. Suspended from the ceiling of the gallery are three printers, spooling out long tangled snakes of paper. Glancing at them in curiosity I wondered what they were printing out. Then I spotted my name and some rather familiar text... My private messages! A nervous grin plastered itself across my face as I desperately tried to remember if I'd said anything incriminating or insulting in the last few weeks. I felt a combination of embarrassment, annoyance and fear as I saw every bit of rubbish I'd nattered on about recently spill through the public's grubby hands.

I was slightly annoyed about this, but then I suppose I brought it upon myself. Apparently other people were less sanguine - one couple getting into a fierce argument as it was discovered one of them was chatting with a strange man and further more complaining of invasions of privacy. Farid is right on the edge of an ethical line here, revealing the kinds of information that could conceivably wreck friendships and destroy relationships is dangerous territory.

This danger is precisely why this is so good. It takes guts to piss people off like this in service of your argument. I love art that explains itself forcefully, straightforwardly and immediately, an installation with something to say and a punkish playful attitude in saying it. Anyway, the perfect counter-argument to anyone that's really got a bee in their bonnet about this is that they agreed that this would happen.

My secret chat info. Thrilling I know.

Also helping is the simple fact that Farid's point about how frivolously we scatter our personal data is a good one. The obscene wealth of Facebook and Google (to name the two most prominent companies) proves that one of the most sought after commodities in the 21st century aren't minerals or food - it's information. Like gardeners putting up fly paper in a greenhouse they create a compelling, enjoyable network to inhabit, which we then become mired in -unable to escape.

In a cruel twist, the more we put into these systems the more we get back from them, and the more the companies learn about us. There's a good argument that the being that knows you best in the world isn't your wife, husband, mother, father or friends - it's Google. Their algorithms hoover up the secrets you'd rather stay secret - embarrassing problems, fears and phobias and your most perverse sexual kicks.

As this data grows a profile on a distant server farm gather more and more information, bulging at the seams with everything it can find out about you - the aim to decide how best to sell you stuff you don't need. So what are prostituting our minds for? Free social networking? Free email? Free maps? And you know what? I'm actually relatively okay with this.

I like using Facebook and I like using Google. Each company has its fair share of ethical black holes, but if they want to mine my brain to try and sell me shit (which is probably blocked by AdBlock anyway) then I'm largely fine with it. What's important is that we recognise what's going on, and Farid's Profile Picture spells out how much we data we put out without the slightest consideration.

It's a smartly tech-adept, brave installation. The visual of the paper spilling from above like manna from heaven, tangling into chromasomal knots on the floor is both striking and aesthetically pleasing, and the enjoyment of sifting through the text gives you voyeuristic tingle. Most importantly it's art that makes you feel something - a sensation that's often lacking in this coolly conceptual climate.

Soulmate is the feature film debut of Axelle Carolyn, best known as the star of 2008's highly underrated, absolutely bonkers Doomsday. That film was a cage match between about ten different genres, all bloodily duking it out in post-apocalyptic Scotland. Given this pedigree I half-expected Soulmates to follow the same aesthetic - so it's with surprise that it goes in completely the other direction. This is an elegant little ghost story that does a lot with very little, a fine example of minimalist film-making.

Our heroine is violinist Audrey (Anna Walton). She's recovering from a recent suicide attempt following the death of her husband and has decided to get away from her old life for a couple of weeks. To this end she's rented a remote cottage in the Brecon Beacons with the intent of hiding herself away from the outside world. The cottage is beautiful, and owners, the Zellabys seem like lovely, helpful village folk.

But as the hour hand inches towards midnight Audrey starts hearing strange noises. Lights mysteriously turn on and off, windows open and there's weird creaking noises coming from the box room. Audrey goes to the Zellabys with her fears and they brush her off "Oh there's just a load of old furniture in there. It's probably bats. *ominous change in tone* We don't go into the box room".

A 'mystery box' containing god-only-knows-what is one of my favourite cheesy cinematic devices. It's the kind of thing that gets me jigging up and down in my seat excitedly muttering "C'mooon... what's in the box!?". So it's a bit of a let down when what's in side is actually a load of old furniture. Well that and a ghost called Doug.

Considering the first act is 'yer bog standard spook story, replete with jump scares and a frightened woman wandering around an ill-lit haunted house, the rest of the film is pleasantly askew. Douglas (Tom Wisdom) is a pretty personable ghost, possessed (sorry) with deadpan (sorry) humour and a rather funereal (sorry) temperament. Douglas and Audrey bond over the loss of their significant others, and both can sympathise with the idea of suicide (though Douglas' suicide attempt was slightly more successful). Soon the two grow close and maybe, just maybe, falling a little bit in love.

At this point it feels like the film is settling into a modern remake of Joseph Mankiewicz's 1947 classic The Ghost and Mrs Muir. Both films have heroines whose ability to deal with the intrusion of the supernatural into their lives borders on superhuman, both are able to quickly get over their fears and are able to start chatting away quite pleasantly with a dead man - even casually bickering with them.

The biggest feather in Soulmate's cap is that this story is never less than compelling. Axelle Carolyn, working from her own script, has produced a compact, concise example of storytelling that never overstretches itself. There are only four characters in the film and their motivations, suspicions and behaviour are crystal clear throughout. But the real hook is the sympathetic, chatty 'normal' ghost at the centre of the story. We're as interested as Audrey is as she gently probes him as to what it's like to be dead, what he can do and what his life is like.

Furthermore, as a directorial feature debut Carolyn seriously impresses. There's a show-don't-tell mentality underlying most of the early scenes, resulting in quite long stretches of dialogue-free action where it's left to us to deduce what's going on. Through a combination of smart cinematography that draws our eye to important elements in the frame we can work out that she's lost her husband, that she's tried to commit suicide and that she's consumed by guilt without even a smidge of exposition.

