Picture perfect: Locatelli at the National Gallery reviewed
Locatelli hangs in a mezzanine in the Sainsbury Wing, which is all mezzanine and one gilded staircase to heaven. It is fiercely generic in creams, beiges and golds and though I understand why they did it – they did it because it will remind the sorts of people who can afford to eat at Locatelli of their own houses in west London – I wish they hadn't. I know the British don't really do the visual arts, except motorcars. We have one perfect painter, J.M.W. Turner (working-class, of course), plus Frank Auerbach (a German-Jewish refugee who painted anguish), so the best of it is seascapes and screaming.
Locatelli sprouts from another hinterland: poised and avoidant anti-art, a place without conflict or regret. It's a rental flat in W1, a neutral cashmere cardigan, the VIP area at Glastonbury and – and this is what is unforgivable – it is inches from the Renaissance. What's left of it, which isn't much, to be fair. Beige moleskin banquettes do not belong near Velázquez's 'Rokeby Venus', which a suffragette attacked in 1914, possibly because Venus is showing so much arse. (I feel the same way about MTV.) If you want to eat in a mock-up of Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' or the 'Arnolfini Marriage' – and I do very much, I love a themed restaurant if the theme is more than nothingness and ease – Locatelli is not for you.
It is, rather, for those who seek immaculate Italian cuisine. We eat a salad of Parma ham, pear and aged balsamic; burrata with spring vegetable and mint salad; veal tortelloni with gremolada and parmesan sauce; tagliatelle with beef and pork ragout; an immense rib-eye steak; a chocolate cake; a tiramisu. It is all sinuous and beautiful: Italian, not Flemish art then, and I prefer the Flemish school.
I understand why the National Gallery wants a real restaurant, as the Royal Academy has. (José Pizarro at the RA is exquisite, as no one has ever said about the Summer Exhibition, which seems to be painted by people who have been on Jim'll Fix It.) They want to remake it as another polished lifestyle destination: that is the rehang. Yet there is something savage about the National Gallery, and not just because it is built on the site of the former royal stables so, were you a medium or Hilary Mantel, you would hear ghostly neighs as white Jesuses wave at you. Look around: where you find civilisation, barbarism will be close at hand. Art should not make you hungry: it should drive you mad. In 1987, a man shot Leonardo's Burlington House Cartoon of the Virgin and friends. I take a bite of impeccable tiramisu, and I understand.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Metro
3 hours ago
- Metro
The 20 best Commodore Amiga games to celebrate the 40th anniversary
GameCentral lists the most iconic games ever made for the Amiga home computer, back in its glory days of the 80s and 90s. It may not be much of a household name nowadays, but anyone who grew up gaming in the late 80s knows that, here in the UK, the Commodore Amiga series of home computers was one of the most popular formats of the time. Its success was one of the reasons the belated release of the NES never took off, something which has affected Nintendo's popularity in the UK ever since. However, once the Mega Drive and SNES launched in the early 90s, the Amiga slowly became overshadowed and, eventually, all but forgotten, apart from a mini-console release in 2022. The Amiga celebrates its 40th anniversary on June 23, but because it was only ever really popular in Europe its legacy is a difficult thing to honour, with only the occasional remaster or reboot for any of its games. But nevertheless, here are 20 of its most memorable titles – almost all of which were originally made in the UK. One of the very first games developed by long-running British studio Team17 – who are still going today as an indie publisher – this top-down shooter is heavily inspired by the movie Aliens and remains an all-time favourite amongst Amiga fans. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Its initial success led to a long line of sequels and spin-offs but while it attempted to segue into being a 3D shooter it was never able to compete with new challengers such as Doom. The attempts at a modern reboot never took off either, which currently leaves the franchise in limbo. When you think of cinematic games, your mind probably goes to big budget PlayStation games like God Of War and Uncharted. But in the 90s, that term was being used to describe 2D platformer Another World and its spiritual successor Flashback. While Another World was all style and little substance Flashback, which also appeared on contemporary home consoles, was way ahead of its time in terms of storytelling in an action games and including a relative amount of non-linear gameplay. A remake and a sequel have both been attempted but the original was very much of its time and even its spiritual sequel, 1995's Fade To Black, wasn't a hit, despite being one of the very earliest third person shooters. The Amiga would have been a far less exciting format without British developer Sensible Software, who have no less than three entries in this list. Cannon Fodder is arguably their greatest creation and something completely unique both then and now. It's essentially a top-down squad based action game, controlled by a mouse (all Amigas came with a mouse – it was the joystick you had to buy separately) where squad-mates would drop like flies, to later be memorialised in an in-game cemetery. The game was heavily criticised by the Daily Star for using images of a poppy but while Sensible were clearly goading tabloids into giving them free press, which they got, the game itself is very clearly anti-war and quietly poignant in terms of the fate of its virtual soldiers. When the Amiga first arrived in 1985, 3D polygonal