Washed for cars review

This second Hobbit movie was for me not just a pleasure, but a revelation. For the first time, I "got" the JRR Tolkien/Peter Jackson experience. I tuned into the frequency. I tasted the fusion cuisine. I heard the eccentric but weirdly rousing choral harmonies. And this is despite – or more probably because of – never having been a Tolkien fan and being agnostic about the myth-making and, indeed, the prose quality. I never had any dogmatic sense of how the original should be represented or any loyalty to childhood fandom, and in fact I came to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 with some unbelief, though as the Rings series progressed I was forced – with some churlish ill-grace – to admire those movies' mighty ambition and scope. With the Hobbit series, the penny is properly dropping: it's not about Tolkien, it's Tolkien-plus-Jackson, of course. It's morphed into something new. This movie is tremendously enjoyable, and … [Read more...] about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – review

The Clive Arms, Bromfield, Shropshire What’s it like? My stay was in one of the new rooms and I found it a comfortable, unfussy space. While it doesn’t have the wow factor, the decor’s shades of light green, prints of birdlife and books artfully scattered about made for a relaxing environment. Slipping into my en suite I found a deep, free-standing roll-top bath and walk-in shower, and big bottles of eco-friendly 100 Acres toiletries – including a very silky conditioner. In one of the new rooms, the bath is actually inside the bedroom (“something younger couples like” according to one of the staff). It’s a pity the noisy A49 runs in front of the hotel but at least the traffic had reduced to a trickle by bedtime. What about breakfast and dinner? I tested their mettle by requesting vegan options: kicking off with a tempura-battered courgette flower that melted in the mouth. My main was a platter of produce picked fresh from the walled garden, … [Read more...] about Five of the UK’s best new hotels for foodies: reviewed

If the spirit of Stanley Kubrick lives in any current film-maker, it is surely the Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter, whose 2008 documentary Our Daily Bread was a chilling study of mechanised food production and animal slaughter. Now he has created a visually extraordinary film composed simply of long, static shots of abandoned human constructions: theatres, hospitals, swimming pools, malls, railway stations, entire apartment complexes. He has found images from all over the world, including Fukushima and Nagasaki in Japan. This simple, eerie succession of images is as gripping as any of the sci-fi thrillers or post-apocalyptic dramas that would normally use scenes like these as establishing shots. At first, I almost expected to see a group of armed YAs blunder into the wrecked streetscape of mossy, overgrown buildings. Geyrhalter goes beyond ruin porn to a sustained meditation on the post-human state; his film is perhaps inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s remark: … [Read more...] about Homo Sapiens review – extraordinary vision of a post-human world

A review has been ordered into the decision to approve the release of a murderer who has never revealed the whereabouts of his victim's body.The family of Helen McCourt, who was 22 when she was killed, spoke of their shock last month when the Parole Board confirmed her killer Ian Simms had "met the test for release".Pub landlord Simms was convicted of her 1988 murder following overwhelming DNA evidence but he has never admitted guilt or revealed where he left her body.Her mother Marie has campaigned to keep killers behind bars until they lead police to the victim's body - dubbed Helen's Law - but the proposed legislation failed to be ratified before parliament was dissolved.On Tuesday, it was confirmed the Parole Board will review its decision to sanction Simms' release after a request by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland. Advertisement A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "After carefully considering the details of this case, we believe there is an arguable case to meet … [Read more...] about Helen McCourt murder: Decision to release killer Ian Simms to be reviewed by Parole Board

This movie from first-time feature director Ladj Ly has one of the most striking and even glorious pre-credit sequences I can remember. It shows the cheering, screaming crowds on the streets of Paris last summer, when France had just beaten Croatia 4-2 in the World Cup. This is a seething mass of humanity with tricolours waving everywhere, boiling with joy. Finally, the director flashes up the title over the people, ecstatic in their triumph: Les Misérables. It’s an irresistible irony and it kicks the film off with a great exhilarating jolt of humour, cynicism, energy and savvy. But what begins as a fascinatingly tough cop procedural gets less interesting when the violence begins, and it becomes a solemnly ponderous issue movie on those familiar subjects of police brutality and community divisions. The stakes are ostentatiously raised, the riot makes it looks like a war movie and it ends unconvincingly. Rather as with Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan from 2015, it’s a … [Read more...] about Les Misérables review – savvy cop procedural swerves into molotov mayhem