Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
All you need to know about love and money
Hymn (almeida.co.uk, Wednesday-Saturday) Stars Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani as men who meet at a funeral and explore what it means to be a father, brother and son. Lolita Chakrabarti’s play will be performed and streamed live each night.
All On Her Own
(stream.theatre, February 16-21)
Janie Dee, left, stars in in a new filmed version of Terence Rattigan’s powerful 1968 TV play about a woman alone at midnight with a terrible secret to share.
Fantasy dwarves, like Sean
Connery characters, always seem to be Scottish.
Which is strange given that the genre’s founder JRR Tolkien based his brave displaced heroes on the Jewish people.
I get why Hollywood needs them to be British. A tiny, hammer-wielding Lenny Bruce could distract from the medieval setting.
But given they are miners, surely
Welsh or Cornish accents would be more appropriate? It was musings like this that saw me through a familiar and forgettable German-made fantasy.
Although, if I was running DreamWorks, I might have had a few questions for my legal department. Apparently, the characters were taken from the novels of German writer Cornelia Funke, but the How to
Train Your Dragon series casts a much longer shadow.
Pitched somewhere between an unofficial spin-off and a bare-faced rip-off, it teams modern-day teenage thief Ben (voiced by Freddie Highmore) with a misfiring adolescent dragon called
Firedrake (Thomas Brodie Sangster) and a testy sprite named Sorrell (Felicity Jones).
Ben bumps into the fantasy creatures after his failed jewellery heist at the premiere of a film cheekily called How to Tame Your Dragon. He perks up when he hears the dragon chatting to a Glaswegian dwarf (Taggart’s Alex Norton) about a mythical dragon paradise filled with silver.
Posing as the fable’s legendary “dragon rider” earns him a spot on the quest.
The animation is bright and breezy, the plot moves at a fair clip, and Patrick
Stewart puts in an enjoyable turn as a dragon-munching monster.
But there’s none of the touching emotional drama that made the DreamWorks series take flight.