Arts
Horrible – but in a very fun way: I Care a Lot reviewed
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…
This fabulous play is like a Chekhov classic: The One Day in the Year reviewed
The One Day In the Year is an Australian drama about the annual commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.…
Our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Impossibly exciting: Sky Atlantic's ZeroZeroZero reviewed
ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time…
The two composers who defined British cinema also wrote inspired operas
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 reviewed
Good Grief is a new drama starring Sian Clifford who shot to fame as the older sister in Fleabag. The…
Makes me nostalgic for an era when music was more than a click away: Teenage Superstars reviewed
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: the best recordings of Korngold’s Violin Concerto
Erich Korngold was what you might call an early adopter. As a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, he’d astonished the…
Incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head reviewed
‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…
Predictable, repetitive and exploitative: Run Hide Fight reviewed
In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really…
This is cinema as car ad, says Geoff Dyer: News of the World reviewed
It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American…
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai are extraordinary
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne
It’s not easy running a stately home: Duchess podcast reviewed
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.…
The music we need right now: James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio reviewed
The two most depressing words in contemporary classical music? That’s easy: holy minimalism. I know, I know. Lots of people…
The Icelandic version was better – and had better knits: Rams reviewed
Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that…
A criminally underrated songwriter: Matthew Sweet’s Catspaw reviewed
Grade: A– The early 1990s were a lovely time for rock music: Beck, Sparklehorse, Sugar, Green on Red and Royal…
From ancient Greece to TikTok: a short history of the sea shanty
From ancient Greece to TikTok: Alexandra Coghlan on the pulling power of shanties
You'll wish you were gay: Channel 4's It's a Sin reviewed
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that…
Enjoyably tasteless: Power – The Maxwells reviewed
This year marks three decades since Robert Maxwell fell naked to his death from the deck of his yacht, The…
Gripping – if you skip the non-stop Yentobbing: Dancing Nation reviewed
Thank God for the fast-forward button. Sadler’s Wells had planned a tentative return to live performance last month but the…
Netflix should turn this into a series: Southwark Playhouse’s Fabulist Fox Sister reviewed
The Fabulist Fox Sister is a one-man show about the three American women who are credited with inventing the trade…