violence
Owen Richards
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap. Perfectly balancing perspective and curiosity, it’s perhaps the most unexpected achievement on the year.Liu has apparently always been the one behind the camera. From his early teens, he’s been pointing the lens towards his friends, primarily Zack and Keire. They’re both friends we recognise: Zack is the joker, always up for partying hard, and Keire Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons. The triad people didn’t help themselves by all wearing black suits with white shirts and running like lemmings into the line of fire, where they did a funny little jitterbug dance on the spot as they were pumped full of bullets.But that’s the way they like it in Strike Back world, where there isn’t an imminent global catastrophe that can’t be solved by Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Did you play videogames back in 2010? If you did, there’s a reasonable chance you played Crackdown 2. Only a reasonable chance as the game was just on Xbox 360 – this was back in the days when there was a lot more console-exclusive titles. But if you did play, you would know just how much fun this sprawling open world run, gun and mega jump game could be.Crackdown 2 was a vertigo-inducing urban romp, where as a super powered law enforcement agent you traverse the city with giant, gravity-defying leaps. Your abilities increase as you explore and complete objectives, bringing you new powers, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin lived such a fearless life that it's a shame this celluloid biopic isn't correspondingly brave. Sincere to a fault and bolstered by a blazing performance from an impassioned Rosamund Pike, Matthew Heineman's film suffers from a script by Arash Amel that seems incomplete at best and often doesn't seem to exist at all, apart from some none-too-plausible platitudes and the hagiography that one might expect and that Colvin herself, one imagines, would instinctively mistrust. Visually, it startles throughout, beginning at the site of Colvin's Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
In the history of early photography in the Middle East, it was the Armenian Christian traders and their descendents who became the pioneers of the new technology. Their numbers include the Armenian-Turkish photojournalist Ara Güler, "the Eye of Istanbul" who died last year and was famous for his signature images of the city. Others found their way to Lebanon, with families fleeing persecution and mass killing amidst the death throes of the Ottoman Empire. Prominent Lebanese-Armenian photographers include Manoug Alemian, born in Hama, Syria, whose land and townscapes record a beautiful mid Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Sitting somewhere between Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Final Destination, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a satirical supernatural thriller that goes for the jugular of the LA art scene.We open at the Art Basel Miami Beach, where art snobs with fat wallets glide from room to room with glazed eyes as they gaze at the objet d'art. There's a talking robot exhibit Hobo Man, and a giant polished silver orb pocked with holes you can stick your arm into - what it does it mean? No one cares much, it’s about how much it’s worth. It’s all incredibly pointed and fun, with Gilroy showing up the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Is there a connection between revolution and theatre? The answer has to be yes – a visceral one. The supremacy of symbols, the collective strength of a crowd, a sense that some kind of pressure valve is being released to challenge the dominant social narrative. The Ancient Greeks understood this – it was from such impulses that theatre had its birth. So how does that work amid the populist turbulence of the twenty-first century?Counting Sheep explodes on London’s theatre fringe scene with rave reviews from Edinburgh about its recreation of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. For a Brexit-broken Read more ...
Owen Richards
Destroyer. It’s an apt name. Like the film, it's grandiose and blunt. Nicole Kidman is almost unrecognisable (a requirement when aiming for nominations) as Detective Erin Bell, a damaged survivor of an undercover heist gone wrong. When her target resurfaces after 17 years, she must pull her life together to hunt him down and finally close the case, whatever it takes.When we first see Detective Bell, she’s barely holding it together. Approaching a crime scene, she looks like an old punk star that stopped enjoying the drugs long before she stopped taking them. Limping, eyes barely open, and a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s about to begin. The final performance on the final night – and only UK date – of the European Apocalypse package tour featuring four extreme metal bands. The 1,700 capacity Roundhouse is sold out. Touts outside are scrabbling for tickets. A curtain covers the stagefront. A procession of images flicker across it; ancient art, demons, gods and hellish conflict. Then the screen goes black. In large white gothic letters, words in sequence: LONDON. PREPARE. TO. GET. DESTROYED. The curtain drops. The white-light silhouetted forms of German thrash juggernaut Kreator pounce in at a velocity Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of Lizzie Borden, controversially acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892, has been explored many times on screen and in print (there’s even an opera and a musical version, not to mention the Los Angeles metal band Lizzy Borden). However, this new take on the story starring Chlöe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart from director Craig William Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass focuses forensically on the why rather than the who, and transforms the story into a fraught and penetrating psychological thriller.Fittingly for our Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Macbeth has rarely seemed quite as metrosexual as in this gorgeous shadow-painted production that marks Globe artistic director Michelle Terry’s first production in the Sam Wanamaker theatre. Even in a play that walks the tightrope between its anti-hero’s fear and his ambition, it’s a daring, occasionally counterintuitive ploy – yet after a precarious start, it proves a rich and rewarding reading of one of Shakespeare’s more problematic texts.That’s down in no small part to the smouldering on-stage chemistry between Paul Ready’s empathetic, emotionally mercurial Macbeth and Terry herself Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like Ken Loach and the Dardennes brothers, Laurent Cantet is a filmmaker with a keen interest in social issues and themes, often using non-professional actors and a naturalistic approach, but perfectly willing to inject a little plot contrivance to spice things up.The Frenchman’s early, calling-card films dealt with the workplace: Human Resources (1999) tackled industrial relations in a provincial factory and the divisive effect it has on a father-son relationship; Time Out (2001) concerned an executive’s painstaking attempt to fabricate a glamourous new working life Read more ...