Unfortunately long after we've established what Audrey's deal is the film does slip into unnecessarily clunky exposition. Oh well, at least it tried. Still, Soulmate is an objectively good looking movie - using the Brecon Beacons as an austere, desolate and lonely backdrop. Carolyn does similarly interesting things with the visual evolution of her heroine. For the first act she's so pale and monochromatic that I was suspicious there was Sixth Sense style twist coming up. Instead, it cleverly places her in the same aesthetic postcode as her ghost buddy, linking the two visually. This isn't some intricate Kubrickian masterpiece, but there's enough tiny moments of craftsmanship to make it worthwile. After all, if I can tell the film-makers care it makes me care.

Soulmate builds up a decent head of goodwill early on; our two leads have obvious chemistry and we're never quite sure where the story is going to go next. So it's a bit of shame that the final act devolves into cliché, abandoning the interesting tone so painstakingly established for a typical horror genre ending that does a bit of a disservice to the rest of the film. Also, while Wisdom and Walton never falter, the supporting performances from Tanya Myers and Nick Brimble as the couple who know more than they're letting on gradually become a bit too Hammer Horror hammy.

Thankfully, quibbles like this don't ruin the film. Soulmate is an impressive achievement from an untested director maximising the impact of a (presumably) limited budget. So it's a bit disappointing that a year after release it has but five reviews on the iMDB and nobody I've spoken to has even heard of it. This is mildly flawed, but good enough that it should be better known. Bordering on a hidden gem.

★★★★

Soulmate is released on DVD 11th August

In C.J. Wilmann's The Picture of John Gray Oscar Wilde is the sun. Shining high in the sky his presence illuminates every corner of this dramatic world. Yet like the sun you can't look at him directly - Oscar Wilde is simply too big a force to be contained on stage. What Wilmann shows us are the planets caught in his orbit, each reflecting individual facets of the great man.

Set in the dying years of the 19th century, we open in the pleasantly scruffy bohemian elegance of The Vale. This is the home of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, two artists lodged within the firmament of Victorian gay culture. The two men appear to able to happily live together as partners as long as they keep their sexuality under wraps, and have cultivated a close-knit social circle formed around a joint love of poetry, art and fine wine.

The first scenes introduce us to their set, all of whom are erudite, well-dressed and with sharply refined tastes. They are; John Gray, a charming would-be poet raised from the sticks; Andre Raffalovich, a very French arch critic and poet gourmand; and Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, extroverted and egotistically domineering. As they recite poetry to each other the atmosphere becomes a cocktail of verbal jousting and one-upmanship. We sense that places like The Vale are a sanctuary from a world of where a good reputation is everything, all governed by prudish morality - a place where visitors can drop their masks.

From L-R: Bosie (Tom Cox), Ricketts (Oliver Allan), Gray (Patrick Walshe McBride), Shannon (Jordan McCurrach) and Raffalovich (Christopher Tester)

The play gradually zeroes in on the relationship between Gray and Raffalovich, who, despite Gray initially insulting Raffalovich as an "ugly French Jew", quickly fall head over heels in love with one another. It's this relationship that forms the bedrock of the play; which proceeds to sensitively explore same-sex relations through a number of different prisms: how it informs an artist's development, the attraction of Catholicism and what it means to live "the love that dare not speak its name".

Let's get two things out of the way, this is a tremendous bit of playwriting and a marvellous piece of theatre. These are intensely clever characters seeking to one-up each other's displays of verbal gymnastics, so it's to Wilmann's enormous credit that never once does his script come across as trying to impress or worse, a caricature of what the 21st century imagines Wildean wit to be. Lying underneath this blizzard of wordplay is a bedrock of carefully considered historical research and some snatches of carefully considered philosophy and the odd moment of honest-to-god actual profundity.

Particularly striking to me was a moment where John Gray, torn between his love for Raffalovich and his devotion to Catholicism, explains precisely why Christianity appeals to him. He perceives life to be a series of unpredictable changes, and from his perspective he's entirely correct. One minute he's the plain old son of a carpenter, the next he's in a relationship with Oscar Wilde, the next he's in Berlin with a gay lover. With the ground unsteady beneath his feet he can at least rely on Christianity to remain static. No matter whether he attends Mass in London, Rome or Berlin it will always be the same ceremony, no matter when or where he picks up The Bible it will always contain the same commandments and morality.

It's not exactly fashionable for a play to extol the virtues of Christianity, especially when you're exploring gay rights issues. But Wilmann weaves the two together with surprising delicacy, showing us a life of priestly Catholicism as one of the few available Victorian avenues for two men to live together without suspicion of immorality or pressure of marriage. Tossing a pinch of salt into the mix is the observation that a gay man who goes into the church is merely forsaking worship of another man for worship of an omniscient masculine deity.

Similarly interesting is the examination of how being gay in Victorian London influences artistic development. Purely by virtue of their sexuality all the characters are outsiders, rebels against societal norms. Wilmann subtly argues that it's this factor that enables them to produce such beautiful art; the poetry recited, the paintings breathlessly described and even the allusions to Wilde's work. The beauty and demeanour of Gray is referred to as the inspiration for Dorian Gray and, in The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters present different personalities depending on their surroundings, mirroring the division between public and private life. The excellent stage design underlines these themes, the walls featuring a gently homoerotic painting of a man's jaw, pots of white paint dot the se and the floor itself is splashed with suggestively white liquid.

Material this good demands a worthy cast, and this doesn't disappoint. Everybody is excellent in their roles, charging the dialogue with crackling, unrehearsed electricity. With repartee this calculated and verbose there's a risk that it could come across as artificial, yet as we watch them react to each other it's as if we can see the cogs turning in the character's heads as they formulate their laser-precise responses. The structure of the play means that fine though their performances are, Bosie, Ricketts and Shannon remain roughly constant for the entire run-time. Their circumstances change, by and large their personalities do not.

It's Gray and Raffalovich that really go through the wringer, their characters gradually evolving over the course of the evening. Patrick Walshe McBride as Gray has the not inconsiderable task of conveying nervy, faintly shy talent masked by false confidence. There's moments where he purposely stumbles a little over his lines, reminding us that while the others are able to effortlessly dish out razor-keen conversation, he has to struggle to keep up. As his spiritual, moral and emotional journey continues we're magnetically drawn to his struggle - taking the difficult dramatic struggle of making earnest faith attractive and succeeding brilliantly.

