Arts
Keith Michell
So the lockdowns end, even in Melbourne, and we get a glimpse of what artistic performance may loom in a…
To Di for
Jasper Rees talks to the Chilean director Pablo Larrain about his new film, Spencer, which makes The Crown look like royalist propaganda
Sin and salvation
Where does the artist end and their work begin? Like 2015’s Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s new ballet swirls creator and…
How to stop another Grenfell
Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry is a gripping, horrifying drama. Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have sifted through the public…
The art of listening
There’s a great documentary film on Netflix at the moment about the late artist Bob Ross, he of the happy…
Take two women
Passing is Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novella (1929) about two biracial women, one of whom chooses to…
Satisfaction guaranteed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
Dutch courage
The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary…
Running on full and empty
The bigger the next big thing, the smaller the room you want them playing in. You want the people who…
Small but perfectly formed
Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…
Bob Dylan
Only in Australia and perhaps only in Sydney, that cradle of the cons and the jailers, the Rum Corps and…
If it ain’t broke
At one point in an early Simpsons, Homer comes across an old issue of TV Guide, and finds the listing…
Beano rules
Stuart Jeffries on the cultural influence of the comic that said it was good to be bad
The death of the live album
Next week The The release The Comeback Special, a 24-track live album documenting the band’s concert at the Royal Albert…
Painting everywhere
There’s a faint scent of desperation wafting through the Frieze tent this year. Pre–pandemic, this was where you came to…
Too much bawl and shriek
Yaël Farber’s Macbeth sets out to be a great work of art. The director crams the Almeida’s stage with suggestive…
Terminal whimsy
The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but…
The quiet Glaswegian
Robert Jackman talks to Robert Carlyle about Begbie, playing a Tory prime minister and the merits of keeping your head down
Maggie Smith
And so we look like being able to see live performance again in the two biggest cities in Australia: Sydney…
O what a lovely Waugh!
Sumptuous, glorious, luminous, lavish: Granada’s 40-year-old adaptation of Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series, says Mark McGinness
Bleak, brutal and bloody
Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told…
Heart and Seoul
Should we be worried that Squid Game is the most popular show in Netflix’s history? If it’s a case of…
A licence for licentiousness
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
Simply Shakespeare
Here goes. The Young Vic’s Hamlet, directed by Greg Hersov, is a triumph. This is a pared-back, plain-speaking version done…
Stepmother superior
Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture…
