Arts
A beautiful but bizarre show, beset by ‘great ideas’: Summer and Smoke reviewed
Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams dates from the late 1940s. He hadn’t quite reached the peaks of sentimental delicacy…
Unsensitive, Unhumane and Uncredible: Unsane reviewed
Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, Unsane, is a psychological thriller about a woman who is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital even…
How the Moody Blues only became good once they realised they were crap
Rarely has one irate punter so affected a band’s trajectory. Without the anger of the man who went to see…
Intelligent, poetic and profound: Tacita Dean at the National and National Portrait galleries
Andy Warhol would probably have been surprised to learn that his 1964 film ‘Empire’ had given rise to an entire…
ENO’s La traviata was so comprehensive a flop that it is painful to go into detail
Handel’s Rinaldo has not been highly regarded even by his most ardent admirers. I have never understood why — even…
Shamelessly undemanding: ITV’s The Durrells reviewed
For as long as I can remember, Sunday nights have been the home of the kind of TV drama cunningly…
Vince Staples is Christian, yet it’s hard to imagine Jesus singing along to GTFOMD
Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record…
The BBC admit they’re not ready to switch off analogue radio
As Bob Shennan, the BBC’s director of radio and music admitted this week, there are almost two million podcast-only listeners…
ACO at the Barbican
As Australians, we have a need to be recognised ‘overseas’. International tours by Australian performing arts groups have been an…
The subtly savage world of filmmaker Ruben Ostlund
There is a culty YouTube video shot three years ago on the laptop camera of Ruben Ostlund. It shows the…
Surreal jokes and juicy strokes: Martin Gayford on the power of paint
René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but…
Babylon Berlin is so brilliant I’d advise you not to start watching it
Babylon Berlin (Sky Atlantic), the epic German-made Euro noir detective drama set during Weimar, is so addictively brilliant that I’d…
What’s in a name
Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech…
Who was the Isdal Woman? And how did she die?
‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World…
Rory Kinnear is less Macbeth, more a tetchy manager of an Amazon warehouse
The Best Man by Gore Vidal is set during a fictional American election in 1960. Two gifted candidates seek their…
Does Gerald Barry hate music?
Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives…
Original sin
This biopic of Mary Magdalene is a feminist retelling that may well be deserved but it’s so dreary and unremarkable…
Russell Crowe
The things we collect can say a great deal about us; so can the way we disperse a collection. The…
Peak Picasso: how the half-man half-monster reached his creative – and carnal – zenith
By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio…
Nils Frahm is clever with textures – but it’s the melodies which drag you in
Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has…
I never expected to last the full hour: Carla Bruni’s C’est la Vie reviewed
You can’t move for women’s voices on the airwaves at the moment — Julie Walters on Classic FM leading off…
There’s much to adore about the Old Vic’s Fanny and Alexander
Fanny & Alexander opens like a Chekhov comedy and turns into an Ibsen tragedy. Ingmar Bergman’s movie script, adapted by…
A short history of French musical decadence
My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back…
Magnificent paintings – oddly curated: All Too Human reviewed
In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art:…
Intriguing but also baffling: The Assassination of Gianni Versace reviewed
By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas…
