Film Jeanne Dielman: The Greatest Film of All Time? The Sight and Sound poll of the world’s best films had a bit of a shake-up last year when an obscure three-and-a-half-hour experimental feminist movie made it to the number one spot. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is as austere, detailed and lengthy as its titl By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Photo: Manuel Harlan Arts REVIEW: The Doctor @ Theatre Royal Brighton Robert Icke’s The Doctor is very much an ideas-driven play. It’s a profusion of debates about race, gender, identity, morality, religion, medical ethics and wokeness which, against the odds, fit neatly into one production. It’s hard to know where the author stands on pretty much any of the themes he By Michael Hootman • 3 min read
Arts AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘Get Carter’ to ‘Vampyr’ What’s hot on the box? Film reviews from Michael Hootman By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
Arts At Home With Hootman: From ‘Jules et Jim’ to ‘Lawrence of Belgravia’ What’s hot on the box? Tune into these film reviews from Michael Hootman By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
Arts REVIEW: Circa Sacre @ Theatre Royal Brighton (BRIGHTON FESTIVAL) The choreography is impressive: fluid and gliding and suitably gravity-defying. However, due to my manifest limitations, I wanted to leave after about ten minutes. By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Lead photo credit: Luca-Truffarelli Arts REVIEW: The Patient Gloria @ Theatre Royal Brighton (BRIGHTON FESTIVAL) It’s probably the only show you’ll see this year which has a flying penis. By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
THE HOMECOMING. Ian Bartholomew (Sam), Keith Allen (Max) & Mathew Horne (Lenny) © Manuel Harlan Arts REVIEW: The Homecoming @ Theatre Royal Brighton Jamie Glover’s excellent production certainly brings out the dark humour of the play. It’s always exciting in the theatre to find yourself laughing and then almost immediately feeling slightly guilty for doing so. By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
Arts AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘YellowJackets’ to ‘Hard Cell’ What’s hot on the box? Michael Hootman reviews the best and the worst TV and film By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
Arts AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘The Proposition’ to ‘Lot In Sodom’ What’s hot on the box? Michael Hootman tunes into the best and worst TV and film By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
Arts AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘The Tinder Swindler’ to ‘The Real Charlie Chaplin’ What’s hot on the box? Michael Hootman tunes into the best and worst TV and film By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
Arts AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘Don’t Look Up’ to ‘Toast of Tinseltown’ What’s hot on the box? Michael Hootman tunes into the best and worst TV and film By Michael Hootman • 4 min read
REVIEW: Bent Double @ Komedia Zoe Lyons has a great rapport with the audience and her likability is definitely an asset. Maybe she was having a bad evening but her material wasn’t great. There was some observational comedy (sans comedy) about people who wear wolf fleeces. We heard the old joke about teachers who work so hard tha By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
THEATRE REVIEW: Hair @Theatre Royal In a game attempt to add a pinch of relevance this production of Hair opens with a name check for Donald Trump before we’re quickly whisked back in time to the era of LBJ, Timothy Leary, acid, free-love and Vietnam. We then meet a tribe of hippy drop-outs in what amounts to a series […] By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Festival REVIEW Silence @Black Rock A ten-foot tall creature wearing flowing robes unveils a shabby bus from which disembark a group of ragged men, women and children. It’s certainly an arresting image, the first of many from Poland’s Teatr Biuro Podrozy which looks at the lives of these civilians both before and after the military ta By Michael Hootman • 1 min read
THEATRE REVIEW: Glengarry Glen Ross @The Theatre Royal David Mamet’s modern classic is a bleakly funny look at the world of men. It centres on a group of salesman as they do anything it takes to close the deal by getting their clients – though ‘victims’ might be a better word – to buy sections of real estate. They lie, flatter and cajole and believe thi By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
THEATRE REVIEW: Bottom @The Marlborough Theatre Willy Hudson’s show focuses on a young man who is swallowed up by a London of exploitative jobs, drugs and sex where what he really wants is to find true love. By Michael Hootman • 1 min read
Fringe REVIEW: Mark Bittlestone: Pity Laughs @The Warren THIS is a show about being an orphan and being gay with the ratio of material about being parentless to jokes about anal sex being roughly 1:9. It has some great gags, and Mark Bittlestone certainly has a winning charm which gets the audience on board. By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Arts FILM REVIEW: You Were Never Really Here If I had to sum up Lynne Ramsay’s style of filmmaking in a word it would be ‘concentrated’. Important clues about a character, or a vital link in a chain of events, might be expressed in a single shot or a couple of words. By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Arts PREVIEW: Queer Films @ Cinecity Film Festival Cinecity, the Brighton film festival, is showing a number of LGBT-themed films tonight and over the weekend. The Misandrists (pictured) is the latest provocation from underground queer film legend Bruce LaBruce (The Raspberry Reich, Hustler White, Gerontophilia). It’s the story of a dissident lesbia By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Arts THEATRE REVIEW: How the Other Half Loves @Theatre Royal Rather like his recently revived Relatively Speaking, Alan Ayckbourn’s play is a farcical look at an affair and the tortured results of covering it up. The intricate web of lies lead, inevitably, to a whole raft of misunderstandings. Written five years later, How the Other Half Loves is almost exper By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Arts DVD REVIEW: Teenage Kicks Teenage Kicks (Matchbox DVD) certainly starts off in an arresting way with incestuous desire leading directly to death within about two minutes. Yet Miklós Varga (Miles Szanto) doesn’t seem to learn from this as he sets out to prove Homer Simpson’s adage about the brain being ‘a subsidiary of the pe By Michael Hootman • 1 min read
Arts THEATRE REVIEW: Rules for Living @ Theatre Royal Sam Holcroft’s marvellous comedy looks at a family get-together as it gradually disintegrates. Over the course of a Christmas lunch revelations are revealed, old resentments are reignited and no one is left unscathed by the events – events for which they all share some of the blame. The play has bee By Michael Hootman • 2 min read
Arts BRIGHTON FRINGE REVIEW: The Starship Osiris @Komedia Studio George Vere’s hour-long confection is a riotous piece of grade-Z science fiction in which a rather bijou starship has to battle cheaply made monsters, a demoralised cast, Vere’s monstrous ego and some of the worst sci-fi power ballads known to humankind. Slowly its creator’s ego trip, during which w By Michael Hootman • 1 min read
Arts BRIGHTON FRINGE REVIEW: Help! I Think I Might Be Fabulous @Brighton Spiegeltent: Bosco It’s been quite a while since I’ve failed to connect with a show as deeply as I failed to connect with this one – it might as well have been performed in Lithuanian so little did I appreciate what was happening on stage. By Michael Hootman • 1 min read
