The Time Out London blog team

★★★★ The parameters for judging a stage adaption of the horror film franchise Paranormal Activity are clearly quite different to, say, a production of King Lear.  It’s not the only consideration, but judgement does essentially boil down to one main question: is it scary? To which the answer here is a frazzled ‘oh my, yes’. Paranormal Activity (the play) is not just a stage transposition of Paranormal Activity (the film), although you can see why it bears the franchise name: there would be a lawsuit if not. While the plot plays out differently in terms of specifics, the fundamentals are identical.  James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Melissa James) are a thirtysomething US couple who have just moved to a rainy London for his job, and to get away from things that were happening at their Chicago home. She believes she’s been haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence since childhood. He wants to be supportive but doesn’t want to pretend he believes in ghosts. She is taking strong antidepressants because she wants to be seen to be playing ball. Nothing weird has happened since they moved – but then, suddenly, weird stuff starts happening.  Clearly you can’t have found footage theatre. But in some ways the fact that Fly Davis’s set is nothing but the couple’s mundane two-storey house captures the genre’s claustrophobia nicely: did something just move in that corner? What’s happening on the top floor while the couple are in the lounge? A couple of grainy screens off to the...

Paul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural thriller One Battle After Another, already tipped for Oscars, has dominated the nominations for this year’s London Critics’ Circle Film Awards. The critically acclaimed political epic picked up nine nominations, including Film of the Year, Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio and Director of the Year for Anderson, while Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn will go head-to-head in the Best Supporting Actor category.   Hamnet also scored highly with the UK critics’ body, picking up eight nods, including Film of the Year. Jessie Buckley was nominated for Actress of the Year and Chloé Zhao collected a Director of the Year nomination, although Paul Mescal missed out in the Actor of the Year bracket. Ryan Coogler’s musically-charged vampire horror Sinners was another favourite with voters, collecting seven nominations, while Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme picked up six.  Other notable nominees include an Actor of the Year nod for Timothée Chalamet for Marty Supreme, and four nominations each for Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind.  Photograph: BBC Film‘Sentimental Value’ ‘At a time when A.I. and homogeny seems to be the shorthand answer to everything, it’s encouraging to see the films that our members voted for are teeming with human life, creativity and unique perspectives,’ says Jane Crowther, London Critics’ Circle film section chair. ‘Boasting bold, vital stories, real experiences and...

Whether you live in London or not, you’ll know that it’s an expensive place to exist in. There’s the ever-increasing tube fares, the eye-watering rent and house prices and the pints that now cost up to eight British pounds. But how does the Big Smoke compare to other cities across the globe?  As part of our big best cities survey for 2025, we asked residents of cities across the globe to rate the affordability of various activities in their hometown. They told us how they rate the cost of eating out, seeing a movie, grabbing a coffee, going to see art, watching live theatre or comedy, booking a live gig, getting a drink in a bar and going on a night out.  Then, we crunched the numbers to find out which cities are the most extortionate of them all. The Big Smoke was voted the 13th most expensive city on the planet.  Of all the cities on the list, London was by far the most expensive place for a night out, with just 16 percent of locals agreeing it was affordable (see how the cost has changed over the last 30 years here). When it comes to eating out, only 35 percent of respondents agreed that restaurant prices are reasonable. Live music in London got a 37 percent affordability rate and just 39 percent said theatre and comedy was comfortably within their means. However, it was redeemed by the fact that locals voted it named one of the cheapest cities to see art. Eighty-three percent of Londoners said art and culture in their city is cheap or free.  Photograph: Shutterstock ...