graphics were all but unknown on home consoles, with even the milestone release of 1993's Starwing (aka Star Fox) on the SNES requiring a more expensive cartridge with extra processing power. And yet the Amiga was filled with hugely ambitious 3D games – all made by British developers and including the likes of Cybercon III, Infestation, Starglider, and Damocles. They all ran with horrendously low frame rates but despite that, Frontier still managed to simulate astronomically accurate solar systems and physics. Like many pioneering games on the Amiga, including 2D titles such as Shadow Of The Beast, Frontier wasn't actually much fun but it was always interesting to explore and play around with. And then when you got bored of that you could play the Amiga version of the original Elite, which was a lot more enjoyable. Speaking of hugely ambitious 3D games with terrible frame rates, that are no fun to play, Hunter was essentially GTA 3 but almost 25 years earlier. The story campaign had you trying to assassinate an enemy general but there's also a sandbox mode where you can take on targets in whatever you like, across an archipelago of islands. This involved driving around in a wide range of vehicles, that you could get in and out of at any time, as well as walking, swimming, and fighting on foot. It was horribly difficult but shared similarities with Midwinter and Carrier Command, in that all three games were decades ahead of their time, in terms of sandbox gameplay, and made by British developers that are now all but forgotten by the wider industry. Although Street Fighter 2 didn't appear until 1991 (there were several versions on the Amiga but none of them were very good), one-on-one fighting games weren't an entirely unknown concept before that, not least because the original Street Fighter came out in 1987. That very same year, the sequel to International Karate, by Jimmy White's 'Whirlwind' Snooker creator Archer Maclean, appeared and it's fascinating how different a concept it is, not least because there's actually three people fighting at a time. It'll forever be most famous for the cheat code that lets you drop the fighters' trousers but that doesn't negate the fact that this is probably the best pre-Street Fighter 2 fighting game on any format. Once one of the biggest gaming franchises of the 90s, Lemming sadly fell out of favour, and drifted into obscurity in the ensuing decades, primarily because it's best played with a mouse, which most consoles never had. It's a puzzle game where you have to stop swarms of lemmings falling to their death, as you block off and dig through the landscape to help them. The series was considered important enough to appear on a Royal Mail stamp, although it's now most famous for being an early work by DMA Design – the studio that went on to become Rockstar North. Without the financial success of Lemmings there would never have been a Grand Theft Auto, which is a sobering thought. Although Sony owns the franchise now, after buying original publisher Psygnosis. Rainbow Islands may be an arcade conversion, of one of the many games claiming to be the sequel to Bubble Bobble, but its true home has always been on the Amiga. It's certainly the only place it's ever enjoyed the degree of fame it deserves, thanks to a near perfect port by legendary developer Andrew Braybrook, creator of Uridium and Paradroid (Commodore 64 games which both had sequels on the Amiga). We know what it looks like, but Rainbow Islands is an incredibly nuanced action platformer, that's filled with secrets and enjoys one of the most flexible weapon systems in any 2D game. The rainbows you shoot out are at once projectiles, traps to catch enemies beneath you, and platforms to be traversed. It's a genius concept that cannot be re-released today in its original form because its soundtrack is technically a knock-off of Somewhere over the Rainbow. Arguably the first ever combat flight simulator, this went unnoticed by many even at the time, although it's a wonderfully imaginative evolution of games like Elite, that focuses solely on combat and arrived a full year before Wing Commander. It features a relatively realistic, physics-based control system and surprisingly involved story missions, obviously inspired by the previous year's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Developer Glyn Williams went on to make the Independence War games, which acted as spiritual sequels, but sadly they're almost completely forgotten too. In some ways it's a shame that Sensible Soccer was so successful, because it meant Sensible Software never got around to making other more experimental titles, like Cannon Fodder and Wizkid. An evolution of earlier game MicroProse Soccer, this was a direct rival to the otherwise popular Kick Off series and was very much the EA Sports FC of its day, except with a sense of humour and played from a top-down perspective. It has a spiritual sequel today, in Sociable Soccer by original creator John Hare, that's seen some success, but nothing like Sensi in its heyday. Although the Amiga rarely got the same games released on contemporary consoles, it did get lots of arcade conversations and PC ports. The PC didn't really come into its own as a games format until the mid 90s but there were notable titles before that time, including the original Civilization in 1991. A franchise so successful the most recent sequel came out just this year. The Amiga version was a bit slower, because of the limited processing power, but it worked very well and so did seminal real-time strategy game Dune 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown – what would later become known as X-COM. Its predecessor Laser Squad was also a cracking turn-based game, even if it still looked like a ZX Spectrum game. Unsurprisingly, top-down racing games are not something you see much of nowadays, even from indie