Arts Archives

The new Spider-Man is a triumph of Hollywood professionalism

Cinema

Remember Peter Parker? By the end of the last instalment of the Spider-Man movies, No Way Home, we were the only ones who could. Following a characteristically complicated but deft collision of multiverses, young Peter (Tom Holland) had realised that the only way to save the world (again) was by getting Doctor Strange to cast a spell that made everybody – including his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) – forget that he’d ever been Spider-Man. He therefore began his Brand New Day alone in his apartment with only a highly evolved piece of AI for company. Sure, he’d returned to his roots of capturing local crooks by the dozen. But while this restored the hero status that J.

Alex Diggins

What’s the point of Unesco?

Arts feature

The FIM-92 Stinger missile is not a subtle weapon. An anti-aircraft rocket, capable of launching a high-explosive ‘fire and forget’ laser-guided warhead at targets up to 5km away, it can be carried and operated by only one man. During the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA provided hundreds of Stingers to the Mujahideen, where they proved terrifyingly lethal, downing scores of helicopter gunships and killing thousands of Soviet troops. But, at times, they’ve been as effective against other, more unusual targets. In 2001, during the first Taliban administration of Afghanistan, the group’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, ordered the destruction of the monumental Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley, a historic Silk Road site deep within the Hindu Kush.

22 July 2026

Richard Bratby

A Sound of Music with brains as well as heart

Opera

If you’re interested in how words work with music, the collected lyrics of Stephen Sondheim are an investment you’ll never regret. But Sondheim isn’t infallible, and when he writes about his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II he’s often plain wrong. Sondheim mocks one particular lyric from The Sound of Music: ‘Like a lark that is learning to pray.’ ‘Wait a minute – a lark praying?’ he snarks. But the character who sings those words is a devout young Austrian woman with a head full of Schubert and folksongs. Hammerstein is writing as Maria, not himself. It’s an art that Sondheim never quite mastered, which is why his characters – whether Swedish aristocrats or East End cannibals – all sound like New Yorkers in therapy.

Michael Hann

Wet Leg have become a proper rock band

Pop

Everyone uses the word ‘indie’ to describe a style of music. And Pulp and Wet Leg are two bands that fit squarely into that rubric. But remember what the word originally meant. An abbreviation of independent, ‘indie’ was music recorded, manufactured and distributed outside the major label system. It began as an economic necessity: the only way the music that the majors were not interested in could reach a public. But it quickly became a belief system: DIY at all costs to avoid the corruption of filthy lucre. And eventually it came to mean a certain kind of music. Pulp’s show was part of a weekend of events at the Southbank Centre celebrating the 50th anniversary of Rough Trade, the label that began as a record shop.

James Walton

The invincibility of menopausal women in TV drama

Television

Ride or Die began with a typical day for a fiftysomething woman in a TV drama. Having assassinated a Russian oligarch in an Alpine mountain resort, Judith (Hannah Waddingham) skied away with Olympian speed, effortlessly evading capture by the many goons who pursued her, right until they crashed into trees. Back on solid ground, she went into a bar where she beat all the blokes in drinking games, before pulling a hunky young barman who was heartbroken the following morning when she made it clear that this was merely a one-night stand. Then, zooming home in a sporty Merc, she still found time to call her friend Debbie in London with the assurance that ‘I’ll be back for book club’.

Deborah Ross

The finest vacuum-cleaner romance you will see

Film

A Useful Ghost is the best sex-with-a-vacuum-cleaner film I’ve seen in a while – or perhaps ever. It is deeply funny. How could it not be? But it’s also, in its way, deadly serious. A first film from Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, its camp absurdism and high jinks with electric appliances are also a satire on Thailand’s violent recent history. You can see why it won the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes. With most films you know what the film is, and where it’s going, within the first few minutes: ‘Oh, it’s this film.’ Here, you’ll have no idea. We start with a character simply called Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan). He lives in an area of Bangkok where the local shops and other buildings are being torn down and replaced by a shopping mall.

Richard Bratby

The finest music ever composed by a Breton naval officer

The Listener

Grade: B+ There’s a special art in making something difficult appear effortless, and the string trio is a supreme test. It’s the smallest viable unit for string chamber music: with one each of violin, viola and cello, there’s no fat, no redundancy, and nowhere to hide for composer and performer alike. And yet its greatest masters – Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven (Schoenberg is a special case, as he usually is) – make it sound like a trifle, a recreation. They’re on a tightrope, but they can’t stop dancing.

