Arts Reviews

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what would become the world’s bestselling video game. The question you’re going to be asking yourself time and again – especially during the Lada-ZiL chase scene through the streets of Moscow in which our heroes try to elude the hatchet-faced KGB agents – is: ‘How much of this is true?’ And the honest answer is: ‘Not very much, actually.’ The star of the show has to be Roger Allam in a possibly career-best performance as Robert Maxwell Yes, there is a game called Tetris (which has sold 520 million copies and

Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and present danger to your children. Though a few true believers still hold to this honourable creed, nowadays most groups are comprised of the kind of people one might expect to be grading your offspring’s dissertation at a respected Russell Group institution. If the National were an author, they might be Anne Tyler The National exemplify rock’s professorial bent: bespectacled academic types, bearded, literate, wry and congenitally suspicious of happiness. Relatability sells, apparently. Almost by stealth, the American quintet have become one of the most successful groups of the age, winning

In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World Conference on Spiritual Science in London. It was a moment the 65-year-old Hilma af Klint had waited a long time for, but her confident prediction 20 years earlier that ‘the experiments I have undertaken will astound humanity’ was not fulfilled. So deafening, in fact, was the critical silence that greeted her work that she left instructions for it to remain under wraps until 20 years after her death. The world wasn’t ready for her ‘future pictures’. Entering the room devoted to Mondrian’s signature grids, you could be in a different

War has broken out in theatreland. Managements are increasingly at odds with the audiences who fund their livelihoods. A recent stand-off involved James Norton’s new show, A Little Life, which contains a couple of scenes in which the actor removes his clothes. A punter at a preview in Richmond secretly photographed the moments of nudity and posted the images online. This sparked a furore in the newspapers and the majority of commentators took the producers’ side against the theatre-goers. Dr Kirsty Sedgman, a media studies lecturer, spoke piously to the Independent about ‘an absolute violation of the unwritten contract between audiences and performers’. The Mirror reported that ‘drastic measures’ might

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series got. The rest of the time it alternated between the inept, the infuriating and the utterly mystifying – and not just because you could never fathom what on earth the characters thought they were up do. How, for instance, did so much money and talent get wasted on a show that the people involved with

‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.’ What’s queer in England is quite normal in Italy, where heated arguments are described as ‘discussioni’, but history has tended to forget that Rossetti was Italian. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites, however, were very conscious of his foreignness, though Holman Hunt found the ‘maccaroni’ served at the Rossetti family table – where you were as likely to meet Giuseppe Mazzini as Niccolo Paganini – ‘delicious’. Rather than professional models the Pre-Raphaelites wanted girls with a mass of hair, preferably red Gabriel (he adopted the Dante in his teens) was the