Arts
A star is reborn
The Life Ahead stars Sophia Loren, and if there is one reason to see The Life Ahead it is this:…
Twin peaks
There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to…
Rebecca
Imagine daring to make another version of Rebecca. Hitchcock’s 1940 film is the version that is bound to overshadow any…
Neil Armfield’s Dream
Benjamin Britten’s setting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an outstanding achievement. In Australia, we have experienced two exceptional…
‘We’re all members of the Stasi now’
The arts are everywhere under attack from those who claim offence, writes Nina Power. Irvine Welsh steps into the fray with a documentary on the new censorship
Spit and no polish
Thank you, Spitting Image, for the nostalgia trip! Your new series on BritBox has rekindled with almost Proustian fidelity those…
Riveting twosome
This week, two electrifying performances in two excellent films rather than two mediocre performances in the one mediocre film —…
Cream of the crop
Theatres can open if they want to. That’s the current position. The only factor keeping a playhouse dark is a…
Shiny blacks, fierce greys, strange whites
Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) should be an inspiration to all late starters. It was not until he had passed the age…
Born of the moment
It’s quite a title sequence. Puccini swells on the soundtrack and words flash before your eyes. ‘Ecstatic!’ ‘Spellbound!’ ‘Passionate!’ ‘Dazzled!’…
Ordinary but extraordinary
How hard must it be to make music that sounds like no one else? And how unrewarding, often, as well?…
Orson Welles
The journals of the plague year from the point of view of culture are getting weirder and weirder from Daniel…
Opera Australia’s Attila before shutdown in March
Attila the Hun might have been hard to stop but Verdi’s opera Attila was stopped in its tracks at the…
Limelight and lucre
Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy…
Bros your mind
The Climb is, essentially, a bickering bromance as two longtime pals bicker bromantically down the years, and it doesn’t sound…
Hare-brained
Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a…
Simply divine
Three shows in a week! Why, it was just like the first week of March. There was, however, little of…
Cannibalism meets feminism
In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England.…
Of man’s first disobedience
Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…
Fantastic beasts and where to find them
Claudia Massie explores the cinematic majesty and mind-bending visual trickery of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen
Too much of nothing
In the world of the arts, some things keep on even in this time of impossibility which the virus has…
Josh Frydenberg
There has been a fair bit of bleating from sectors claiming to have been ignored in the Budget; in fact…
Spreading the word
Nineteen fifty-six: the Suez crisis, the first Tesco, Jim Laker takes 19 wickets in a match. But also: Trinidadian pianist…
Car-boot sale of the unconscious
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
Mossad’s Lara Croft
If you love Fauda — and of course you do — you’re in for a long wait for season four,…
