Richard Hartley

1 week ago | richardhartley.com | Richard Hartley

Pick of the weekPiece By Piece We’ve had Robbie Williams played by a CGI chimp so why not Pharrell Williams as a collection of small plastic bricks? This weird but joyous documentary from Morgan Neville uses Lego to encapsulate the life of the wildly successful Neptunes producer and musician. Williams having synaesthesia – he experiences sound as colour – means the film can go off on visual flights of fancy; the beats he creates becoming rainbow fireworks or vibrant waves.

1 month ago | richardhartley.com | Richard Hartley

Eurovision has always been a time to gather round the TV and experience dancing babushkas, gorilla stage invasions and someone inhaling from a helium balloon halfway through their song. But being a Eurovision entry now looks like being part of an exhausting social media content factory, which may be driving some of the wackiness out of it. No one is giving a wolf a banana this year.

1 month ago | richardhartley.com | Richard Hartley

Since it started in 2022, the Star Wars spin-off Andor has proved an unexpectedly bolshie addition to the Disney-owned mega-franchise. By portraying worker uprisings, surveillance states, sexual violence and prison industrial complexes, showrunner Tony Gilroy added fresh political nuance and human stakes to George Lucas’s endless galactic civil war.

Mar 30, 2025 | richardhartley.com | Richard Hartley

The date is 1765. Llanrumney is a slave plantation in Jamaica, established by Captain Henry Morgan, a privateer and former lieutenant governor of the Caribbean island, who named it after his supposed birthplace, now a suburb of Cardiff. This is the setting for Azuka Oforka’s drama TheWomen of Llanrumney. Rooted in the truths of slavery, the play tackles its horrors with verve, energised by anger and laced, unexpectedly (if not always successfully), with broad humour.

Feb 26, 2025 | richardhartley.com | Richard Hartley

North Korea was behind the theft of approximately $1.5bn in virtual assets from a cryptocurrency exchange, the FBI has said, in what is being described as the biggest heist in history. The haul, which reportedly has since lost some of its value, exceeded the previous record sum of $1bn stolen by the dictator Saddam Hussein from Iraq’s central bank before the 2003 war, and underlines the North’s growing expertise in cybercrime.