Arts
Rock and awe
You very possibly know the music of the Glaswegian band Mogwai, even if you don’t think you do. You might…
From worst to best
It was something a friend said to me about The Revenant, Leonardo diCaprio’s bloody-minded and brutal Oscar vehicle: ‘The problem…
Deliciously dark
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…
Aussie rules
The One Day In the Year is an Australian drama about the annual commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.…
Looking for a new England
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Three plots for the price of one
ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time…
From screen to stage
It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage…
Das Rheingold
You could hardly ask for a more exorbitant return to mainstage theatre than a production of the first part, the…
Robyn Nevin
The Adelaide Festival program describes her, accurately, as ‘our finest stage performer’. Robyn Nevin is appearing there (2 Feb-14 Mar)…
Perfect to fall asleep to
Good Grief is a new drama starring Sian Clifford who shot to fame as the older sister in Fleabag. The…
When music was more than a click away
In Teenage Superstars, a long and slightly exhausting documentary about the Scottish indie scene of the 1980s and ’90s, there…
From bad joke to 21st-century classic
Erich Korngold was what you might call an early adopter. As a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, he’d astonished the…
Joining the dots
‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…
Trigger happy
In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really…
Cinema as car ad
It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American…
Lost and found
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne
From Downton to Dudley
The Duchess of Rutland, Emma Manners (née Watkins), grew up on a farm in the Welsh Borders before becoming proprietress…
It’s a sin
It’s easy to forget what Russell T. Davies has achieved to date. Twenty-odd years ago, Queer As Folk altered a…
Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli
For 60 years, in an idyllic location at Kirribilli, the Ensemble Theatre has been providing entertainment in an intimate format.…
Holy maximalism
The two most depressing words in contemporary classical music? That’s easy: holy minimalism. I know, I know. Lots of people…
Lowering the baa
Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that…
Matthew Sweet: Catspaw
Grade: A– The early 1990s were a lovely time for rock music: Beck, Sparklehorse, Sugar, Green on Red and Royal…
Sea fever
From ancient Greece to TikTok: Alexandra Coghlan on the pulling power of shanties
You’ll wish you were gay
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that…
They had it coming
This year marks three decades since Robert Maxwell fell naked to his death from the deck of his yacht, The…
