violence
The Best of AA Gill review - posthumous words collectedSunday, 12 November 2017
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he... Read more... |
Thebes Land, Arcola Theatre - meta-theatre at its most thrillingMonday, 18 September 2017
Thebes Land returns to the Arcola Theatre as part of the wider CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, following a short 2016 run that resulted in an Off West End Award, or Offie, for Best Production. Director Daniel Goldman's pinpoint translation of... Read more... |
Tin Star, Sky Atlantic - broken characters stalked by remorseless fateMonday, 11 September 2017
Sometimes you can find yourself hankering after those old-fashioned TV dramas where you got a self-contained story every week, so you can drop in on it at any time and still keep up with what’s going on. With Tin Star, on the other hand, you need to... Read more... |
Christopher Shinn: 'I did not know if I would be alive and someone wanted me to write a play'Monday, 14 August 2017
Plays do not usually come into being in isolation. When I search my gmail archive I see that my first communication with Robert Icke about a commission came in April 2012. Rupert Goold and Rob were still at Headlong then. I was busy so asked that we... Read more... |
Gloria, Hampstead Theatre review – pretty gloriousFriday, 23 June 2017
As with life, so it is in art: in the same way that one can't predict the curve balls that get thrown our way, the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins defies categorisation. On the basis of barely a handful of plays, two of which happen now... Read more... |
Muhsin Al-Ramli: 'During Saddam’s regime at least we knew who the enemy was' - interviewSunday, 28 May 2017
Saddam Hussein’s name is never mentioned in The President’s Gardens, even though he haunts every page. The one time that the reader encounters him directly, he is referred to simply by his title. In a novel of vivid pictures, the almost... Read more... |
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword review - Guy Ritchie's deadly weaponThursday, 18 May 2017
Guy Ritchie is back birthing turkeys. Who can remember/forget that triptych of stiffs Swept Away, Revolver and RocknRolla? Now, having redemptively bashed his CV back into shape with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, the mockney rebel turns to... Read more... |
Occupational Hazards, Hampstead Theatre review - vivid outline in search of a fuller playWednesday, 10 May 2017
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Black Society TrilogyFriday, 10 February 2017
Mixing up your yakuzas and your triads can be a bloody business, as Takashi Miike’s films show in the goriest detail. The title of the earliest work in his “Black Society” trilogy, Shinjuku Triad Society from 1995, says it all – a Chinese... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Raising CainTuesday, 31 January 2017
It has Brian De Palma’s greatest shock ending since Carrie, and an Alec Guinness-worth of John Lithgow psychopaths – yet 1992’s Raising Cain is rarely remembered among the director’s best works. I last came across it midway through, late at night on... Read more... |
The AccountantThursday, 03 November 2016
You could begin to wonder if The Accountant is part of a game of one-upmanship between Ben Affleck and his old buddy Matt Damon. If Matt can strike it big with Jason Bourne, the amnesiac super-lethal assassin, Ben can go one better – Christian Wolff... Read more... |
Jack Reacher: Never Go BackWednesday, 19 October 2016
Four years on from Tom Cruise's debut as Jack Reacher in Jack Reacher, here he is doing it again. Not a lot has changed. Cruise eerily continues not to age (does the Scientology robotics division know something we don't?), Jack Reacher is still the... Read more... |
