Arts
Sons of a preacher man
A few years ago, I spoke to Mick Jagger and asked him which of the (relatively) new crop of rock…
One man and his robot
Brian and Charles is a sweetly funny mockumentary about a lonely Welsh inventor who is not that good at inventing.…
Location, location, location
Roy Williams’s new play is a wonky beast. It has two dense and cumbersome storylines that aren’t properly developed. Dawn…
The thrilling game
‘The Terminal List is… a dated and drably made eight-part military thriller that offers little intrigue or excitement,’ says the…
A very polished performance
Sam Neill is one of those Kiwis we want to claim as we do everyone from Russell Crowe to Neill’s…
P is for pointless
The Princess, a new documentary film, is the first re-framing of the Princess Diana story since it was last re-framed,…
Indie heaven
‘Well, it’s just not Glastonbury, is it?’ said my daughter aggressively, when told that our yurt featured an actual bed,…
How to get it all wrong
The Glass Menagerie directed by Jeremy Herrin is a bit of an eyeball-scrambler. The action takes place on a huge…
More melancholy, please
The Yeomen of the Guard has been called the ‘English Meistersinger’ but the more you think about that, the dafter…
Not one for the naive
The Undeclared War has many of the traditional signifiers of a classy thriller: the assiduous letter-by-letter captioning of every location;…
Miracle in an evening gown
When Motown first packaged up a roster of artists and songs that could be embraced by a non-black audience, no…
Vive la gloire
The refurbishment of Paris’s galleries and museums continues apace, with money no object, finds Rupert Christiansen
Time takes a cigarette
June 16 was Bloomsday, the day we celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it was a special Bloomsday because 2022 is…
Bloated waffle
The Old Vic’s new show, Jitney, has a mystifying YouTube advert which gives no information about the play or the…
Overmilking the crime cow
Nothing new under the sun. Or at least it feels that way these days, doesn’t it? The movies are TV…
Fever pitch
Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley and it’s cradle to grave but told at such a gallop you’ll…
Naughty but very nice
Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one…
Shooting star
Tanjil Rashid on the polymathic Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who spearheaded a new school of Indian cinema
Read his lips
Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…
This will end badly
I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV.…
Tinkering with the masters
It was sad to see Ray Liotta, that magnificent actor, had died the other week. He was most famous for…
Central line
James Graham has made his considerable name writing political-based dramas of a highly unusual type: non-polemical ones. And this certainly…
Principle of Pan’s People
I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance…
Tony’s looney tunes
Harry Hill’s latest musical traces Tony Blair’s bizarre career from student pacifist to war-mongering plaything of the United States. With…
Born again
Richard Bratby on the resurrection of wunderkind Erich Korngold’s long-neglected masterpiece
