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With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Sue Steward's rating
Reader rating
Description: A selection of images from the competition.
Times: From Oct 1, Mon-Sun 10am-5.50pm, closed Dec 24-26, ends Apr 30
Price: phone for prices
Phone: 0207942 5000
Website: www.nhm.ac.uk
Trains: Tube: South Kensington 
, Tube / Bus: 14, 49, 70, 74, 345, 360, 414, C1 
Extra info: Party Hire, Telephones, Food, Air Conditioning, Parking
Environmental reminders: Steve Winter's winning portrait of the rarely seen snow leopard is a stark reminder of all we stand to lose
Time for the annual exhibition of escapist imagery, which leads us into remote places to gasp at Cartier-Bresson-like “frozen moments”, and to see the magic on our own doorstep. As environments melt and burn, and their inhabitants come under threat, these photographs are reminders of the riches in peril, but also of those carrying on as usual.
The year’s overall winner, National Geographic legend Steve Winter, also received the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife, for his Snowstorm leopard in Northern India. This rarely seen creature walks on snowy earth across the frame, in darkness, captured by one of 14 remote-controlled cameras set up by Winter awaiting the animal’s arrival before he went to sleep.
Moral questions increasingly enter this competition and cuddly images are clearly weeded out. Dave Maitland’s One Earth Award-winning “Sacrifice”, a sickening image of a colobus monkey’s head in a bonfire, highlights the bushmeat trade but raises many questions. Savagery abounds in nature — and is part of the fascination here in amusing images of a chimp scoffing half a pig, and a tree frog trying to eat a snake. It’s fun to anthropomorphise Stefano Unterthiner’s black-crested macaque monkey, “Troublemaker,” a hoodie with a hairdo like Nigel Kennedy.
Suggestions of fine art enter in many guises, but Carlos Virgilis’s “Sun Jelly” (winner of the Black and White Award) converts a suspended jellyfish into a translucent abstraction resembling a detailed charcoal drawing.
Each year, the under-17s bring many breathtakingly beautiful images, and Catriona Parfitt (UK), who won the junior competition with “The Show”, is exceptional. Such young contenders are the future caretakers of these subjects, and, as Winter said of the snow leopards, “I hope we can give them a bright future”.
Until 26 April 2009. (020 7942 5000, www.nhm.ac.uk)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
