Other People's Money, Southwark Playhouse review - onetime Off Broadway hit retains its sting

★★★★ OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY, SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE Greed is good in feisty revival of Eighties period piece

Greed is good or at least entertaining in feisty Off West End revival

Deft and funny and nicely cast, what's not to like about Other People's Money, the era-defining Jerry Sterner play in revival at Southwark Playhouse? The play's 1989 premiere Off Broadway allowed for a contemporary skewering of the roaring, rapacious, uncaring 1980s.

Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feeling

Nastiness and clichéd characters

Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having put his artistic aspirations on ice. Typical millennials. They’re in love. Or rather, we’re told they’re in love. In fact, we’re told rather a lot of things - it seems to be the book’s mode.

DVD: Generation Wealth

★★★ GENERATION WEALTH Documentary ramble through greed, money and vicarious excess

An intriguing documentary ramble through greed, money and vicarious displays of excess

“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth.

£¥€$ (LIES), Almeida Theatre review - financial frolics at the gaming table

★★★★ £¥€$ (LIES), ALMEIDA THEATRE Financial frolics at the gaming table

Ontroerend Goed's latest offers a cunningly immersive take on capitalism

Theatre critics tend not to experience an 140 percent increase in their financial assets within 21 minutes. So on that remarkable front alone, the London premiere of the Belgian £¥€$ (LIES) is giddily immersive fun, at least up until such time as the Ontroerend Goed production shifts gears and sends the financial world, and our momentary prosperity, crashing down.

Dessert, Southwark Playhouse review - undercooked and overwrought

★★ DESSERT, SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE Oliver Cotton's new play is undercooked and overwrought

Oliver Cotton's new play, directed by Trevor Nunn, begins well before succumbing to absurdity and hysteria

"What is this, Saving Private Ryan?" a character randomly queries well into the actor Oliver Cotton's new play, Dessert. Well, more like a modern-day An Inspector Calls on steroids, with the volume turned up so high in Trevor Nunn's production that you don't half believe the questioner's wife when she talks about a state of affairs that could be heard all the way to France. After a promising and prickly start, Cotton's hectoring satire of our recklessly self-absorbed, increasingly divisive age devolves into implausibility and hysteria in equal measure.

Gold

GOLD Matthew McConaughey's fable of untold riches is harder work than it ought to be

Matthew McConaughey's fable of untold riches is harder work than it ought to be

Matthew McConaughey has already had a go at hunting for gold (on film, at any rate) in 2008's Fool's Gold, where he and Kate Hudson were on the trail of a sunken Spanish galleon full of treasure. Critics were unsympathetic ("excruciatingly lame" was a fairly typical response).

The Accountant

THE ACCOUNTANT Gavin O'Connor's thriller has lots of good stuff undone by a silly ending

Gavin O'Connor's thriller has lots of good stuff undone by a silly ending

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, an autistic accountant and super-lethal assassin!  

Money Monster

MONEY MONSTER George Clooney and Julia Roberts's enjoyable anti-Wall Street drama

George Clooney and Julia Roberts star in enjoyable anti-Wall Street drama

This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.

Billions, Sky Atlantic

BILLIONS, SKY ATLANTIC New power-and-money drama is smart and slick, sleazy and cheesy

New power-and-money drama is smart and slick, sleazy and cheesy

The pre-title sequence – in which a middle-aged man without any trousers lies trussed up on the floor – immediately tells us that we are not to take Billions too seriously. A woman in thigh-high leather boots with killer heels towers over him. Removing a cigarette-holder from her lips, she tells him he’s in need of correction before stubbing out the fag on his bare chest.