developers, but there were lots on the Amiga, including arcade conversion Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road and the excellent Skidmarks series. Super Cars 2 is most people's favourite though, not because it does anything particularly original but simply because it does it very well. The inclusion of weapons is relatively unusual though and ensures multiplayer matches are always glorious chaos. It was also essentially a sister series to the equally popular Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge games. This list of games isn't in any particular order but the two frontrunners for our favourite Amiga games of all-time are Rainbow Islands and this: the best game the Bitmap Brothers ever made and still the definitive example of a future sports game. It's basically a hyper violent version of handball crossed with hockey, where you aim to get the ball into the goal by any means necessary, including punching your opponents to the floor and creating score multipliers by throwing it at devices at the side of the arena. A follow-up has been attempted multiple times, with a new one currently in early access from Rebellion but nothing has matched the elegant simplicity of the original… or its amazing theme tune. As much as his reputation has been tarnished nowadays, Peter Molyneux was on fire during the Amiga era, doing all his best work while at now defunct developer Bullfrog, with titles such as Flood and Syndicate. Populous was his most famous game at the time and along with SimCity (which was also available on the Amiga) helped create the now largely abandoned god game genre. It's arguable how much real strategy was involved in the gameplay, but at the time Populus' open-ended nature and isometric graphics were a revelation. The sequel never added any real depth to the concept though and the franchise has been mothballed for almost two decades now. We've already discussed many of the Amiga's most innovative 3D games but arguably the most impressive is Starglider 2. Rather than being a straight shooter, like its predecessor, it is a completely open-ended sci-fi adventure where you can travel anywhere in a solar system, nominally in an attempt to blow up an enemy space station with a special bomb. No one ever bothered with that though and instead spent their time exploring the fascinating 3D worlds that featured no loading screens and flat-shaded (as opposed to wireframe) polygon graphics, as you travelled from outer space, through the atmosphere, and onto a planet's surface. The highlight was undoubtedly listening to the space whales in the atmosphere of the system's gas giant but the whole game was a technical marvel, with many of the team going on to develop Starwing for Nintendo. While the Amiga had plenty of its own exclusives, and many titles shared with rival home computer the Atari ST, much of its portfolio was made up of ports from other formats, whether it be arcades, the PC, or earlier 8-bit computers. Exile is one such game, having first appeared on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. That means nobody outside the UK has ever heard of it and yet it's a fantastically ambitious action adventure, with completely open-ended gameplay, a realistic physics engine, and clever artificial intelligence. Perhaps if it had had modern style signposting, and a lower difficulty, it might be better known today but the unfortunate truth is that if a game isn't popular in the US or Japan it's rarely ever seen again. Lucasfilm Games were a loyal supporter of the Amiga and while their later point 'n' click adventures had increasing trouble running on the format the original Monkey Island worked perfectly and thanks to the Amiga's excellent sound chip was arguably the definitive version at the time. Still one of the funniest games ever made – which says just as much about its level of competition as it does the game itself – this is both a charming screwball comedy and a graphic adventure whose puzzles are perfectly pitched as difficult but not impossibly illogical. As a bonus, the series is still going today, thanks to the 2022 soft reboot. If this were a list of most underrated Amiga games, The Sentinel would comfortably sit at the top since, even at the time it came out, very few people had ever heard of it. And that's despite it having been released previously on various 8-bit formats. The Sentinel is a remarkably unique stealth game, where you control an immobile robot and must avoid the glare of the titular Sentinel by teleporting from one spot to the other across an abstract 3D landscape. It was the creation of SIr Geoff Crammond, but as good as Stunt Car Racer and Formula One Grand Prix were, it's The Sentinel which stands as his greatest achievement. This is the main reason we semi-resent the existence of Sensible Soccer, as it's the weirdest and most experimental game Sensible Software ever made. It's nominally a sequel to their earlier 2D shooter Wizball, which was also ported to the Amiga, but has almost nothing in common with that in terms of gameplay. More Trending You play as the disembodied head of Wizkid in what could vaguely be described as a mix of Arkanoid and Rainbow Islands, as you knock tiles and other objects onto enemies below you. It's when you rejoin your body that things get really weird though, in what is one of the most thoroughly British video games ever made. No Amiga list would be complete without Worms, which was initially made as part of a programming competition run by the magazine Amiga Format. At heart, it's a pretty simple riff on Artillery games, where you have to judge the trajectory of shells fired from fixed gun emplacements, but here you can move and there's a much wider range of weapons. More importantly, it's filled with very British humour and a fantastic multiplayer mode. The series continues to the current day, although after the failure of battle royale spin-off Worms Rumble the next mainline entry has been reduced to an Apple Arcade exclusive called Worms Across Worlds. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The A500 Mini console review – all 25 Amiga games reviewed from Alien Breed to Speedball 2 MORE: A classic 90s Amiga video game has got an unexpected reboot on Steam MORE: Flashback 2 review – from Amiga classic to modern calamity