But it's Christopher Tester as Raffalovich that was my undisputed highlight. It's difficult for me to pin down precisely what it is that I liked, but there's a core of humanity to the performance that straight up knocked my socks off. Perhaps it's that in the opening scenes he seems invincible, the most verbally dexterous of all, followed by all this being gradually stripped away from him to reveal deep vulnerability and longing. It's a powerhouse of a performance, and if you're going to see it I recommend sitting as close to the front as possible to get the full effect.

As a new play this is a huge success and I feel privileged to have seen it so early on. I can't imagine that it anyone seeing it won't enjoy it, especially not anyone with the remotest interest in Oscar Wilde who, even as an off stage presence influences everything we see. Simply put, this is a wonderful bit of theatre that deserves a wide audience.

The Picture of John Gray is at the Old Red Lion Theatre, Angel until the 30th of August. Tickets available here.

All photographs by Miriam Mahony

How on earth do films like this made? The Congress is an aggressively confusing, utterly idiosyncratic cocktail of a thousand different influences in which meaning, motivation and even the bare bones of the plot slip through your fingers like quicksilver. Using the critically acclaimed Waltz With Bashir as a springboard, Ari Folman has wrung out the contents of his mind onto a the silver screen, ending up with a movie that explores the far reaches of what cinema might become by way of an animator's wet dream.

At first it seems so straightforward. Robin Wright (Buttercup from The Princess Bride and Jenny from Forrest Gump) plays herself; a middle-aged actor for whom parts have almost entirely dried up. Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) lays it out to her: she's made too many bad choices, she was dealt a winning hand and bodged it, leaving her over the hill , unemployable, a cinematic liability. There's only one option available to her; new technology allows the Miramount film studio to completely digitise an actor, scanning every millimeter of them into a computer and recreating them digitally on screen. While she ages in obscurity her digital self will remain forever young, able to be slotted into whatever roles the studio decrees.

The film is no slouch visually in the non-animated bits either.

"20 YEARS LATER". Act two opens in the year 2033, where a 64 year old Wright attends the Futurological Congress, introducing new chemical technology allowing people to don animated avatars. Anyone can become whoever they want to be. It's here that we transition from humdrum reality to an intense animated world of motion and colour. The dirt and grime of reality is scrubbed away to leave a primary coloured psychedelia heavily influenced by animation legends like the Fleischer brothers, Gerald Scarfe and Ub Iwerks.

It's at this juncture that the Folman slams his foot down on the accelerator and zooms off into the realm of the bonkers. Narrative fades away into a chaotic blizzard of references, characters transition from people into walking metaphors and every single frame vibrates with fractal levels of detail. We feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, initially struggling to map out this Gordian knot of conflicting symbols, imagery and pop culture. Soon you realise your best bet is to relax, let yourself be swept along into a truly beautiful cinematic world that's like few other things I've ever seen in cinema.

Oh yeaaaah.

Visually the closest comparison I can make is to the densely populated, fast-paced cinematic worlds created by Studio 4°C, primarily the wonderful Tekkon Kinkreet and the avant-garde masterpiece Mind Game (a criminally unseen film). What they and The Congress have in common is a desire to push animation as far as it can go. After all, with just a few strokes of pencil on paper the animator becomes God, conjuring whole universes into being direct from his imagination. Why settle for recreating desaturated, gritty dull old reality when you can spin a blanket of skyscrapers that flutter into the air like butterflies, faces that blossom into flowers and jet planes that flap, dovelike, through the sky?

Textually, though the film credits Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (writer of Solaris) with inspiration I was more reminded of the work of Philip K. Dick, particularly the unsettling queasily drug-tinged worlds of Ubik and VALIS. Part of what makes Dick's science fiction so compelling is the utter divorce from the familiar. In The Congress' future of inhaled experiences, where people change personae like we change t-shirts and where the human form tends to gloopily disintegrate at a moments notice, we feel this typically Dickian disconnection - us understanding the future is as unlikely as a caveman with an iPhone clutched in his hairy fingers figuring out Candy Crush Saga.

Good shit.

That said, in the midst of this beautiful confusion there are ideas that repeat like melodies. Folman uses the prehistory of animation as a vehicle to explore the future of cinema, a future that begins with digital actors and goes from there. We see a studio executive excitedly proclaiming the end of cinema as we know it, the medium replaced with a kaleidoscope of individual, personal experiences in which we can cast whoever we want. As if leading by example, Folman casually casts Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Jones, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Jesus Christ and David Bowie (among many, many others). He teases the prospect of casting our girlfriend or boyfriend as the romantic lead in a sweeping epic, or your family in a lighthearted comedy.

He concludes with the idea of pop culture completely superseding reality entirely, masking the cruel realities of life with a consensual hallucination of day-glo beauty powered by limitless imagination. Most impressively there's no moralising argument that the only acceptable way to experience the 'real world is without blinders, Folman correctly concluding that a topsy-turvy LSD influenced world where everyone can be whoever they want to be is as valid as any other.

My kinda movie.

God only knows how he managed to scrape together the funding for this - though the litany of logos at the end of the credits hints at a Herculean effort in convincing practically every film board in Europe to chip in. All that hard work has paid off; in a swamp of fast food blockbusters advertising photorealistic HD carnage, The Congress shines as a monument to ambition, creativity, beauty and a bloody-nosed devotion to the ideal of cinema as artistic endeavour.

★★★★★

The Congress is on limited release from 15 August.

Reviewed at Views from the Gods.

A music biopic that's not allowed to use one solitary note of the subject's music is a tricky proposition. If we're not here for the music, then what are we here for? The musician's sparkling personality and social life? What fills the gap? Well, John Ridley's film is turns out to be less about the who and why of Jimi Hendrix and more about the sexual, racial and class politics of the 1960s, with Hendrix the prism through which we view society. The result is loose, zoned out and languorous, constantly off into odd little explorations of the psychology of swinging London.