Lloyd Evans

This J. Edgar Hoover musical is destined for Broadway

Theatre

Here Comes J. Edgar! has a brash poster featuring a cross-dressing FBI agent in fishnet tights with his thighs splayed aggressively towards the viewer. He points a warning finger as if to say, ‘Enjoy this show or go to jail.’ The abrasive imagery aligns with the arrogant tone of most LGBTQ+ advertising but the show itself has a more humane and playful temper. Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold have written a superb tragicomedy about a powerful homosexual who wants to conceal his love life while hunting down America’s most notorious criminals. We first meet Hoover as he lies in a hospital bed flanked by two chain-smoking nurses who discuss his health while filling the room with tobacco fumes. This quietly amusing scene sets the mood.

Hermione Eyre

The Victorian Hieronymus Bosch

Arts feature

No one paints fairyland like Richard Dadd (1817-86). In ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, 1855-64, he reveals a teeming congregation of tiny folk, summoned by a dragonfly trumpeter, marshalled by a pompous chamberlain no bigger than a daisy, all gathered in the presence of Merlin (dead centre) to witness a macho fairy break a hazelnut with an axe. The shell will serve, of course, as Queen Mab’s chariot. And yet the scene isn’t cute. By placing the shiny bald pate of a frightened gnome a jot too close to the swing of the axe, the artist suggests the fairy feller might break that nut instead. Dadd is like a Victorian Hieronymus Bosch.

15 July 2026

James Delingpole

In defence of Little House on the Prairie

Television

You can tell things have started to get really bad by the fact that they’re bringing back Little House on the Prairie. When a society is in serious crisis – or so I’ve read – it no longer needs edgy, transgressive, exciting art to push boundaries and challenge assumptions. Rather, it needs to be soothed and cosseted with bland, undemanding and familiar comfort food. Nothing, not even The Waltons, does that quite like Prairie. It first appeared on British screens in January 1975 – so after an annus horribilis, including the Three-Day Week, power cuts, the miners’ strike, the Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings, etc. – and was scheduled to capture children just before bedtime.

Lloyd Evans

A funny, unorthodox Much Ado About Nothing

Theatre

You may need to do a spot of homework before attending Tilly No-Body at the Arcola. Acted and written by Bella Merlin, the play examines the sufferings and blunders of Tilly Newes, an actress born in 1886, who married the experimental German dramatist Frank Wedekind. At first sight the show looks like a lesson for newcomers but the content is bound to confuse anyone who lacks a working knowledge of German theatre in the early 20th century. The ideal viewer is a literary expert familiar with the whole of Wedekind’s dramatic output. Numerous lines from his plays are quoted, not always with intelligible citations. ‘Women are natural actors’, runs a typical aphorism, and ‘no woman can keep a man happy by behaving sincerely.

Graeme Thomson

Confessions II gets thrillingly close to vintage Madonna

Pop

There comes a point in the career of any established artist when looking backwards seems to be the only possible way to move forwards. Madonna was a great pop star until she wasn’t. Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005, was her last really successful record; ‘Hung Up’, from that album, her last truly unforgettable single. Ever since she has been chasing musical trends with increasingly diminishing returns, the heavy-handed concepts and contrived personae – Madame X, anyone? – no longer supported by anything approaching a properly decent song. Ms Ciccone seems to have belatedly remembered that Madonna is, and always has been, the concept So Confessions II is an act of both commercial and creative necessity. Its reclamation of the past is twofold.

Deborah Ross

The Odyssey is shallow and tiring

Cinema

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s relentless, deafening three-hour take on Homer’s epic poem, and while it is technically impressive filmmaking – Imax cameras; massive mechanical puppets, minimally pimped up by CGI; thousands of extras – it is set piece after set piece which becomes rather tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring What we get is an action blockbuster, without significant depth, although there is some heft to the final act – everybody’s favourite act, surely. Who doesn’t love it when Odysseus finally makes it back to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and no one recognises him?

Damian Thompson

The greatest symphony that no one’s heard of

Classical

I’ve been listening to a symphony that I would describe as an almost perfect masterpiece by a composer of towering importance. But until last month I’d never heard it. Most music-lovers would struggle to identify the piece; most orchestras have never performed it and have no plans to do so. We can only be talking about a symphony by Joseph Haydn. He wrote 104 of them, plus two or three others that didn’t make it into the catalogue. For that reason alone there aren’t going to be many opportunities to hear the less popular ones. Which raises the question: what makes a Haydn symphony popular? The short answer is: a nickname. That’s not surprising. The Farewell, the Hen, the Clock and the Military play tricks that invite affectionate titles.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Damien Hirst should burn down his gallery

Exhibitions

I love my friends at the loucher fringes of the art world, but every now and again, someone does something so obviously stupid that it calls certain such ties into question. Last week, a pal’s poor judgment engendered a Salo-grade spectacle so nightmarish that I can’t bring myself to elaborate. Suffice to say: some parties present will never shake off the trauma; and that the instigator was extremely lucky to avoid castration. It gets worse, too. I’d just returned from Margate, where I’d spent ages taking notes on the locale’s second-most-famous artist: a noisy, blue-haired ceramicist called Lindsey Mendick (b.1987). Mendick is fluent in the art-historical resonances and material subtleties of her chosen medium.

