Director Egor Abramenko delivers a creepy creature-feature with Sputnik. It starts with two cosmonauts planning to return to Earth, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. It’s 1983. After a Soviet space mission returns into barren Kazakhstan, the support team find one of the intrepid travellers hasn’t make it and the other – the commander…
The story of the younger years of an ordinary man, August celebrates the beauty of the small things and the purity of experiences that can be had in living a simple life. A thoughtful novel that seems oddly placed in time, August has much to say about what it is to grow up as a…
Damon Galgut’s ninth novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. Not having read all of the shortlisted novels it is hard to determine whether it was the best of the five. But there is no doubt that The Promise is a towering yet often intimate novel combining family drama and incisive character observation set…
Edward Ashton burst onto the science fiction scene with his ‘cloning meets first contact meets colonisation’ tale Mickey 7 (now the long-delayed movie Mickey 17 directed by Bong Joon Ho and starring Robert Pattinson). Mickey 7 was followed up by a less successful sequel Antimatter Blues. For his third book, Ashton does something different although…
From the outset we just know the contention in the action-crime thriller Free Fire is one set to explode and it will inevitably end badly. Suspicion, ego and, above all, greed stand in the way of a cadre of crims in Massachusetts in the late ‘70s. That they are on opposing sides is almost of…
Anger was my overwhelming emotion while watching this passionate, moving documentary about the barbaric Japanese practice of slaying defenceless whales in Antarctica. Four vessels of the marine wildlife conservation organisation Sea Shepherd set out on their ninth campaign to police the waters of the Antarctic. The location is the world’s only international whale sanctuary, where…
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel Open Water is a deeply personal exploration of the connection between two people and whether that connection can survive the pressures of the world. It is clearly, from the first page, a love story, but it is much more than that, as Nelson considers what it means to be young…
Featuring a live band and ten sexy performers, A Very Naughty Christmas is the holiday comedy event you didn’t know you had to experience. With festive classics as you’ve never heard them before, this show is bound to get you into the holiday spirit. And back, as it is, for its fifth helping, it really…
The final film from director Roger Michell (whose drama The Duke is currently screening in cinemas), Elizabeth: A Portrait in Part(s) is a documentary about Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning British monarch. The documentary has been released to coincide with her platinum jubilee. While this may not be the definitive portrait of Queen Elizabeth…
Mark Haddon’s best-selling award-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has been adapted to the stage by fellow playwright an Olivier winner himself. The novel which has become a staple of the school curriculum. Haddon himself thought the novel unadaptable, but Stephens’ version has been quite successful, remaining reasonably faithful to the novel….