André Benjamin's Jimi Hendrix is a frustratingly gnomic centrepiece. Your usual music biopic protagonist is driven by past tragedy that both accentuates his genius and wrecks his social life, Hendrix just plays guitar beautifully and that's pretty much that. There's a hint of annoyance regarding a broken family, but he's totally absent of any burning internal trauma. In fact he's absent of most things, mumbling his way through the movie while being coaxed towards stardom by a series of well-meaning white women.

First among them is Linda Keith (Imogen Poots). Keith, girlfriend of Keith Richards, spots Hendrix playing in a rubbish band in New York and it is immediately smitten. She coaxes him towards a solo career by essentially mothering him. Imbued with upper-class English forthrightness, she behaves like an LSD gobbling Mary Poppins - ordering that Hendrix sit up straight, eat his vegetables and be charismatic on stage. For all Poots' considerable charm Linda Keith is rather thankless character and, like Hendrix, we quickly grow sick of her.

So it's thankful that once the film reaches London we jettison her in favour of the slightly more interesting Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell). She's a broadly drawn Northern lass with a Sheffield accent, and a far more interesting person to spend time with than Daddy's girl Linda Keith. Even so, though Atwell really gives it some welly we still never quite zero in through the haze, as to what is actually going through her head.

Benjamin is great casting.

This loose vagueness is present throughout the entire film. You could charitably say that Ridley's ambition is to recreate a fuzzy, acid-tinged stoned atmosphere of drugged-out late 60s London. He plays fast and loose with the editing, demonstrating a willingness to make abrupt cuts in the middle of scenes, give us an unexpected dose of quickfire montage or the exact opposite; allowing conversations to ramble on awkwardly for minute after painful minute. There's echoes of Antionioni's Blow-Up and Nicholas Roeg's Performance, and by and large Ridley succeeds in recreating a woozy, chilled out mood with sinister notes distantly rumbling in the background.

Underlying all that care is that, unfortunately, this Jimi Hendrix just isn't very interesting. In a heartfelt and obviously carefully judged performance André Benjamin recaptures the tics and body language we've seen in archive footage, but accurate to reality it might be, this Hendrix just isn't particularly fun to be around. There's a notable scene where he meets Michael X, "the authentic voice of black bitterness" in London. Hendrix is interrogated as to whether he's merely a novelty act for his predominantly white audience, X pointing out that reviews refer to Hendrix as "wild" and "tribal" and that these adjectives never used for white musicians.

It's a fair point. Hendrix's response is a mushy-mouthed hippy-dippy ramble about how everyone is one people and the entire world is his audience. The film unjustly acts like he's won this argument. Later we hear Poots' character remark that Hendrix can be "annoyingly profound". This might well be true, but it's something we see precious little of in Ridley's film.

The fashion is also a high point. Hendrix wears some badass shirts.

The obvious counter-argument to Hendrix not being the most articulate bloke around is that he doesn't communicate with his words, but with his guitar. Problem is, there's not really that much guitar playing in the film and due to them not having any rights to Hendrix's iconic tunes, what we do hear is largely formless jamming. That we never hear even a smidge of classics like Voodoo Chile, All Along the Watchtower or Hey Joe genuinely hurts the film. Robbed of the music, it becomes a bit difficult to remember why we should care about Hendrix's story.

This all culminates in a late scene where Hendrix graphically beats Kathy, now his girlfriend, with a telephone receiver, the film taking it's time to show us the bruises and black eyes he's inflicted. This violence comes from nowhere and is very out of character for Benjamin's chilled out Hendrix. Crossing this moral event horizon makes Benjamin's Hendrix rather unpleasant, and the violence poisons the remaining scenes. It's a tone-deaf inclusion, made even more bizarre by the real life Kathy Etchingham insisting this didn't happen to the extent of considering legal action against the film.

There's a bunch of good stuff in All Is By My Side; Andre Benjamin is great, as is the supporting cast; the fashions of the time are beautifully recreated, the soundtrack is well-picked and there's a conscious effort made to evoke mood through clever editing. Unfortunately without Hendrix's songs the film feels half-formed, and it makes way too many character and tonal missteps to make up for their absence.

★★

Bloody hell. Grinding industrial electronic music blasts over the end credits of Alleluia. I look around the screening to see a roomful of people exhaling in relief, some grinning at what they'd just been through, some wide-eyed and staring like conscripts returning from a very bad war. Alleluia is intense. Alleluia is traumatic. Alleluia is nauseating. Alleluia is sadistic. Alleluia is downright demented.

Taking inspiration from the real life "the Lonely Hearts Killers", Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck , Welz' film lures us down into a pitch-black cellar, entangling love and murder, romance and sadism. The centre of the film is the relationship between Gloria (Lola Dueñas) and Michael (Laurent Lucas), who meet over internet dating. Even before they're together they emanating sinister vibes; the film opens on a shot of morgue-worker Gloria washing a corpse and the first time we meet Michel he's engaged in a quasi-occult masturbatory ceremony designed to get Gloria to "succumb to his charms".

Clearly he's onto something because they immediately get on the right foot, Michel playing the debonair manipulator while Gloria looks on with shy adoration. The two quickly team up, weaselling their way into lonely women's lives, conning them out of money and murdering them. Surprisingly it's the mild-mannered Gloria that goes full-bore homicidal, transforming from housewife and mother into bloodthirsty predator, getting sexual joy from crushing windpipes and caving skulls in.

This dizzying carousel of blood, sweat, tears and cum is shot on grainy handheld camera, with a penchant for tight-close ups on the staring eyes of their shocked victims and the erotic joy on the killer's faces. Welz' lens roams around this horrible couple, implicating us within their crimes as silent observers. Structurally the film is divided into four acts; which correspond to four women within the film. Within this are a series of tonal peaks that allow us a brief respite of domestic safety before descending into blood-soaked carnage. Disturbingly, we find ourselves anticipating the chaos, looking forward to the quick-cut bravura film-making that accompanies the most brutal scenes.

