The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show of this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
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“Particulars of plot, character, and world-building often take a backseat to matters of ‘How the hell did they do that?’ And that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay — it’s ultimately the real reason we watch this sort kind of thing: for the Wow Factor… Age of Resistance is like an immense, ten-hour magic show, engrossing down to the very last wondrous detail. This is an altogether staggering artistic achievement, and a joyful continuation of the Henson tradition.”
Released 30 August on Netflix
MOVIE: The Informer
Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph
“The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.”
Released 30 August
BOOK: Legacy by Thomas Harding
Andrew Hill in the Financial Times
“Legacy sets out to celebrate that [catering] empire and its founders, going back to Lehmann Gluckstein, who fled west from Prussia’s anti-Jewish pogroms in the 19th century. Lehmann’s grafting descendants ultimately turned misfortune into success in the UK, first as tobacconists Salmon and Gluckstein - Barnett Salmon married Lehmann’s granddaughter Lena - and then as J Lyons. Joe Lyons, hired as a frontman for the catering business, ‘wowed and impressed,’ Harding writes, but ‘the family and the rest of the staff did all the work’.”
Released 29 August
STAGE: A Brutally Honest Evening with Mel B
David Simpson in The Guardian
“Brown reveals the five hours of hair-weaving and vocal warm-ups that turn her into Scary Spice. She talks about her mixed-race childhood and bisexuality, hints that the Spice Girls will play Glastonbury in 2020 and is joined by her dog, Cookie, who promptly pees on stage… It’s far too long, but somewhere in the chaos is a powerful insight into superstardom’s human cost and what it means to gain, surrender and determinedly rediscover girl power.”
1 September at the Savoy Theatre, London