Rupert Christiansen

Three cheers for Britain’s most unabashedly elitist school

Arts feature

As we ponder the ups and downs of our sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting our unquestioned prowess when it comes to the demands of classically based dancing. The Royal Ballet is consistently more than a match for any comparable company in the world, and its chief feeder, the Royal Ballet School, currently celebrating its centenary, is similarly and solidly rated as one of the two or three best of its kind anywhere. Both these institutions are deeply beholden to tradition, and the RBS might well be the most unabashedly elitist educational establishment in the country. It receives globally more than 2,500 applications a year. All these will lead to an audition, the number finally whittled down to 30-odd offers of a full-time place.

8 July 2026

Lloyd Evans

Springwood is a waste of time

Theatre

Springwood, set in June 1939, looks at a series of tricky meetings between the American president FDR and George VI at the Roosevelts’ family retreat in upstate New York. George and Queen Elizabeth are guests at the poky old house and although they complain to each other about their sleeping quarters they hide their dismay from their hosts. The writer-director, Richard Nelson, evidently despises the main characters apart from FDR (Robert Lindsay) who comes across as a genial old buffer addicted to whisky. The dialogue is divided into easy-to-handle segments. First, we get the history bit. FDR tells George that the US ought to join Britain in the coming war but pro-German sentiment is very strong and the majority of Americans may support Hitler. Then we get the therapy bit.

James Walton

The blackly comic life of Katie Price

Television

These days, the 1990s seem to be regarded – especially by people too young to remember them – as a prelapsarian idyll. In Britain, London swung again to the sound of Britpop. In America, good-looking twentysomethings lived cheaply in large apartments, wisecracking and hugging their way through solvable problems. And all without the tyranny of social media. A rather less rosy picture, though, emerged in the opening episode of the four-part Katie Price: Nothing to Hide, in which Price added to her nine autobiographies and numerous documentaries and/or reality shows by deciding to ‘reflect on my life’ for the first time. The result was both a revealing social history and not unlike a novel by Martin Amis at his most blackly comic.

Daisy Dunn

Alexis de Tocqueville’s America has vanished

Radio and podcasts

When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in New York in 1831, he found a city a quarter of the size of Paris, perched on the lower tip of Manhattan, roamed by pigs. Speaking to everyone he met, high and low, he was struck by how many of the rich used to be poor. There was, he observed, an ‘equality of conditions’ that filtered down to the way parents treated their children. The 25-year-old ‘wiry aristocrat’ filled 14 notebooks during his nine-month road trip across America to 17 of the 24 established states. It formed the basis of Democracy in America. ‘The American inhabits a land where everything is constantly moving, and each movement seems to be progress,’ he wrote.

Richard Bratby

Lisette Oropesa triumphs in I puritani

Opera

Vincenzo Bellini realised early on that as titles go, Le teste rotonde ed i cavalieri (The Roundheads and the Cavaliers) doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. He settled for I puritani instead, though he’d have been equally happy (or so he told friends) to name the whole opera after its lovestruck heroine Elvira. He admitted that the plot catches fire only after she loses her mind: the soprano who plays her has to be able to act, and she really has to be able to sing. ‘In opera, it is the singing that moves one to tears, that causes horror, that inspires death,’ as Bellini put it, and he practised what he preached.

Deborah Ross

Nothing can save Rosebush Pruning

Cinema

Rosebush Pruning is one of those films where you’ll say to yourself at the end: what the hell have I just seen? And not in a good way. It’s about a wealthy family who are into fratricide, parricide, incest and blood. No quiet evenings playing Trivial Pursuit or charades for this lot. Mercifully, it is only 90 minutes long but, on the other hand, there are images you won’t be able to scrub from your mind for a lifetime. Swings and roundabouts, my friends, swings and roundabouts. When it comes to the eat-the-rich genre, this does make Saltburn look like child’s play Inexplicably, it has a knockout cast: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Lukas Gage. (You will want to pull each aside to ask: ‘Why? Did you piss off your agent?

Michael Hann

The slipperiness of Harry Styles

Pop

For the first time at a gig, I spent much of Harry Styles’s show thinking about the maths. He’s cunningly doing his 68 shows in seven cities, with 12 of them at Wembley Stadium, which means he has transferred a significant amount of the costs of touring to the fans. In other ways fans are rewarded. As is common when stars play stadiums, Styles spent little time on the main stage. Instead he peddled his wares from a series of walkways – around 350 yards of them, apparently – stretching way out into the crowd, along which he remained in near-constant movement. That meant an awful lot of people got to be at the barrier. At an estimate there were maybe 20,000 people who got within a few feet of Styles. That’s as many people as fit in the whole O2. Clever.

