Blue Valentine: A review
Please don’t consider going to see this with your spouse of ten years, the one with the crows feet, the stressful job and the flagging libido. Because this might just hammer the nail in your relationship.
Roisin Kiberd
At Swim-Two-Birds at the Project Arts Centre: A review
How do you stage three plays at once? A company is faced with such a question adapting Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds for stage, a labyrinthine, some might say proto-postmodern work (though the renownedly no-Bullshit author might not have liked this name…)
Cracked: A review of Crack magazine
God bless the guileless dreamers who buy British Lotto tickets, for their impulse-bought scratchcards fund the likes of Crack… A year-old freesheet for the city of Bristol, Crack has quietly persevered its combination of local and international art, scoring interviews with everyone from James Murphy to a deranged local agony aunt named Mavis (offering advice on ‘how to survive this mean game called life’).
Catfish: A review
Tech-phobes left cold by The Social Network will find vindication in Catfish, a slow-burning documentary about the online friendship between a documentary filmmaker, Nev, and a young artist named Ali.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams: A review
Granted unprecedented access to the oldest artworks on Earth, Herzog finds ample fuel for favourite themes- man amongst the elements, inhospitable landscapes and the odd close-up of a particularly photogenic reptile.
The Betrayal: A review
Having survived starvation and German invasion, Leningrad couple Andrei and Anna face one final, particularly nasty purge, that of the “saboteur” doctors.
Private Life: A book review
It takes a lifetime to see a life wasted: beginning in 1883, Jane Smiley’s Private Life concerns that most commonplace of horrors, the loveless marriage. Recalling Henry James’s Beast in the Jungle –
