Film review: TS Spivet (12A)

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TS Spivet
(12A) 105mins
★★★✩✩

The Young And Prodigious TS Spivet was an instant success as a book - with a 12-year-old mini-genius telling a tale of his cross-country adventure to pick up a scientific award told with digressions, subplots, marginalia and footnotes.

Film review: Benny & Jolene (15)

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Benny & Jolene
(15) 86mins
★★✩✩✩

Filmmaker Jamie Adams seems to have been especially keen to make his debut. He called in favours from friends and pulled together this mumble core micro-budget mockumentary in a matter of days.

Exhibition: Mammoths - Ice Age Giants, Natural History Museum

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Lyuba led a short life. But she has become endlessly significant.

At around 35 days, the infant mammoth tumbled into soft clay. Her trunk and oesophagus were clogged with mud and she suffocated.

Stage review: Bakersfield Mist, Duchess Theatre

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Bakersfield Mist
Duchess Theatre WC2
★★★✩✩

Maude is the bourbon-swilling, plaid-wearing, tub-thumping ex-bartender surrounded by gaudy knick-knacks and urgent ashtrays.

Spiral Notebook: Lutfur Rahman - here comes the new boss, same as the old boss?

COMMENT

By Giles Broadbent

Racked by weariness and relief, the new Mayor of Tower Hamlets wept. He was hurt, he said, by accusation that he was racist, that he was a disciple of division.

Stage review: Incognito, Bush Theatre

Incognito
Bush Theatre
★★★★✩

The image repeats itself throughout Nick Payne's engrossing new play: a ribbon of starlings flocking together, flashes of silver on the wing, creating apparent order from a frenzy of dots.

Exhibition: Comics Unmasked, British Library

The novel is dead, declared Will Self recently. Really dead this time, he said, certainly as the prince of artforms.

So what will take its place as the pre-eminent, written narrative structure of the new century?

Film review: The Two Faces Of January (12A)

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The Two Faces Of January
(12A) 96mins
★★★✩✩

Film-maker Hossein Amini confesses this, his directorial debut, is a labour of love, a project he has nurtured for years ever since he first read Patricia Highsmith's difficult novel of guilt, secrets and self-destruction.

Book review: The Madness Of July, by James Naughtie

The Madness Of July
James Naughtie (Head Of Zeus)
★★★✩✩

James Naughtie, via his Radio Four Today programme, has spent years prowling the corridors of Whitehall, sniffing out discord, examining motive and exposing double-dealing.

His love of dark politics conducted in low voices in secret nooks over finest brandy finds voice in this slow-burning spy thriller that owes much to the master himself, John Le Carre.

Film review: Plastic (15)

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Plastic
(15) 102mins
★★✩✩✩

"Hollyoaks meets Hustle" is what springs to mind as this glossy, crime caper - based on a true story - begins to reveal its twisting tale of twentysomething wheeler dealers.