Like the corpses Gloria and Michel leave in their wake Alleluia is narratively pared down to the bone. Every inch of fat has been sliced away leaving a 90 minute rollercoaster of a movie that, once it gets going, never eases up. Bravura moments are a nightmarish sequence where we see the naked killers dancing around a bonfire. The shots are sliced up into a disorientating whirlwind of flames, blurry appendages and screaming, ecstatic faces. All this to a seriously intense electronic soundtrack that bludgeons us about the head with screeching distorted sonic shards. It's full on, man.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is an intensely creepy shot of a dull-eyed Gloria standing next to a nude corpse laid out on a kitchen table. Her gaze bores right through the screen as she breaks into a impromptu song, apparently for our benefit alone. There's a sickly, tangible 'wrongness' to what we're seeing that turns the stomach green - the scene reminiscent of the gross fuckuppery of Chris Morris'Jam.

Even outside these highlights the film is constantly shot through with careful framing and beautiful lighting. Highlights are primary-coloured nightclub and cinema sequences at - the characters wallowing in cold electric blue and hellish red light. These moments stand out a mile compared to the desaturated reality of the rest of the movie, which has a camcorderish home movie quality that makes the violence that much more palpable.

Similarly impressive is the way Welz uses cinematography to tell the story in place of expository dialogue. In an early scene we see Gloria and Michel in the throes of passion in a darkened room. Michel's side of the frame is wreathed in pitch darkness while Gloria's still has spots of light illuminating her. As the two come together they're drawn down into Michel's dark world, the light vanishing from the frame as they furiously rut on the grubby floor. The handheld style gives a free, loose sensation to the film, making it seem improvised - but the careful framing proves that every frame is carefully calculated to maximise horrible, creepy nausea.

Another arrow in Welz' quiver is devastingly close-ups. The camera is often tightly locked on Dueñas' face, which we see progressing from romantic innocence to homicidal fury. Dueñas is simply magnificent, her Gloria a genuinely terrifying cinematic creation, reminding me Charlotte Gainsbourg's 'She' in Antichrist. As she moves in for the kill her eyes roll back in her head like a Great White about to take a chunk out of an unsuspecting diver. In the opening scenes you assume that arch-manipulator Lucas' Michel is going to be the leading villain, but both actor and character are quickly overshadowed by Dueñas' Gloria, a straight-up tour de force role.

This graphic, amoral carnage play quickly reminded me of the casual brutality of Rémy Belvaux's monstrous 1992 classic Man Bites Dog. So it was with no surprise that I later learned the films share a co-writer, Vincent Tavier. These films are the cinema of a grand guignol; gouts of sticky blood leavened with the blackest of black humour. Be warned, Alleluia is emphatically not a fun watch, it's a nasty, sick little bastard of a film where the innocent are slaughtered while the killers giggle and fuck.

Alleluia has a black, ichorously Satanic heart but though it's up to its eyeballs in evil it's a goddamn brilliantly constructed film. Perhaps not a great date movie, but perfect fodder for aficionados of extreme cinema, those who crave intense weirdness and perverts of all stripes. My feel-bad hit of the summer.

★★★★

Alleluia is released 22nd August

At times the theatre scene feels a bit myopic, companies spinning around the same old dramatic and musical standards ad infinitum. Quality aside, it gets a little tiring when you learn that perennials like Miss Saigon or Uncle Vanya have returned for umpteenth time to London. All Star Productions recognise this and draw upon the enormous library of the ignored, the unstaged and the forgotten. These are the orphans of the modern stage, productions floating in eerie dramatic limbo.

The Apple Tree, tonight's production, is a prime example. It has a good of pedigree, written by the hits factory of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, famous for Fiddler on the Roof. Originally performed on Broadway in 1966 it ran for 463 performances, so there must be something worthwhile here. And so, blowing decades of dust from the yellowed songbook, All Star Productions breath life into the old bones.

This is production is a triptych: the first act a couples comedy based on Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve, the second Frank R. Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger? (a historical love story) and the third a Hollywood reimagining of Cinderella adapted from Jules Feiffer's Passionella. These very different settings require quick changes and All Star's cast swap roles like they're shuffling a deck of cards. Nicely, nearly all the cast get a moment in the spotlight, so the leading lady in one segment might be a backing dancer in another.

Catriona Mackenzie and Rafe Watts as Adam and Eve.

But is it any good? Well that's a bit trickier to pin down. Awkwardly for critics, there's nothing objectively wrong with anything this cast and crew do. Crammed into the slightly pokey space above a pub is a real surfeit of talent. This fresh-faced cast throw themselves onto the stage with aplomb, relishing the chance to really stretch their dramatic muscles in these broadly comic roles. The small orchestra, led by upbeat looking Musical Director Aaron Clingham, appear to be having a similarly good time, smiling happily at the rear of the stage and consistently note perfect.

With that all locked down, what could possibly be go wrong? Well some of forgotten, rarely staged productions are rarely staged for a reason. The opening Adam and Eve segment is a downright gruesome slog through middle-class 1960s humour, reimagining Genesis through the lens of a couples sitcom. Trapped in the middle of this, Rafe Watts and Catriona Mackenzie frantically man a dramatic defibrillator, putting in downright Herculean efforts to wring laughs from gags so creaky they'd make a dinosaur groan. But it's to no avail - this material is practically prehistoric and doesn't hold up at all in 2014.

This segment runs to about an hour, taking us from creation to Adam's old age. Biblical scholars tell us he lived to the ripe old age of 930, and believe me I felt every one of those years. It was with a curl of worry winding around my belly that I realised I might have at least another two hours to go of stuff like this. Thankfully the following two segments were a) better and b) shorter (though the latter might have influenced the former).

