Arts
At His Majesty’s pleasure
Damian Thompson on King Charles III’s love of classical music
Insane profligacy
The UK Drill Project is a cabaret show that celebrates greed, criminality and drug-taking among black males in London. It…
Theatre of the soul
Whatever you think of the question of the Voice it was fascinating to hear Noel Pearson, that most formidable and…
A matter of life and death
Living is a remake of one of the great existential masterpieces of the 20th century, Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), which didn’t…
No country for old men
Tanjil Rashid talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his long and underexplored love affair with film
Written in stone
‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’…
Busy Lizzie
Elizabeth the First is a ten-part American podcast series that isn’t about Elizabeth I at all. The assumption of its…
Bad education
King Hamlin is a shock-horror drama about gang crime in London. Hamlin, aged 17, has left school without learning any…
Man up
Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation…
The eyes have it
Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a…
Prepare for lift-off
The first time I saw Franz Ferdinand was at the sadly lost Astoria, just after the release of their first…
Grace and lucidity
The news of Carmen Callil’s death last week shocked the literary world even though it was expected. She made an…
But what about the plot?
You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera…
One long moan of woe
I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised…
Something special
Bob Dylan has always toyed with audiences. He plays what he wants, how he wants, letting his mood dictate tempo…
Sick at heart
The latest film from Ruben Ostlund received an eight-minute standing ovation after its screening in Cannes and also won the…
Clown or vicar – who cares?
London has a brand-new theatre – yet again. Last summer, a cabaret venue opened in the Haymarket for the first…
Dog days of the USSR
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the…
Something special
A reliable metric for measuring pop success is hard to find these days, as Michael Hann noted in these pages…
The artist’s artist
Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…
Fight club
Not all video games are war games but those that are do something deeply unpleasant to our brains, says Sam Kriss
One night in a Gentlemen’s Club
How fascinating it is to see that Australia’s Brendan Cowell is playing John Proctor in the new English National Theatre…
Flesh and fisticuffs
Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a…
Motivated by love
At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following…
Full marks for the bottom
My Policemanis a forbidden love drama starring both Harry Styles – whose bid for movie stardom continues apace – and…
