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'Jurassic World' (2015) directed by Colin Trevorrow
Much as I try not to be a sap for franchise nostalgia, Jurassic Park still tugs at my heartstrings. I vividly remember being an incredibly excited dinosaur obsessed ten year old in 1993, astonished and...
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'I and the Village' at Theatre503, 14th June 2015
For cosmopolitan British theatregoers small town America may as well be the surface of the moon. These are places only really familiar to us from movies, television and literature: the last fifty years...
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'Mr. Holmes' (2015) directed by Paul Condon
Since the ovary-tickling double impact of Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr, Sherlock Holmes has spent the last half decade or so undergoing a sexy renaissance. Gone is the classical...
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'L'italiana in Algeri' at the Brunel Shaft, 16th June 2015
When most people think of opera, they imagine a crowd of white-tied toffs watching a wailing woman who looks as if she's been dragged backwards through a make-up counter. Opera is an artform where...
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'Iphigenia in Tauris' at The Rose Playhouse, 18th June 2015
You can't fault Iphigenia for being a bit glum. Her Dad Agamemnon, an A-lister of Greek Mythology, was all set to offer her as a human sacrifice. Escaping by way of divine intervention she now finds...
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'Chef' at the Soho Theatre, 17th June 2015
Food is a fantastic dramatic metaphor. The best food and the best art both get under your skin, both bear the fingerprints of its creator and both communicate complex emotions without words. Not to...
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'A Single Act' at Theatro Technis, 19th June 2015
Something terrible has happened in central London. Shellshocked commuters stumble home, ears ringing from the crash of atrocity, eyes stinging from billowing clouds of disturbed dust. People stare...
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'Slow West' (2015) directed by John MacLean
The psychedelic Western ranks highly in my obscure film genre top ten. In these rare films, agoraphobia inducing scenery stands for the spiritual infinite, and combined with antisocial (usually...
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'The Tribe' (2014) directed by Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
The Tribe sounds like a parody of arthouse cinema. It's from the Ukraine. It's shot in bleak government buildings. It's brutally violent and unflinchingly sexual. The characters communicate entirely in...
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'Amy' (2015) directed by Asif Kapadia
In which we observe a talented and charismatic woman gradually descend into alcoholism and mental illness, culminating in her skinny corpse being wheeled into the back of a van. This is the story of...
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'Asking Rembrandt' at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 26th June 2015
Set within fragments of a gigantic picture frame, lit with warm sepia-tinged light and spattered with long-dried paint, the set of Asking Rembrandt believably drags its audience back to well-used...
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'Love and Mercy' (2015) directed by Bill Pohlad
Ah the sixties musobiopic, we meet again. This is a genre plagued by cliché, inherently bereft of suspense and often overshadowed by truly colossal egos. All too often we have stars smothered under bad...
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'The Tempest' at the Hope Theatre, 2nd July 2015
It's like sitting in an oven. On one of the hottest days of the year we dutifully troop into what can only be described as a sweatbox. To aid us we're spritzed with water, handed cool drinks, have...
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'As Is' at Trafalgar Studios, 3rd July 2015
Morbidity hangs heavy in the basement of Trafalgar Studios. The black painted walls sport the chalked names those lost to our modern plague, HIV/AIDS. Snatches of news reports play out, tracking the...
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'Orson's Shadow' at the Southwark Playhouse, 6th July 2015
The saga of Orson Welles is sobering. After his notoriously panic-inducing radio broadcast of War of the Worlds he went on to write, direct and star in Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane might be the greatest...
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'Judgement' at arebyte Gallery, 7th July 2015
Surrounded by cranes, shorn of floodlights and apparently devoid of life, the London Olympic Stadium has become the centre of a ghost town. Its neighbours, the velopark and aquatics centre, are...
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'Flick & Julie: Pop-Up Penny Pinchers' at the Leicester Square Theatre, 8th...
With George Osborne's post budget cackling still echoing down Whitehall and 'No Cuts' protesters gathering in Trafalgar Square, what better time for some 'austerity busting' comedy? Boy oh boy do we...
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'The Diver' at the Rag Factory, 10th July 2015
What the fuck is this shite? Gigantic alarm bells were blaring out from minute one, as director Rocky Rodriguez took to the stage to encourage us to drop the masks of adulthood and put on the masks of...
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'Inside Out' (2015) directed by Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen
In Still Ill Morrissey sang, "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?". Inside Out asks the same question, an animated summer blockbuster entirely about a 12 year old girl's fears....
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'Noonday Demons' at the King's Head Theatre, 14th July 2015
In 1953's Duck Amuck, Daffy Duck is tormented by an offscreen animator, his physical appearance, clothing and voice are sadistically screwed with. The duck collides, violently, with his limitations as...
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