Arts Reviews

The New York Review of Books editor is the latest casualty of the identitarian mob

The legendary tenor saxophonist died last weekend aged 91

Delacroix in the flesh, at the Met

The critics who disliked 2001 on its initial release found the characters empty and the plot thin — but it’s their criticism that has dated badly

This adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play is handsomely mounted, as they say, and features a stellar cast (including Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss and Saoirse Ronan), but it won’t be setting the world alight. It is not a waste of 90 minutes, and Bening is superb, as if you even needed me to tell you that. But it doesn’t especially distinguish itself otherwise and I kept waiting for it to deliver emotionally. I waited and waited and waited, but no, nothing. The film is, of course, set on a country estate just outside Moscow, because if it weren’t set on a country estate just outside Moscow it plainly wouldn’t be Chekhov.

Reports of the death of bookstores are fiction. In 1931, there were about 4,000 bookstores in the United States. Almost all of them were gift stores, selling a limited stock of paperbacks. Only about 500 of them were specialist bookstores, and almost all of them were in major cities. True, between 1995 and 2000, the number of independent bookstores collapsed by 40 per cent. Amazon opened for business in 1994, but two other factors were big-city gentrification, and the expansion of mediocre chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, which went public in 1995. Now, the big chains are gone — and who, apart from a homeless person looking for

Yardie is Idris Elba’s first film as a director and what I have to say isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I love Elba and wanted this to be terrific. I wanted him to be as good from behind as he is from the front, so to speak. I wanted this to absolutely smash it as a narrative about the Jamaican-British experience as there have been so few. But, alas, it is a disappointment. It is patchy. It’s not paced excitingly. The characters are insufficiently drawn. And I struggled with the thick Jamaican patois, I must confess. I was often muddled, yet whether it was due to that

The group melded the materialism of the urban landscape with what was idealistic and essentially Romantic about the city

Christopher Robin reviewed

Time to buy brown

William Giraldi, author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark ahead of  publishing his first collection of essays,

They said politics couldn’t get verse, but now it has…

Online life is no life at all

The former British Shadow Chancellor’s new documentary is more favourable of Trumpsters than anyone at the BBC could have ever imagined.

The furore around the Teeth author’s latest short story shows the risk of keeping your politics slightly to yourself.

The New York Times critic has nothing to apologise for. Yet he has apologised.

Mission Impossible: Fallout reviewed.