sat 05/04/2025

magic

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald review - mischief not quite managed

Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald...

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CD: Imogen Heap - The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

London’s Palace Theatre this week celebrated the thousandth performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened there back in 2016. Like everything else JK Rowing puts her hand to, it’s been an outrageous success, taking the post-Hogwarts...

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Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Home / The Prisoner

 Home ★★★★   Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless...

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Disenchantment, Netflix review - Matt Groening show has promise after poor start

It’s an event that only comes around once a generation: a new Matt Groening TV series. The Simpsons is rightly regarded as one of the greatest shows ever made. It changed the face of American television, and 10 years later was followed Futurama, a...

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Blu-ray: La Belle et la bête

Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used...

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Mr Swallow - Houdini, Soho Theatre

Nick Mohammed doesn't do things by halves as his chatty airhead alter ego Mr Swallow. Forget the scholarly approach of finely researched biographies of Harry Houdini (“boring!”); his “first-ever entirely true auto-biopic” of the magician and...

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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Palace Theatre

Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling’s world-beating franchise beyond the realm of fiction and film to embrace live action:...

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Derren Brown: Miracle, Palace Theatre

Derren Brown calls himself a mentalist, but he's also a great showman, as his latest show, Miracle, attests. With its simple set, this is seemingly an evening of straightforward illusions. But that's deceptive, as Brown provides more than two hours...

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Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This, ITV

Comedians offer rich pickings to dramatists – whether they fall into the crying clown category, or the nice bloke on stage and complete arse off it, or the side-splittingly funny performer who is as boring as watching paint dry in real life. So no...

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Jonathan Creek, BBC One

In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the...

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Now You See Me

This movie has a couple of key advantages - it doesn't have any serial killers or zombies in it. It also pays the audience the compliment of assuming that it has a certain amount of intelligence, enough at least to appreciate being bamboozled by its...

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Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb, BBC One

Three years after Jonathan Creek's last one-off special, tellies across the land resounded once again to the strains of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, a theme tune cunningly chosen to reflect the show's mix of menace, wit and whimsy. Nor had...

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