Culture

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s 50 years since an assortment of scruffy youths from the leafy suburb of Bromley, the grimy streets of Finsbury Park and under the Westway gathered together, often in art colleges, to form ‘punk’. They will be celebrated this summer – but more for what they became than what they were. The Clash became the towering public statues of rebel rock. Johnny Rotten again became John Lydon – musical adventurer and perpetual irritant. Siouxsie Sioux became the unwitting, and unwilling, inventor of goth. The Damned became national treasures. The ones we remember wrote books, took up acting, went where the wind took them. They didn’t stay punks. Not like Charlie Harper. When he first came across the punks, he didn’t see anything new.

Toy Story 5 – do we need it? One worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is thrashed to death like this. The latest ​instalment, however, does address one of the most pressing dilemmas of modern childhood (screen time) and whether it will be the end of toys. (‘Extinction… Not again!’ cries Rex, the dinosaur.) It is timely, with some delicious touches – Woody now has a bald spot So it is timely, with some delicious touches – Woody now has a bald spot. And while it isn’t as entertaining as the first three and stumbles at the finishing line, it may be better than the fourth, with its horrible doll Gabby Gabby.

Under the Shadow is a timely drama set in Tehran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam’s missiles are raining down on the city which puts an additional strain on the troubled marriage of Iraj and Shideh. Iraj is a doctor. Shideh is a part-qualified doctor. During quiet spells, they chat about humdrum stuff. Iraj wants Shideh to have another baby. Shideh prefers to leap around doing her Jane Fonda exercises. Her mother-in-law potters in and out and fusses over bits of crockery. Their daughter snuggles on a sofa with a rag doll. The low-energy dialogue flits from one issue to the next without any sense of direction. The characters tell each other jokes to pass the time.

Grade: A It’s spring in Vienna; well, OK, it’s early summer but it’s a grey day when Mozart doesn’t make you feel younger and I reckon this new release from Alim Beisembayev will do just that. In a world of infinite entertainment possibilities, Beisembayev has done the hard bit – the choosing – for you. Here we have two late piano concertos (Mozart wrote them between the ages of 30 and 32, as his own solo career wound down) charged with a grandeur, a playfulness and an endless smiling compassion that will come as a glorious corrective to anyone whose last experience of Mozart involved bodily fluids and confectionery in Sky’s hellish remake of Amadeus.