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Markie Robson-Scott
Friday, 04 December 2020
“California is for cocksuckers and flag-burners. Did they know you were a fag in the army?” Willis (Lance Henriksen; best known as Bishop in Alien) asks his son John (Viggo...
Robert Beale
Friday, 04 December 2020
The Hallé have been slow off the mark, compared with some, in their response to the challenge of concert-giving in the Covid era. But now that they have delivered on the first of...
Adam Sweeting
Friday, 04 December 2020
The story of the raid on dams in Germany's Ruhr Valley by the RAF’s 617 Squadron in May 1943 has become a subject of perennial fascination as well as a potent national myth. The...
Thomas H Green
Friday, 04 December 2020
Doncaster musician Dominic Harrison – Yungblud – appeared a couple of years ago, a self-proclaimed punk, alive with vim and righteousness, touting music that, loosely speaking,...
Maxine Kwok
Thursday, 03 December 2020
2020: a year that at some point felt like the end of live performance for the world of the performing arts, certainly for the foreseeable future. Artists spent months without any...
Adam Sweeting
Thursday, 03 December 2020
This debut feature by writer/director Henry Blake is a shocking and remarkably assured drama about the “county lines” trade, where children are used as drug traffickers. Using...
Veronica Lee
Thursday, 03 December 2020
Edgy comedy runs the risk of discomfiting the audience so much that they can't relax and enjoy the show. But Natalie...
Joe Muggs
Thursday, 03 December 2020
Dance music has a notably different relationship to its past than other kinds of music. This has a real, material basis:...
Sarah Kent
Wednesday, 02 December 2020
Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of...
Demetrios Matheou
Wednesday, 02 December 2020
For so much of the year, Tenet was cited as the film that was going to save cinema – the tentpole extravaganza...
Liz Thomson
Wednesday, 02 December 2020
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Songs from Home has been an anchor-point almost since the beginning of lockdown for many people, all...
Graham Fuller
Wednesday, 02 December 2020
It was around the time of the 14th century Black Death that the word “corruption” – from the Latin corruptus, the past...
Guy Oddy
Wednesday, 02 December 2020
The Covid pandemic has meant, with both performance and recording opportunities at a minimum, that many musicians have had...
Adam Sweeting
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
Throughout its preceding five episodes, The Undoing (Sky Atlantic) has skilfully, if a little shamelessly, kept the fickle...
Boyd Tonkin
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
It began as a Christmas present in the bleakest of winters. In December 1939, as war engulfed Europe, Bertolt Brecht sent a...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 61: Amy Winehouse, Krust, Motörhead, Extrawelt, Sade, Chase and Status and more
Thomas H Green
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
Welcome to the penultimate 2020 edition of the world’s vastest, most musically wide-ranging, regularly posted, online vinyl...
Lydia Bunt
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in...
Daniel Baksi
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
In his exclusive half-hour-plus interview for distributor Second Run, the affable Tsai Ming-Liang makes a striking admission...
India Lewis
Monday, 30 November 2020
Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-Palestinian narrator, desperately...
disc of the day
Album: Yungblud - Weird!
Pop-punky Brit singer's second album sounds fizzy and enormous but lacks rebel spirit
tv
The Dambusters, Channel 5 review - yet another telling of the Bouncing Bomb story
An eager Dan Snow recreates the fabled mission of Guy Gibson and 617 Squadron
The Undoing, Series Finale, Sky Atlantic review - bluff and double-bluff as the truth is revealed
Murder mystery reaches dramatic courtroom climax
Small Axe: Red, White and Blue, BBC One review - sobering real-life story of police officer Leroy Logan
One man's bid to change the Metropolitan Police from the inside
film
Falling review - Viggo Mortensen's powerful directorial debut
Portrait of a disintegrating mind: Lance Henriksen excels as an angry old man
County Lines review - a scary descent into drug-dealer purgatory
How criminal gangs lure vulnerable children into their distribution rackets
Mank review – David Fincher’s brilliant, bitter-sweet paean to Hollywood’s Golden Age
Gary Oldman is on top form as Citizen Kane’s scathing screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz
new music
Album: Yungblud - Weird!
Pop-punky Brit singer's second album sounds fizzy and enormous but lacks rebel spirit
Album: High Contrast - Notes From the Underground
An elegiac take on rave revivalism from thoughtful Welsh superstar producer
Mary Chapin Carpenter, One Night Lonely livestream review - down-home and perfectly paced
Thanksgiving at Wolf Trap with a musical pilgrim
classical
Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester online review - re-consecration of the house
A performance on film that's more, not less than live
Not-quite-solitude on the 34th floor: violinist Maxine Kwok on the short film 'Rising'
The LSO player relates her lockdown experience in the City of London she loves so much
Christine Rice, Julius Drake, Wigmore Hall review - songs of love and death
A great mezzo's journey from cradle to grave
opera
L'enfant et les sortilèges, VOPERA, LPO, Reynolds online – Ravel and Colette reimagined
Through the laptop screen and what the child found there, in a brilliant take on a classic
The Seven Deadly Sins, Opera North online review - viscerally thrilling
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's indictment of capitalism in a vibrant new production
Ariodante, Royal Opera online review – stylish, but confined
Accomplished ensemble tries its best to cross the footlights in livestream-only Handel
theatre
What a Carve Up!, Barn Theatre online review – ingenious whodunnit
Film adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s 1994 bestseller is a postmodern masterpiece
15 Heroines, Jermyn Street Theatre online review - putting the women back into Greek myth
Scorching adaptation of Ovid is a welcome theatrical respite from lockdown
Death of England: Delroy, National Theatre review - a furious if fleetingly seen sequel
Opening and closing night were the same for vital solo show
dance
The Seven Deadly Sins, Opera North online review - viscerally thrilling
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's indictment of capitalism in a vibrant new production
The Royal Ballet: Live, Within the Golden Hour review - stunning, joyous dance
Setback? What setback? Restrictions seem to push this company to ever greater things
Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells review - onward and upward
Carlos Acosta sets out his stall as artistic director of BRB
comedy
Natalie Palamides: Nate: A One Man Show, Netflix review - deep dive into toxic masculinity still has power
'One-man' show about consent
Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine, Netflix review - star-studded special for Trump lip-syncer
Politics and race examined in sketch show
Dear Joan & Jericha review - glorious wrong advice from spoof agony aunts
Filthy and fun creation of Julia Davis and Vick Pepperdine
Books
Annie Ernaux: A Man's Place review - an intimate portrait, necessarily incomplete
In a memoir built on absence, France's leading writer inspects the life of her father
Zaina Arafat: You Exist Too Much review - second-generation love addiction
Self-conscious therapeutic development cannot help but recall the past
Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC review - we won't know what we've got until it's gone
No government has attacked the BBC more determinedly than 21st century Conservatives
visual arts
Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern review - photography as protest
Pictures so confrontational they knock you sideways
Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, Barbican Art Gallery review - mould-breaker, ground-shaker
A crash course in the life and times of an iconoclast and muse
Sin, National Gallery review - great subject, modest show
A small gathering can't do justice to this fabulous topic
latest comments
My sentiments exactly. I've looked around for the...
lovely!
this will give insight to people out here
Do watch it. That's her skill, to make you feel a...
In the lockdown I have fallen even more in love...
Great themes in this cold-war thriller, but all...
The most boring album of all time from the DM...
what a disgrace the white policemen in the London...