Hermione Eyre

Lartigue’s photos are made for the Insta generation

Exhibitions

Will photography as an art form survive the age of Instagram? Now that we think we are all photographers, and curators and collectors too, constantly cropping, sifting, saving and storing, our sensibilities risk becoming blunted, and our attitudes blasé. Two new shows confirmed to me that galleries are going to have to be clever to maintain photography’s hard-won status. In Milton Keynes, the MK Gallery hosts a new retrospective of the photographer’s photographer, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986).

Matthew Wilson

Artists vs the Odyssey

Arts feature

It’s a noble story of one man struggling against monstrous odds, valiantly captaining his crew while trying to avoid being skewered and striving to reclaim his crown. Welcome to the chronicles of Christopher Nolan and his hubristic film adaptation of the Odyssey. Will Nolan’s Odyssey make us feel – as Keats did when reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer – like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into our ken? Or will it be a thundering, 172-minute disappointment? Being a cinematic endeavour, the film should be judged more on its visuals than its script. And on that front, Nolan is pitting himself against a 2,700-year history of artworks depicting Homer’s epic.

1 July 2026

James Delingpole

The World Cup is evil

Television

I tried to think, Pointless-style, of two of the countries least likely to be participating in the world kicky-ball nonsense. Then I burst into the sitting room to annoy Boy. ‘Quick! Quick! We’re missing Haiti vs Burkina Faso.’ He looked up contemptuously from the sofa. ‘Actually, Haiti are playing right now. Against Morocco. So that’s another of your comedy fails.’ Sixty years in I don’t think I’m ever going to get a handle on this football malarkey. I first realised I was different in my first week at boarding school. All the other eight-year-olds owned a football and knew how to play with it and had even been taken by their dads to matches. I was the one who knew the Latin name for the common wall lizard.

Lloyd Evans

A Sinatra musical for hardcore fans

Theatre

Sinatra: The Musical dramatises the star’s career during a minor wobble in the early 1950s. After falling from grace, Sinatra stages a comeback and becomes an Oscar-winning film actor. Joe DiPietro’s script gives the impression that Sinatra’s world is ruled by wise, powerful and well-connected women. Billie Holiday teaches him how to sing with feeling: ‘Bend the notes at the end of the phrases.’ His mother explains the secret of a happy marriage: ‘One talks, the other doesn’t.’ When Sinatra punches and injures a photographer, his wife tries to restore his image by ordering him to play a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Sinatra obeys. The film bombs so badly that his press agent, George, severs all contact with him.

Graeme Thomson

It’s impossible not to be impressed by Metallica

Pop

The intensely ritualised choreography of the standard summer stadium show has one inbuilt structural issue, which is especially obvious when occurring this far north – and it is the fact that it takes place mostly during the hours of daylight. This is of perhaps minor significance for a breezy pop concert, when the powder-puff skies align more closely to the music. When it’s Metallica, however, and the first two songs in the set are called ‘Creeping Death’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, the lack of an appropriately lowering mise-en-scène threatens to suck much of the (melo)drama from proceedings. In the event, on a warm Thursday night in Glasgow, it’s fair to say that Metallica managed to circumnavigate this natural handicap.

Deborah Ross

Funny, savvy, starry: The Invite reviewed

Cinema

The Invite is a dramedy from the dinner-party-gone-awry genre about a marriage and whether a sex party might save it – or will it make it go boom? It’s extremely savvy, very funny and packs an emotional punch. It stars Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton – and if there is more pleasure to be had than watching great actors behaving badly, I would genuinely wish to know about it. If there is more pleasure to be had than watching great actors behaving badly, I would wish to know about it It opens with a quote from Oscar Wilde: ‘One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.’ (Wilde obviously didn’t know about the tax advantages.) Joe and Angela’s marriage is hanging by a thread.

Richard Bratby

A spectacular new staging of L’Orfeo

Opera

Say what you like about Monteverdi, but he knew how to get his audience on side. ‘I greet you, heroes, princes,’ declares the personification of Music in the opening scene of L’Orfeo, and if you’re a Glyndebourne regular you’ll feel at home right away. ‘Many singers have celebrated you – and fallen short of the truth, which is too exalted for mortal vision.’ Why, thank you; and how true, how very true. Now, when’s the picnic? But seduction is what opera does. It’s what opera has done since the very beginning – and L’Orfeo, premièred in 1607 at the court of Mantua, is almost as close to the beginning as we can get.