Like a faded star, wearing the moth eaten dresses of her past, still stalking a shuttered Hollywood set, Lara Croft has seen better days. Ah, the old days – she made or broke consoles, appeared on fashion magazine covers, had Angelina Jolie play her in the movies.
The Wicker Man is a great British film, one of the top horror films of all time. Since its release in 1973, its curious combination of queasily jolly folkloric ritual and sinister paganism has only grown to seem more discomfiting, reeking of the uncanny, and flavouring new films as recently as the extraordinary Kill List.
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.
Memo to William Shakespeare: could we have more, please, in The Tempest of the anxious, angsty Prospero, the mortality-minded magus played in his most riveting theatre performance in years by Ralph Fiennes? As long as Fiennes is prowling the Haymarket stage, staff in hand, the West End's latest exercise in starry Shakespeare bristles with a quietly baleful urgency that erupts occasionally into a roar.
Saturnine means to be hard, impermeable, gloomy and dull. Thudding, even. The word quite literally means to be like lead. It is an odd choice of album title for a record which is none of those things.
The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic bulk of Jason Momoa, the half-Hawaiian and half-Irish veteran of the celebrated cheesecake opera Baywatch.
Hollywood has turned the special effect into a birthright for a generation of movie-goers. “How did they do that?” is no longer a question you hear in the multiplex. In the theatre it’s another thing entirely. Whatever the reception for the show in its entirety, the musical version of The Lord of the Rings did contain one remarkable illusion in which Bilbo Baggins vanished before the audience’s eyes. Even Derren Brown had no idea how it was achieved. The architect of that effect, and countless others in a long career in the theatre, was Paul Kieve.
Derren Brown is witty, urbane, clever and a keen student of what makes humans tick - which must come as a huge advantage when you are developing an evening’s entertainment based on kidology. He makes it clear he’s not a psychic or clairvoyant and that there is a rational explanation for everything he does in his two and a half hours on stage, and indeed describes himself as “Illusionist, mentalist and sceptic” - I imagine emphasis is on the sceptic.
Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who would sooner use diminishing brain-cell capacity to store more pertinent information can tell you who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, the uses of gillyweed and the difference between a grindylow and a blast-ended skrewt.