Steve TimmsIn the world of movie directing, there’s the auteur, and there’s the journeyman. The craftsman occupies the middle ground, motivated more by story and character than a need to stamp his personality on the finished product. Sydney Lumet was one of...
You don’t need to have read Fast Food Nation to know modern meat is created in an environment which would fit happily into the pictorial world of Hieronymus Bosch. A fake food advert in Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home book – for a product named...
In 1948, poet WH Auden wrote an essay outlining the key components of the ideal English detective story. ‘A murder occurs, many are suspected: all but one suspect, who is the murderer, is eliminated: the murderer is arrested.’ Such was the national...
Slapstick comedy has never gone out of fashion; as a genre, it transcends both time and language. It’s why the work of Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin continues to attract new converts. It’s also why the various incarnations of...
Does the world need another version of ‘Frankenstein’? Director James Whale drew up the movie blueprint with his original 1930’s film (and its sequel), a vision so distinctive that few have come close to surpassing it in the decades since. The...
What happened to 3D films? There was a time when nearly every big movie came in two versions. But much in the manner of My Space, 3D disappeared almost overnight; indicative of how dispensable it was in the eyes of film fans (there is still the...
Everybody loves an underdog success, and they don’t come much bigger than cross dressing musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Loosely inspired by the life of Jamie Campbell (subject of a BBC documentary, still on the I-Player), this fast paced...
Alongside musicals and thrillers, farce remains one of the great mainstays of commercial British theatre. Why? The 1950’s Whitehall farces largely set the mould, wherein misunderstanding always trumped character and believability. And it’s a formula...
Who killed Oldham Coliseum? That’s the question many are asking as this historic local theatre closes after over 100 years of business. A theatre which has survived two world wars, a global pandemic, and which helped launch the careers of Stan...
I often find it difficult to take dramas about miners seriously; mostly because of the famed Monty Python parody featuring the son who comes home from Barnsley to visit his London family: an inspired juxtaposition, given the former is now a coal...