Arts
Where to start with Ethel Smyth
I’m reminded of an old Irish joke. A tourist approaches a local for directions to Dublin. The local, after much…
A dish served very hot
Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting —…
Ill-judged sanctimony
I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the…
Soul-dead crypto world
Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated…
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil… the Art of Starting Over
Grade: Z If you wish to experience the full hideousness of Now, of our current age, condensed into one awful…
Ladies of misrule
General Secretary is a new drama with a dull title and an off-putting poster. A pair of angry women in…
Cheerleaders, cultists and King Kong
Social distancing continues to put the kibosh on large-scale productions, but Jo Stromgren has a nifty workaround in Rooms, which…
A Murder of Crows
Sometimes a crime show on TV turns into something higher and better, a transfigured thing. The Victim, from Scotland, falls…
Opera on the Harbour: La Traviata
These days, you’d need to be as game as Ned Kelly to run an opera company. It’s a chancy enough…
Cooking the books
Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s…
Sins of the father
I’d forgotten what a rich and deep and characterful voice John le Carré had. Listening to author and lawyer Philippe…
Not down with the kids
Some pictures are now so mediated that their actual physicality has long been dwarfed by a million reproductions. The ‘Mona…
A changed woman
Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris,…
The Mozarts of ad music
Richard Bratby meets the hidden men and women composing melodies to make you buy
Mainlining sunshine
One thing about a streamed festival is that the toilets are better than at the real thing. The other thing,…
Life after deaf
The multi-Oscar-nominated Sound of Metalstars Riz Ahmed as a heavy-metal drummer whose life is in freefall after losing his hearing.…
La Streep
It’s one of those secrets that we keep even from ourselves that great acting, everything that we know in terms…
Boy Swallows Universe
It is difficult not to be irritated by the preoccupations of the funded state theatre companies. They seem to be…
Prop forward
In the early Noughties there was a Hollywood subgenre (by which I mean a few cult movies, each with terrible…
Woman of the cloth
Laura Freeman considers how artists have depicted one of the strangest and most touching of the Stations of the Cross
Keeping girls out of the lab
Jina and the STEM Sisters is a blatant act of propaganda. And its intentions are excellent. This is a musical…
Mad about the boy
In the summer of 2018, when film-maker Lee Isaac Chung was on the brink of giving up filmmaking and had…
Without borders
Community music-making is the unifying jewel in the British crown, says James MacMillan
So damned French
For the past few weeks I have been binge-watching the Netflix series Call My Agent! (or Dix pour cent, as…
The Virtues
It’s a bit amazing that Hamilton is opening in Sydney on 27 March. Only a few months ago it was…
