Arts Reviews

No one feuds quite as well as a celebrity woman. Don’t believe the sickly sweet farce between Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, ego, bright lights and competition for stage time have always provoked infighting. But while leading ladies used to duke it out Bette Davis and Joan Crawford style, today’s celebrity duels are a lot nastier.Over the weekend, Patti LuPone did something unheard of – she apologized. Or, at least, she released an apologetic statement. While appearing on Broadway in The Roommate, LuPone complained to the theater next door about a sound bleed from the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen. After the sound was adjusted, LuPone sent the tech team some flowers and a thank you note.

There are few American shows more acclaimed and successful in the past decade than Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s peerless study of the corrupting influence of money and power, as illustrated through a Murdoch-esque media dynasty led by Brian Cox’s bull-like Logan Roy. The series was magnificent because it blended hysterical, unexpected black humor (step forward the excellent Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Wambsgans, who is hilarious virtually every moment he’s onscreen) with the serious thespian pyrotechnics of a starry cast including Cox, Kieran Culkin and the great Jeremy Strong, who, rumor has it, did not believe that he was making a comedy but a serious study of moral decay.

If you haven’t yet heard the names Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton or Alastair Stout, then rest assured, in a couple of years they will be entirely inescapable. They are the three actors who have been cast in the new and highly anticipated Harry Potter television series, which is going into production for HBO later this year with a likely broadcast date of late 2026 or 2027. Respectively, they’re playing Harry, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, and they have been picked after a long search that has seen 32,000 children put themselves forward (or, more likely in many cases, been put forward by their ambitious parents) to play the iconic trio in the new adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding series.

Tony Gilroy’s Andor, having concluded its second season on Disney+ this week, stands as a monumental achievement given the pressures of Disney-era Star Wars leadership and its Kathleen Kennedy authoritarian “The Force is Female” complex.  The excellence seems almost accidental, a trick of timing and opportunity. With Gilroy exercising the authority of an auteur director from outside the world of science fiction, equipped with sensibilities derived from corporate thrillers and conflicts that pit differing clans of elites against one another, the series is the standout of an otherwise unmemorable or eagerly forgotten era of Star Wars creations.

“And now, the end is here, and so I face the final curtain”... If Tom Cruise isn’t quite Sinatra performing “My Way,” then the long-anticipated, much-hyped apparent finale to the Mission: Impossible series has a similarly valedictory feel to it. Ever since a youthful Cruise first took to movie screens in 1996 in the first, Brian de Palma-directed film – which those with long memories might recall was unfairly criticized on release for being virtually incomprehensible – the movies have been a welcome part of the contemporary movie-going experience.

Donald Trump has thrown another trade grenade. His latest idea – a 100 percent tariff on all foreign-made films – is crude, impractical and potentially disastrous for his frenemies in the Hollywood industry that he has suddenly decided to champion. Announcing the tariffs via Truth Social, Trump tried to paint movies produced overseas as a danger: not just to America’s film production industry, but national security too. “WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!" he thundered. Invoking national security to justify these tariffs is legally shaky. Practically, it’s not clear how you even impose tariffs on a complex, multi-national production like a modern movie. Films shot in Croatia, edited in the UK and funded by America pose an administrative nightmare.

When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary Aladdin’s Cave of anthropology, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, is perhaps a case in point. A Swedish academic, Staffan Lunden, has convincingly argued that Hicks is guilty of "distortion" when writing about the British raid on Benin in 1897, which brought several thousand objects, including finely wrought brass statuettes, to museums across the world. Hicks published his uncompromising views in 2020 in a prize-winning book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution.

George Clooney isn’t afraid to politic. And last July he showed himself willing to speak truth to his own party’s power: by voicing the dramatic decline in Biden’s facilities in a New York Times op-ed, Clooney, a lifelong Democrat, helped force ole’ Joe out the race. Is it any surprise, then, that Clooney has chosen to make a splash on Broadway in a play that is explicitly political? Clooney’s resurrection of his critically acclaimed 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck for the stage is timed for maximum impact. Good Night, and Good Luck dramatizes Edward R. Murrow’s historic takedowns of Joseph McCarthy on his beloved CBS show See It Now.

The critical reception to the second series of Andor has been nothing short of ecstatic. At the time of writing, it has a hugely impressive, near-unprecedented 99 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, far in excess of any other Star Wars movie or television spin-off. Its creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, who has been open in the past about his relative disdain for fantasy in general and Star Wars in particular, has been doing the interview circuit and making it clear that he has no interest in fan service. He told the Daily Telegraph, “Some people have a problem: ‘It’s not for kids. There aren’t enough creatures in it.’ Well, I don’t make that show. Sorry.

As I write, I sit swimming in turbulence somewhere over Virginia, on the same jet as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – heading to Panama City in an effort to restore the country’s critical canal to US control.But Saturday was a very different scene. A far more comfortable experience, too. In Box 3 at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, for the National Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mozart and Mendelssohn.I hadn’t been to the Kennedy Center in a while (i.e., we are so back). Now run by Trump loyalist Ric Grenell, proudly displayed on the concessions counters are signs that read: “STANDARD STRAWS NOW AVAILABLE!”That means no more paper.

Charlie Brooker’s cautionary technological tales have now been running for well over a decade, and they are almost in danger of seeming old-fashioned. When Black Mirror began in 2011, Instagram was only a few months old, the iPhone was a new novelty just coming into the mainstream, and Elon Musk was best known for being CEO of Tesla. Now, virtually everything in the world has changed, and Big Tech plays roles in our lives that the ever-cynical Brooker could barely have imagined. There is, naturally, a residual irony that in order to afford the budgets – and starry casts – that the show continues to demand, it long since left its original home on Britain’s Channel 4 for the deeper-pocketed Netflix, which still funds it into its seventh series.