Film review: Hello Carter (15)

Hello Carter
(15) 81mins
★★✩✩✩

According to the support notes to this film, Londoner Anthony Wilcox sold his house  and spent a year writing the script for Hello Carter, his full directorial debut.

Film review: Paddington (PG)

Paddington
(PG) 95mins
★★★★★

Clear the decks, grab the children, make a note - there's a new tradition elbowing its way into Christmas schedules.

Book review: How We Got To Now, by Steven Johnson

BOOK
How We Got To Now
Steven Johnson (Penguin)
★★★✩✩

The world is rich with academics with a good turn of phrase exploring the history of ideas and innovations, making the mundane endlessly fascinating.

Film review: Third Person (15)

Third Person
(15) 137mins
★★★✩✩

There's something wrong here. You ask yourself, how come something that reeks of quality, with a quality cast and a quality writer-director reprising - structurally at least - his finest hour, feels so limp and insipid?

Book review: The Story Of The Human Body, by Daniel Lieberman

The Story Of The Human Body
Daniel Lieberman
(Penguin)
★★★★★

This book was published in October. It  has taken me several weeks to complete. This could be for two reasons.

Stage review: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, Gielgud Theatre

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time
Gielgud Theatre
★★★★✩

The torment of living in a world that is threatening, jagged and strange is given full expression in this inventive and intelligent adaptation of Mark Haddon's award-winning book.

Stage review: Shakespeare In Love, Noel Coward Theatre

Shakespeare In Love
Noel Coward Theatre
★★★★★

The genius conceit of Shakespeare In Love - plunging the young Bard into the sort of fictional, farcical world that he might have concocted - is endlessly delicious.

Stage review: Neville's Island, Duke Of York's Theatre

Neville's Island
Duke Of York's Theatre
★★★✩✩

Rain pours down on a verdant inlet and the perfume of pines fills the auditorium. Stormy camps, reluctant kindling and a fragile grasp on fortitude.

Film review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (12A)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
(12A) 101mins
★★✩✩✩

When mindless Megan Fox thinks about the loss of her father and her role in the whole Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle circus, her eyes tell a story.

Film review: Effie Gray (12A)

Effie Gray
(12A) 108mins
★★★★✩

If Effie Gray lacks the emotional release that the painstaking accumulation of frustrations appears to demand, it is perhaps testimony to the artistic courage of script writer Emma Thompson (who also stars).

Book review: The Sense Of Style, by Steven Pinker

The Sense Of Style
Steven Pinker (Allen Lane)
★★★✩✩

Steven Pinker is an dazzling thinker, an excellent writer and a brilliant matchmaker of the two - marrying complex ideas to simple English.

This has not happened by chance. He has studied hard to make his writing appear easy and now wishes to share his learning.

Book reviews: Scarcity, The Gods Of Guilt, The Young And Prodigious TS Spivet

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Penguin)
★★★✩✩

The authors have a "big idea", another in the newly popular field of behavioural economics. The nudgers and freaks are joined by the lackies - those who live with scarcity.

Film review: A Most Wanted Man (15)

A Most Wanted Man
(15) 122mins
★★★✩✩

Director Anton Corbijn's sombre spy film is dressed in graffitied concrete, kebab shop neon and cold steel blue.

Art: How Turner squared up to the oblong tendency

Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Tate Britain

For the longest time pictures were brick-shaped. Photographs in an album and portraits on the wall were often pre-figured to the Golden Ratio, that pleasing aspect that had mathematical as well as aesthetic qualities.

Art: Clare Woods on her commission for London's river services

Cranky and Idler may sound like sneaky nicknames for your deadwood colleagues but in the hands of artist Clare Woods, they are shimmering takes on the River Thames.

Film review: Lucy (15)

WHAT'S ON

Lucy
(15) 89mins
★★★★✩

Nothing in Lucy feels particularly new. It doesn't require a great deal of brain capacity to spot the references - 2001, Limitless, The Matrix, Inception.

Film review: The Rover (15)

WHAT'S ON

The Rover
(15) 108mins
★★★✩✩

Guy Pearce is mad, bored and has nothing to lose. Well, he has one thing to lose and that's his car (not the Rover of the title, sadly). When the dusty Aussie emerges from a roadside bar and sees criminals making off with his wheels, he finds a purpose that makes him less bored but more mad.

Book reviews: Feral, by George Monbiot; The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith

BOOKS

Feral
George Monbiot
(Penguin)
★★★★✩

"Shifting baseline syndrome" is a curse of the re-wilding movement, one of a list of foes that also includes sheep, Scottish landowners and stupid EU diktats.

Film review: God's Pocket (15)

WHAT'S ON

God's Pocket
(15) 88mins
★★★✩✩

The work of Philip Seymour Hoffman has always been compelling and watchable.

Film review: Begin Again (15)

WHAT'S ON

Begin Again
(15) 104mins
★★★★✩

Actors secretly harbour a dream to be a musician and musicians want to be an actor one day." So says Brit James Corden, who turns up in this love song to the power of music which is heaving with job swappers.