FLIP!, Summerhall Edinburgh review - sassy, satirical parable

★★★★ FLIP!, SUMMERHALL EDINBURGH A Faustian fable crackles with energy and attitude

A Faustian fable of online influence crackles with energy and attitude

You can almost feel the energy blazing off the stage in this fast, furious and fiercely funny two-hander from writer Racheal Ofori and Newcastle-based Alphabetti Theatre. Don’t blink or you’ll miss a crucial plot twist, or a nifty swerve into new characters, or even a major technological development.

Fool's Paradise review - unfunny stab at making fun of Hollywood

★ FOOL'S PARADISE Unfunny stab at making fun of Hollywood

Charlie Day's comedy is loaded with cameos but very low on laughs

It must have looked like a funny idea on paper: a mute innocent stumbles into a Hollywood career, is mindlessly fêted by the industry and throws all its idiocies into stark relief. It’s an idea as old as the romances of Chretien de Troyes and Voltaire’s Candide, and was given an earlier Hollywood outing in Being There. But the lack of originality of the basic premise isn’t the problem here. 

Album: ¿Téo? - Luna

Opulent rap-R&B-Latin view of LA decadence

A little remarked fact of modern music is just how lush the sound of modern R&B and adjacent music is. A decade ago, the relative harshness of trap beats and EDM synths seemed to dominate sonically, or on the more bohemian fringes there was a meandering haziness derived from the UK influence of James Blake and Burial.

Henry Hoke: Open Throat review - if a lion could speak

★★★ HENRY HOKE: OPEN THROAT If a lion could speak

Our treatment of animals and their environment comes under scrutiny in Hoke's daring fifth novel

I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it seemed, at first glance, to be an over-intellectualised prose-cum-poetical text about a mountain lion.

Fatal Attraction, Paramount+ review - Adrian Lyne's bunny-boiler blockbuster expanded onwards and outwards

★★★★ FATAL ATTRACTION, PARAMOUNT+  A fascinating series trips over its own ambitions

A fascinating series which sometimes trips over its own ambitions

Directed by Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction was the biggest-grossing film of 1987, and gave the world the term “bunny boiler”. Lyne isn’t aboard for Paramount’s new eight-part series, but the film’s screenwriter James Dearden is a major script contributor alongside the show’s creators Kevin J Hynes and Alexandra Cunningham.

Marlowe review - Liam Neeson wearily treads those mean streets

★★★ MARLOWE Neil Jordan leans on threadbare noir pleasures, and his star's burnt-out private eye

Neil Jordan leans on threadbare noir pleasures, and his star's burnt-out private eye

Neil Jordan’s take on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the first since Bob Rafelson’s Poodle Springs (1998), itself a lone outlier after Michael Winner’s misbegotten The Big Sleep (1978). No one seems to have considered why, or what they might add.

Album: Miley Cyrus - Endless Summer Vacation

★★★★ MILEY CYRUS - ENDLESS SUMMER VACATION The former child star finally in her own

The former child star has finally come into her own

Being a few years more marinated in life than Miley Cyrus, it’s taken me a while to come around to her music. From the periphery, I’ve traversed the annoyance of small folk watching Hannah Montana and the "Hoedown Throwdown", to the bemused horror of watching a young female talent be either so manufactured/exploited by a male-centric music industry or rebelling against it so hard without being safeguarded she seemed intent on implosion.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On review - small fry with a big heart

★★★★ MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON Small fry with a big heart

Charming animated tale of a bereft one-inch shell overdoes the sentiment

Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a drawer when he left. Marcel pines for them, and he tugs at our heartstrings more relentlessly than should be allowed by a one-inch carapace animated by stop motion.