Rosie Glossop and Luke Wilson as Princess Barbara and Captain Sanjar

After the narcosis of Adam and Eve, The Lady or the Tiger? gives the night a big shot in the arm. Set in a vicious barbarian kingdom, this is based around the conceit that rather than engage in trials they simply present accused criminals with two doors. Behind one is a ferocious starving tiger, behind the other a comely lass who must be married forthwith. This isn't the most original setting, but the setting allows for tight martial dancing, a lot of yelling and some loud banging, all of which keep my attention. Also helping is a marvellous physical turn by Rosie Glossop as Princess Barbara, taking every conceivable opportunity to strike hilarious hieroglyph poses.

After a short turnaround we're onto the final segment. This updated Cinderella story is still plagued by dated jokes, though the brevity and dynamic choreography elevates the material into the realms of the genuinely entertaining. Michaela Cartwright, playing the lead in brushstrokes so broad she may as be using a roller, has fun both as a cheeky cheery cockney chimney sweep and the rather drag-queenish glam starlet Passionella. This tale rumbles along in a breezily pleasant manner, wrapping up the night in a way that, if not show-stopping, is at least competent.

Daniel Donskoy as the Snake

The undoubted highlight of all three tales was Daniel Donskoy. He played the Snake in the first, and the narrator of parts two and three. To put it simply he's straight up marvellous, a magnetic stage presence underscored with a Jaggeresque sexual dynamism and a faintly diabolical demeanour. Only he truly succeeds in reanimating the material, willing it to life by sheer force of his personality.

The Apple Tree is a production that's probably best left forgotten. The tone is decrepit, the creaky old jokes inducing mild, polite titters rather than big belly laughs and the music okay but unmemorable. It's a bit of a shame, because the cast and crew have pulled out every stop they can to make this work, but you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear (particularly when the sow has been rotting for 50 years).

It's not bad per se, but it's definitely not my kind of thing. A passing thought I had was that my Gran would have enjoyed it - and that's about as good a recommendation as I can give.

The Apple Tree is at Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre, Walthomstow until 30 August. Tickets here.

The best films make you feel. Whether it's exhilaration as a grimacing hero explodes a helicopter, romantic squishiness as star-crossed lovers finally realise they're perfect for each other or tear-streaked, sniffle-nosed whimpering as someone sacrifices themselves for the greater good. Night Moves certainly induces feelings, but it's a sensation a little rarer in cinema: guilt. Gnawing away at the foundations of your soul, the background hum that informs everything you do, the deep sucking queasiness in your belly as you try to come to terms with the consequences of your actions - yeah, that guilt.

Set within the eco-warrior counterculture, Night Moves explores the minds of those who, when confronted by the evidence of man's destruction of the planet, don't stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing's wrong. Jesse Eisenberg is Josh, a terse, serious young man who moves with a taut nervousness, as if he's expecting a heavy hand to fall on his shoulder at any moment. We first meet him jockeying with the slightly more upbeat Dena (Dakota Fanning), a slumming rich girl who's dedicating her trust fund towards the cause.

One of the central problems in environmental activism is that it's extremely difficult to see what palpable effects your efforts are having. If you spend your entire waking life protesting against CO2 emissions what difference will it make? The ice caps will keep melting, cars will keep pumping out exhaust and fossil fuels will be being burned worldwide. Activists can go two ways, throwing their hands up in nihilistic surrender; "fuck humanity, they're a plague and deserve everything they get" or direct action. Josh picks direct action.

Dakota Fanning as Dena

More specifically he wants to blow up a hydroelectric dam that's screwing up some river systems. With Dena's money and old comrade Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) handling explosives preparation he masterminds a plan to demolish it via a boat packed full fertiliser. What follows is a scarily comprehensive and tense guide on how to make a big bomb and blow something up. But though Josh's plan is carefully planned out, things go a bit wrong...

Reichardt's biggest asset is undoubtedly Mark Eisenberg. He's become known for performances that radiate intelligence, brittle physicality and deeply internalised conflict. There's shades of The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg in Night Moves, both characters desperate to impose their vision upon those around them, but trapped in passive-aggressiven suppression of his instincts. He quickly comes into a subdued conflict with Harmon, who (sorta) steals Dena, his (sorta) girlfriend and begins to take over the leadership role in the operation. Over the course of the film we gradually understand that the destruction of the dam is less to give industry a bloody nose and more a subconscious act to bolster his bruised, vulnerable ego.

This all comes to a head when things go wrong. We watch with a mixture of sympathy and morbid fascination as Josh frantically tries to square his actions with his desire to be an ecological messiah. The guilt gradually overtakes him, transforming instinctive neuroticism into straight-up paranoia. Every car pulling up might be the cops ready to slap some bracelets on him, every wayward glance from his friends seems to read "we know what you've done". As the film ticks on you can see guilt eating away at him like woodworm consuming a tree, leaving a fragile husk that eventually collapses into dust.

He's surrounded by a desaturated, overcast cinematic world that feels damp and seamy. Everything is slightly grubby and run-down, from the eco-commune Josh lives in to the vaguely creepy caravan his veteran co-conspirator Harmon plots in. When we reach the woods and the dam the natural world is presented utterly without beauty.

Reichardt's take on the natural world reminds me of Herzog's conception of the "overwhelming indifference of nature". Though man might have the ego to think he's affecting the world around him, be it through pumping out noxious fumes into the atmosphere or destroying a dam, the natural world couldn't give a toss either way. This quiet desperation informs every frame, the characters often swallowed up by the drab, muddy world around them. Though Night Moves is about eco-warriors it doesn't have a preachy ecological message save for that the basic impulse of humans is to destroy and consume - an impulse we realise even when we try to fight against it. Gradually our characters realise this awful truth, and Reichardt gradually dissolves the narrative into splintered, acts of low-key violence and denial.

Night Moves isn't a fun watch, but it's consistently very very interesting. When we're not wrapped up in the compellingly realistic psychology interplay between Eisenberg, Fanning and Sarsgaard we take a sinister interest in how to build a huge bomb or we simply grip the edges of our seat in appreciation of some wonderfully tense sequences; namely Fanning's purchase of the fertiliser or the midnight journey to the dam.

Vicariously experiencing intense guilt isn't exactly the happiest I've ever been in a cinema, but that I was feeling emotions this keenly proves that Reichardt is doing a hell of a lot right in Night Moves.

