Stage review: Strangers On A Train, Gielgud Theatre

STAGE
Strangers On A Train
Gielgud Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
A stylish and slick take on Hitchcock's classic has plenty of tension, but is occasionally stymied by its own aesthetic ambition

Turner And The Sea, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

JMW Turner was the pre-eminent landscape painter in Western art, according to leading Victorian art critic John Ruskin. But the weight and obsession of the artist's canon suggests he was, above all, and with an relentless obsession, a seascape painter.

Film review: The Family (15)

FILM
The Family
(15) 111mins
★★✩✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Director Luc Besson creates some uncomfortable shift in tone that undermines the work of his accomplished cast.

Spiral Notebook: The wrong Brand of revolution

Russell Brand has suggested that young people should not vote, their collective act of indifference sparking crisis, then revolution.

He delivered his polemic on Newsnight in his usual baroque lexicon, like a child keeping pace with a runaway autocue.

Film review: Gravity (12A)

FILM
Gravity
(12A) 91mins
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
Director Alfonso Cuaron takes CGI to a new level with his spellbinding 3D space adventure.

Bringing children back to the wild

Mason is 10. He looks out on Canary Wharf from his high-rise. He wants to take film-maker David Bond on a tour of his manor, where he takes his dog for a walk to the patch of green that is his meagre playground.

"People moan at us for playing ball games," he says as he heads past the forbidding signs and down the "curly wurly" stairs of his concrete jungle.

Spiral Notebook: Not more cruel, just more of it

There are a lot of us about. Billions in fact. And what with the world opening up to journalists looking for tales of weirdness and cruelty and a healthy appetite for the same on the web, there appear to be more and more of us each day.

Take China. The opening up of the Red Giant has, yes, provided a bigger market for our widgets but, more importantly, it has fed the world with another tranche of human misery of which we were previously ignorant.