Arts
Health, wealth and happiness
Stories about money are never about money. They are about pain, about family, about atrocity, about luck, about health, about…
‘Having the right answer is boring’
Graeme Thomson talks to the cult singer Joan Wasser about the robotic nature of pop, finding salvation in songwriting and Tony Allen
The good, the bad and the cocky
Clint Eastwood is 91; Cry Macho may well be his last film. Or maybe not. He has, after all, been…
How’s your father?
I was turned on to Midnight Mass by Ricky Gervais who raved about it in one of his social media…
Screwball Austen
Let’s be honest. Jane Austen is popular because War and Peace doesn’t fit inside a handbag. Austen’s best-loved novel, Pride…
The Crucible
Sometimes you think the Apocalypse doesn’t go away. It just takes new and frightful forms. No sooner was the lockdown…
The eyes have it
Stuart Jeffries on the tyranny of the visual
Open book
365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die is a podcast that experimental filmmaker Caveh Zahedi started…
Who dares wins
BBC1 continuity excitedly introduced the first in the new series of Doctor Who as ‘bigger and better than ever’ —…
Cheesy feat
Go see Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, which stars Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, and the next day you will wonder: did…
A call to arms
’night, Mother is a two-hander that opens like a comedy sketch. ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ says Jessie. She’s…
Showtime
Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had…
Old school ties
It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood.…
Oh dear, Abba’s new album is a bit of a dog: Voyage reviewed
Time has been very kind to Abba. No one back in the 1970s thought of them as geniuses. But they've even lost the talent for writing memorable tunes
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…