★★★★

Night Moves is released August 29th

“Gotta make way for the homo superior”. Amidst a din of clattering guitars, maniacal whoops and digital noise, Bowie's words ran laps around my head. Why? Because I'm pretty damn sure Annie Clark is the next stage in human evolution. On stage she mixes up slithery, chaotic punk rock androgyny with dance moves like an android struggling to break free of its programming – all underscored by guitar virtuosity that's as gobsmacking as it is effortless.

As 2014 began I was already pretty appreciative of St Vincent. Their 2011 album Strange Mercy had rolled around in rotation for a couple of weeks upon release and their 2012 David Byrne collaboration Love This Giant had tickled all my tastes. Then I heard their latest release, the eponymous St Vincent. Hot-shit-god-damn what an album! Shot through with haunting, cryptic vocals that combine the domestic, the technological and weirdly erotic (“Oh what an ordinary day. Take out the garbage, masturbate.”) I was hooked.

Then at Glastonbury I finally saw them. They were up against stiff competition, Jon Hopkins, Disclosure, Jack White and the outstandingly fun Dolly Parton, but emerged by an inch as the best thing I saw all weekend. After a horde of fey young men sitting around mournfully plucking at acoustic guitars and warbling about their feelings, St Vincent functioned as musical electro-shock therapy. As Clarke dove from the stage and thrashed around on the muddy floor, fingers a-blur on the fretboard, fizzling with manic alien energy I fell a tiny bit in love.

The day I got back from the festival I got online to see where she was playing in the UK next. Cambridge? A little far from my usual stomping grounds but fine, whatever. It was worth the trip. It would have been worth going to Mars. At times I thought I was on Mars. Annie Clarke occupies the stage with supreme confidence – her every motion radiating style, every idiosyncratic lyric spilling out of her like she's carved a hole in her head and let her thoughts run rampant.

In person she's some fucked up hybrid of all my loves - like someone's stuffed my favourite musicians into the telepods from Cronenberg's The Fly - the woozy electro lyricism of Bjork with the guitar skills of Prince and the eccentricity and self-assured weirdness of Kate Bush. Wearing a dress covered in sequinned eyes and brace-toothed mouths (all bleeding) and moving in a way that suggests she's communicating secret codes it's difficult to take my eyes from her. Standing pressed against the front row centre I fool myself into thinking she's often staring right at me, making me feel like a deer caught in a hunter's spotlight.

My highlights are all songs from her most recent album. Digital Witness is elegant and precise, a circus stomp pah-rump paean to the blurred lines between fleshy reality and the electronic world. To hear Bring Me Your Loves live is to tumble down a mountain in a skip full of broken synthesisers, her guitar sounding like an old modem screeching down a phone line, the song punctuated with killer, crunchy-as-hell riffs. Best is Huey Newton with its hallucinatory painkiller lyrics. Midway through there's a bass drop so fierce that Skrillex stares on with envious eyes, and Clarke launches into a guttural stream of consciousness about “fatherless features, you motherless creatures” and “the pop and the hiss in the city of misfits”. The fluids in my body are fizzling with bass, strobes are threatening an early epileptic end and once again, she seems to be singing these words right at me.

Being stage front for a show like this is like chewing through a high voltage cable. My musical tastes tend towards the energetic and pounding, but here even the slower, more emotional songs reek of majesty. Temporarily shorn of her guitar, Clarke mounts the giant pink steps at the rear of the stage and poses like a renaissance painting. She's illuminated in bright primary colours, singing softly through Prince Johnny and I Prefer Your Love – delivering them like torch songs from the year 2200.

So yeah – I had a pretty goddamn great time. St Vincent feel tailored to me in particular, though given the rapturous reception the band got from Cambridge I suspect everyone feels this sensation, just as I'm sure they all felt like Clarke was singing directly at them too. The climax of the concert is the epic Your Lips Are Red– a Class A freakout of clattering, punished guitars and a band going bonkers. Clarke climbs into the audience and starts grabbing people's camera, snapping pictures and grinning madly.

And with that she was gone. St Vincent have had a stratospheric rise in my estimations this year; landing right on the list of bands that I will pull out all the stops to see; regardless of price, location of time. Right now Annie Clarke is at the top of her game; she's Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon, she's Dylan at Newport Folk, she's Hillary on Everest. Go and see her, dammit.

First two pictures courtesy of Matt Thorpe (http://www.matt-thorpephotography.tumblr.com/), last crap one courtesy of my cameraphone.

Futurology is a mug's game. History is riddled with people making idiots of themselves when predicting the future, from Victorian underwater cities to the famously dumb 1977 assertion "there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home". It turns out that aside from the most vague, obvious ideas (computers will get faster, technology will get smaller) it's downright impossible to predict the twists and turns technology will take and how they'll alter our behaviour.

But this hasn't stopped the graduates of The Royal College of Art from trying! But rather than pompously declaring what the next big thing is going to be, this Next Brave New World is extrapolated from contemporary life. These sci-fi visions aren't so much serious predictions, more explorations of what the end-point of 2014 trends. Laced with satire, humour and imagination they lead us into the human genome, to outer space, even up the M1 to Blackburn.

Superbivore by Kathryn Fleming

Immediately catching your eye is Kathryn Fleming's menagerie Endless Forms/Endless Species. Throughout human history man has altered the ecosystems around him; be it medieval deforestation, 20th century dam construction or genetically modified supercrops. Fleming makes references the idea of the Anthroposcene: that humanity's impact upon the environment is so large that it constitutes a new geological epoch.

It's a concept fascinating and worrying in equal measure, one that Fleming has approached through subtle humour and imagination. Two taxidermied "synthetic biology" animals pose in the centre of the gallery - man's sticky fingers rummaging in the genetic cookie jar brought to life. Perched gracefully atop a crag is her Superbivore, a majestic deer/goat/giraffe hybrid topped off with a tangled coral reef antler. Below it prowls the Retro Reflective Carnivore, a fierce-looking six-legged predatory coil of muscles combining the best of feline and canine.