Daily Mirror
3 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
'We witnessed the Lionesses' jaw-dropping victory over Italy - and it brought tears to eyes'
The Lionesses proved cats really do have nine lives after making another sensational comeback from being a goal down 96 minutes in - securing England a spot in the Euro finals England have won a place in the Euro finals after a jaw-dropping 2-1 victory over Italy. The Lionesses proved cats really do have nine lives after making another sensational comeback from being a goal down 96 minutes in. It seemed certain the Lionesses were about to crash out of the tournament. But then, fans blew the roof off the Stade de Geneva with thunderous roars of delight when super sub Michelle Agyemang saved England's bacon with 60 seconds spare on the clock. The 19-year-old, who is the youngest player on the squad, sent a rocket shot into Italy's goal, equalising in seven minutes of extra time. And after a foul on Beth Mead inside the penalty area in 119 minutes of extra time, Chloe Kelly scored the winner. Every player and FA staff member ran from the bench in wild celebrations at the miraculous result. Fans had been hopeful for a straightforward win after their nail-biting penalty shootout with Sweden in the quarter-finals but the England women seemed set on delivering some more drama. Moved to tears by the rollercoaster performance, Sharon Brown, 43, from Middlewich, Cheshire, said: "We were on the edge of our seats in the living room at home watching the penalty shootout against Sweden. "We were worrying at the time we wouldn't get to actually cheer them on in the stands if they got kicked out, so to be here and see them not only get into the final but to do it like that, it feels like a once in a lifetime moment as a family." Sharon, who has tickets for the final with husband Phil, 42, and their three daughters, Eryn, 15, Eliza, 13, and Eadie, nine, admitted they'll be celebrating by finishing their holiday in... Italy! And they've been forced to renegotiate bedtime rules for their youngest, who was determined not to miss any of the action. Sharon said: "There's no bedtimes out here. We're flying from here to Zurich for the next semi-final, and then after the final we have an early flight to Italy for the last part of our holiday so we might be asleep on the plane but we'll hopefully have some big celebrations as a family when we get there!" Pals Liz King, 60, and Sharon Rogalski, 73, from Peterborough, told how their home city is nicknamed 'Pizzaborough' thanks to a huge contingent of Italian residents there. Liz said: "It's nicknamed pizzaborough we have that many Italians, they are truly lovely people but there's not that many times we get one over on them so to get one over on them today feels like it was meant to be." The pair have been hoping throughout the tournament that the Lionesses would give them the chance to watch an England final together. And as their wish came true Sharon was moved to tears. She added: "I cry every time England score a goal so I can feel myself welling up, my heart is with England. We've never seen England in a final and now we are going to see one." Asked how they'll celebrate, Liz said: "We are going to the pub! It's just surreal we only did the group stages at the Australia World Cup so to get to a final and be out here for it together is amazing." Mollie Shurmer, 31, from Blackpool said: "The emotions have been all over the place during the whole tournament, I was expecting another emotional rollercoaster but I wasn't expecting that. She added: "We're off to go and find an afterparty."
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Reputation review – front and swagger in brawling portrait of British male rage
Squint and you can picture the two leads of this film playing the Gallagher brothers circa the big Oasis bust-up of 2009 – all front and swagger, eyebrows set into aggrieved furrows. Instead, in this small-time British crime drama, James Nelson-Joyce and Kyle Rowe play old mates dealing drugs in the fictional northern town where they grew up. It's a brawling tale about a man who feels trapped by toxic masculinity, though in the end the film too backs itself into a bit of a dead end of macho violence. Nelson-Joyce is Wes, who has been questioning his life and choices since his best mate Tommy (Rowe) went to prison. Wes and his girlfriend Zoe (Olivia Frances Brown) have just had a baby, and there's even talk of a job. Then Tommy is released, a repugnant bully unwilling to let Wes go. Rowe's ferocious performance feels horribly real, like an angry dysregulated little boy with a need to break anything he can't have. Tommy's rage gives the film some nauseating moments; perhaps even harder to stomach is the casual misogyny in Wes's circle. Reputation is a grim portrait of male rage, though it doesn't seem particularly interested in the reasons behind it. There is a real sense of place though, in rows of narrow terraced houses backing on to wide open expanses of countryside. And for a film put together on what looks like a minuscule budget, it gets a considerable amount done. There's a promising plotline about one of Wes and Tommy's customers, the mother of a murdered 10-year-old boy, as well as little flickers here and there of another life open to Wes. But in the end it all builds to a big grandiose violent ending, which is a bit of a shame. ● Reputation is on digital platforms from 28 July.
