Futures and pasts

This week on CW, Sam Peczek is disappointed by Fay Weldon’s Chalcot Crescent, a frustratingly fragmented post-recession dystopia, but Nicky Charlish finds more contemporary resonance in Cathi Unsworth’s noirish take on 1950s London, Bad Penny Blues. Alistair John enjoys a selection of BBC shows by Jonathan Meades on the occluded and forgotten, and Mark Carrigan reviews the Wellcome Collection’s Identity exhibition, finding it intriguing, but constrained by its focus on individual biography. Finally, Beatrice Winberg offers a sex-worker’s perspective on Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, and John Ellingsworth finds dance theatre group Motionhouse’s athleticism more striking than their message.

11 December 2009