It's one thing to imagine genetic manipulation, quite another to have a three dimensional, lifelike example of it in front of you. It's posited that these creatures would roam around a future Regent's Park, now converted into hothouse for evolutionary selection; a self-sustaining zoo where predator and prey can exist in competition - each engaged in their own race for survival. Fleming's creations are beautifully realised and her graphic design excellent, strongly reminiscent of Jurassic Park with all the potential for disaster that implies.

Indivicracy - by Alexa Pollman

Nestled alongside are another set of beautiful creations: Alexa Pollman's Indivicracy. As opposed to the genetic experimentation, Pollman's is more a political prediction. It posits the gradual collapse of nation states and traditional nationalities - replaced by identities constructed around economic activity. The jumping off point is the emergence of transitory groups of migrant workers shipped from around the world to fuel building booms in Middle Eastern cities. Required to surrender their passports, the shady companies that exploit them shear away their nationalities, reducing them to depersonalised economic assets to be moved at their employer's whim.

Pollman imagines groups of truly transitory humans, united by their constant motion rather than the geographic location they happened to be born in. Her realisation of this is a costume that emphasises motion; a body fused into a clothing-vehicle with limbs that terminate in wheels rather than hands. Race, gender and age are suppressed, leaving an identity that's summed up by behaviour. Rendered in soft cloth it's a remarkably tactile creation, yet the blank, expressionless hoods with their blank eye-hole bear more than a passing resemblance to Klan hoods - underscoring the whole thing with sinister undertones.

Smile, The Fiction Has Already Begun by Zoe Hough

This queasy atmosphere continue in Zoe Hough's Smile, The Fiction Has Already Begun. Projects like the 'Happy Planet Index' push back against traditional ideas of a countries success; measuring not the economic output but the happiness of the population. At first glance it seems like a nicely hippy dippy sort of plan, all hugs and smiles. But as Hough later points out, a happy population is more likely to be law-abiding and economically productive - factors that may lead governments towards manipulating our emotions to force us to be happier.

Her exhibit imagines Blackburn, apparently one of the least happy places in the UK, being made happy. Black clothing is heavily taxed, the population walks around with rictus grins plastered on their faces and everyone skips everywhere. It reminded me of the Ned Flander's vision of the future from The Simpsons, where the real horror is that happiness is rigorously enforced. Her exhibit combines corporate iconography and design, showing the machinations of glass-tower dwelling London bureaucrats mirrored in a very creepy video of a 'happy' Blackburn.

The Validation Junky by Adam Peacock

Further manipulation of the human form occurs in Adam Peacock's The Validation Junky, an complex piece that treats the modern body like a piece of plasticine, playing God and reshaping us into something 'better' suited for modern living. Peacock argues that our bodies evolved for a hunter/gatherer life on the savannah, not to be hunched over the halflight of a computer monitor. He splits the body from the brain, first picking apart the 'post-industrial brain' as a complex diagram of political, social and emotion needs built atop Maslow's hierarchy of needs; realised in a huge intricate diagram and a fantastic book that showcases his ideas by building up layers of transparencies. Accompanying this are his bizarre future bodies designed for a sedentary lifestyle. They're troll-like and vaguely infantile - freakish yet weirdly logical for modern life.

Finally we reach out into space with Henrik Nieratschker's The Boltham Legacy. A fictional British industrialist has embarked upon a 400 secret space mission to bacterially colonise a distant planet, allowing him to gain the upper-hand in future space mining. Displayed, as if in some 2414 museum are the artefacts; a letter written by Boltham to his family, a diagram of the precious metals up for grabs at this planet and his elegant equipment.

The Boltham Legacy by Henrik Nieratschker

The upper-class British tendency for imperialism and outer space are a potent combination; the methods Nieratschker imagines weirdly reminiscent of reproductive fertilisation; the bacterial container as sperm cell and planet as egg. Given that NASA go to enormous trouble to sterilise their spacecraft to prevent bacterial stowaways, it's interesting to ponder the ethical dilemma of us conducting our own planetary invasions; a thought experiment that loops right around the ethics of modern mining of polar regions or rainforests.

Following the exhibition there was a wonderful dinner where each artist presented a course influenced by their work on display. As we gobbled down delicious cocktails, pancakes, soups, biscuits and cakes the artist explained their motivations and thought processes, as well as taking questions from the audience. The gathered crowd proved remarkably well-read, shooting perceptive questions at the artist on topics ranging from the politics of fashion to the differences between wild and domestic animals.

Yum.

I've always been a big proponent of art as food and this dinner was one of the best examples I've come across, and served as a perfect way to get to know the artists. And the food was absolutely delicious. Five fascinating future visions, five delicious courses at dinner and five genuinely interesting, smart young artists: a damn good night and a damn good exhibition.

Next Brave New World is at Arebyte Gallery until 18 September 2014

Whitecross Street Party 2014

'Lilting' (2014) directed by Hong Khaou

'Hercules' (2014) directed by Brett Ratner

'Boyhood' (2014) directed by Richard Linklater

'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' (2014) directed by Matt Reeves

'Drag King Richard III' at Riverside Studios, 29th July 2014

'Guardians of the Galaxy' (2014) directed by James Gunn

The Tea and Crumpet Filmcast Episode I

'Dessa Rose' at Trafalgar Studios, 31st July 2014

'Profile Picture' by Mark Farid at Arebyte Gallery, 3rd August 2014

'Soulmate' (2013) directed by Axelle Carolyn

'The Picture of John Gray' at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 8th August 2014

'The Congress' (2013) directed by Ari Folman

What I do When I'm Not Doing This.

'All Is by My Side' (2014) directed by John Ridley

'Alleluia' (2014) directed by Fabrice Du Welz

'The Apple Tree' at Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre, 15th August 2014

'Night Moves' (2013) directed by Kelly Reichardt

St Vincent at The Cambridge Junction, 19th August 2014

'Next Brave New World' at Arebyte Gallery, 20th August 2014