The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch, who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race, injustice, police brutality —
Twitter was awash with mockery last week, after Adam Levine, the singer of the American group Maroon 5, was interviewed on Apple Music and told Zane Lowe: ‘It’s funny, when the first Maroon 5 album came out there were still other bands. I feel like there aren’t any bands any more, you know?’ Out came
Well, this a bit awkward. A fortnight ago, in my last TV column, I confidently asserted that, despite the involvement of Jed Mercurio, Bloodlands (BBC1) was nothing like the programme it was being compared to in all the advance publicity. Two episodes, several twists and at least one bent copper later, my ringing conclusion ‘Just
Philip Guston’s later work is — and I say this with love — nails-down-a-blackboard weird. The vapid pinks and flat reds lend a nightmare cheerfulness. The menacing American figure wearing Mickey Mouse gloves is rendered in cartoonish style. The clock shows it is time to panic, challenging you to call out the hood for the
Rachmaninov’s First Symphony begins with a snarl, and gets angrier. A menacing skirl from the woodwinds, a triple-fortissimo blast from the brass, and then the full weight of the strings, hammering out one of those doomy Russian motto-melodies like lead boots dragging you to the bottom of the Neva. ‘Vengeance is mine; I shall repay’
The Finborough’s new show is a love story with the male partner absent. Two women, one Irish and one American, explain their feelings for a London businessman, aged 45, who seems to be connected with the fashion trade. The women, known as ‘I’ and ‘A’, have different functions. ‘I’ is a young Irish model and
For my 13th birthday in 1995 I requested — and got — my own ‘line’. This meant that I could jabber all night without taking the phone out of service for everyone else. Getting your own line was a rite of passage for teenage girls in America back then, and everybody just sighed and let
I don’t say this lightly, but after 20 years of opera-going, Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato might just be the most baffling opera I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen Stockhausen’s Licht. It starts with 27 named roles and originally featured no fewer than ten castrati among its cross-dressing, all-male cast. This operatic game of Twister
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a musical fantasy set in a Nordic town near the Arctic circle. Johan is a magician whose healing powers have won him the respect of his neighbours. But his rebellious daughter, Eva, has been expelled from school for scrawling ‘down with the patriarchy’ on a mirror. She’s also suspected of trying
Here’s a worried question I want to plant in your head: when is TV drama going to start depicting the world we actually live in, where almost everyone wears masks, even outdoors? The current state of affairs — watching people on screen in familiar locations interacting closely, as we used to, and not wearing face-coverings
Last Saturday on Radio 2 Claudia Winkleman was inaugurated as the host of what was formerly Graham Norton’s mid-morning spot. She announced her arrival by playing ‘Help!’ by the Beatles and offering a line-up comprised solely of fellow Saturday-night TV presenters. Here was Sir Tom Jones, calling in from ‘a terrace overlooking the Thames’ and
Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine, non-white representation, a narrative that isn’t hung up on romance — but no one involved appears to have asked themselves: do we have an interesting story? Do we have any fresh ideas? Is it fun?
Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had often heard about it but never actually been there. Evidently Sickert had a sense of London as an unknown city, full of potential. And he was far from being the only artist fascinated by the
The thing to remember about Chet Baker, an old acquaintance says of the errant jazz musician in Deep In A Dream, James Gavin’s exemplary 2002 biography of Baker, is that ‘he can hurt people even after he’s dead’. Baker could be dangerous but mostly he hurt himself. He died, squalidly, in 1988, and his music,
I must have been about 16 when I got my first Portastudio. The compact home recording unit had first been introduced by Japanese electronics firm Teac in 1979, offering unprecedented multitrack dubbing to the bed-bound amateur musician. For a little less than $1,000, you could record four separate tracks of instrumentation — as much as
Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who played in four World Cups (a record) and was one of the first global sporting superstars. But while there is plenty of footage showing his astonishing talent, if you’re interested in what made him tick,
‘The World’s Most Lavish Art Book’ is a pretty big claim, but when two men lugged it through my front door I conceded that The Sistine Chapel is one monster tome. Three, actually. Three hardback volumes, each two feet-tall, each weighing nearly two stone, each in its own calico bag, comprising of digitally perfect photographic
Another week, another online concert; and since orchestral music seems likely to be confined to screens and stereos for a while longer, one might as well try and experience something new. But not too new — I’ve pretty much had it up to here with the present. The Hallé orchestra is currently streaming a collection
The Almeida is fighting back against lockdown with a sprawling family drama about two long-lost siblings. Adrian Lester plays Gilbert Jones, a successful entrepreneur, who runs a clothing business and a stationery shop in London. At his dad’s funeral he meets his half-brother, Benny (Danny Sapani), who was brought up in care but is now
Everything is too long these days, isn’t it? Every series is at least two episodes too long, podcasts go on for hours, you have to scroll through pages of someone’s barely disguised eating disorder mania to get to the recipe on their blog, and every documentary on Netflix is four hours long, forcing me to
To begin on a cheerful note, it’s certainly been a good week for fans of slow-burn British crime dramas with one-word titles in which an anguished middle-aged cop investigates murders from the 1990s while also battling police bureaucracy. Bloodlands has been described in several newspapers as the latest exhilaratingly twisty thriller from Jed Mercurio, creator
Steven Wilson is going about becoming a pop musician entirely the wrong way. For one thing, he’s into his fifties, not typically the point in life at which budding chart-botherers launch their assault on hearts and minds. For another, in an age in which pop stardom and identity politics have become entwined — in cultural
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s savage. It’ll make you dread old age even more than you already do, if that’s possible. It’s horrible in so many ways — cruel? Did I mention it’s also cruel? — yet it is also
On 5 July 2009, an unemployed 54-year-old metal detectorist called Terry Herbert was walking through a Staffordshire field when his detector started to beep and didn’t stop. Herbert guessed almost immediately that he’d found gold. What he didn’t realise was that he had made Britain’s greatest archaeological discovery since the second world war. Three hundred
You very possibly know the music of the Glaswegian band Mogwai, even if you don’t think you do. You might well have not listened to a note of their ten studio albums, their three live albums, or their four compilations. You may never have seen one of their pulverisingly loud live shows, or heard them
It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage movies gather — Film 4, or the excellent Talking Pictures TV. Then search through their early-hours offerings, and press ‘record’ more or less at random. Gainsborough costume flicks; Rattigan adaptations; anything with John Mills in
The One Day In the Year is an Australian drama about the annual commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. It was written in 1958 but it could have been dashed off last week. What makes it thrillingly topical is that the personality of Churchill and the truth about Britain’s colonial past are central to
It was something a friend said to me about The Revenant, Leonardo diCaprio’s bloody-minded and brutal Oscar vehicle: ‘The problem with the film is once you start laughing, you can’t stop. And for me, that moment was the second time he fell off a cliff.’ I thought about this a lot listening to Into the
I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington. All I remember now about the show, and my review, is that I said she could teach Paula Rego to suck eggs. From the mischievous energy packed into her small figurative paintings I assumed she