theartsdesk.com, first with arts reviews, news and interviews
Nick Hasted |
“Why does everyone hate the police?” the teenage son of French cop Stéphanie (Léa Drucker) asks, reflecting the opinion of all his friends. It’s the exact sentiment being voiced…
Thomas H. Green |
Australian singer Courtney Barnett exists within a rare Venn Diagram intersection. Her lyrics meld poetry and prosaic everyday detail with witty, very human insight. Her music…
Boyd Tonkin |
Scipione has not fared well with critical posterity. True, the Grenadier Guards somehow enlisted its stately opening orchestral number as their regimental slow march. Otherwise,…
David Nice |
It's a double first, please, for all the students involved in what for me are two of the year's best concerts. Back in May, two soloists and a wind ensemble played at the highest…
Thomas H. Green |
From 2010, for around five years, Tinie Tempah was one of Britain’s biggest pop stars. He had three chart-toppers, as well as many other hits, and breathed new life into UK rap…
Aleks Sierz |
Older women, even middle-class women, are living with unbearable stress. Don’t believe me? Well, look around you. The stress of living up to slogans about “having it all”; the…
Helen Hawkins
At first sight, Dominik Moll’s latest release, Case 137, might look like a police procedural, or a docudrama about a specific incident. But it’s more than that. Moll has created a…
Markie Robson-Scott
Taiki Waititi’s take on Klara and the Sun is, unsurprisingly, more of a comedy - childish, slapstick - than Kazuo Ishiguro’s sombre dystopian novel of 2021 (the film had its world…
Kathryn Reilly
“My childhood was small, but I’m going to be big,” sang Grian Chatten on Dogrel in 2019. He wasn’t kidding. Fontaines DC are on one hell of a roll and critics far and wide are…
Sebastian Scotney
There were times when this event felt more like a devotional rite than a concert. Thirteen thousand of us had gathered at the Utilita Arena by the canals in Birmingham to be “…
David Nice
Many epic biopics make a messy spread of their protagonist's life (the overrated Oppenheimer is a prime example). Not this one. Though De Gaulle's title in France means it could…
David Nice
"Chiaroscuro" - "light-dark", usually applied to bold contrasts within a single painting - isn't a term I'd have thought a good fit for the gut strings of period instruments or…
Heather Neill
Ibsen's powerful study of hypocrisy gleams and bristles in the close-up intimacy of the bijou Jermyn Street Theatre. Richard Eyre's version, first seen at the Almeida in 2013,…
Martin Guttridge-Hewitt
A tray of water, a metallic plate piled with salt, a bubble-producing plastic stick. The kind of tat that looks so cheap you probably wouldn’t trust it with an adult, let alone…
Thomas H. Green
Music can be a life-healing catalyst, the untrammelled essence of heart and mind conveyed human and raw from the soul. There’s magic in that. Alternately, there’s singing, “Lost…
James Saynor
At the start of theartsdesk’s third foray into the wonders of this year’s London Film Festival, let us pause to look back at the first LFF in 1957 (which makes this year’s event…
Veronica Lee
What a delightful show this is: a big hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and now enjoying an extended run at Soho Theatre, Highlander 70 is an inventive piece of found…
Guy Oddy
Over the last 30 years or so, the Avalanches have proved themselves to be samplers supreme and masters of the cut-up, producing soulful pop and hip hop tunes aplenty from a snip…
Sarah Kent
The 90s: Art and Fashion starts well. The first thing you see are Sarah Lucas’s boots. With razor blades inserted under the toe caps, they evoke the “fuck-you, I’ll fight my…
disc of the day
One of UK rap's breakout stars returns with a lively set of bangers and chat
tv
Sea monster yarn is preposterous but quite entertaining
Last time around for Anthony Horowitz's bookish heroine Susan Ryeland?
film
The master director relects on his timely revisit of the Gilets Jaunes and police crackdown
Léa Drucker shines as a dogged Parisian investigator of her own police colleagues
More from the second week of the LFF: 'Klara and the Sun', 'Filipiñana', 'Misty Green', 'Woman Unknown' and more
new music
With her usual trio, the indie stalwart rips into a meaty set of rockin' and janglin'
One of UK rap's breakout stars returns with a lively set of bangers and chat
'Dripping with existential dread, there are zero laughs here'
classical
One of the world's top conductors galvanises a superb young team
Period-instrument guttiness allied to supreme musicianship
Fun and fluency from a French pianist add to the splendour of orchestral sound
opera
A rare, and precious, outing for a buried Handel treasure
Energy, passion, intensity and tenderness in Garry Walker’s conducting
Inventive sets and choreogaphy, eclectic music, atone for a clunky libretto
theatre
New play about the stresses of life for older women is a thriller starring Anne-Marie Duff
This intimate space emphasises the intensity of relationships past and present
Philippe Decouflé's production stylishly channels the best of Murakami's vision
dance
The Royal Ballet principal shows off his tap skills, his colleague a Paganini party piece
The Pandora myth makes an underwhelming vehicle for the dangers of AI
Matthew Bourne’s 2000 hit revs up again with impressive dancers and a witty score
comedy
Silly but poignant US high school tale
Irish comic delivers a gag-heavy hour
books
Style fails to meet philosophical ambition in a novel that treads old ground
This revelatory biography is sympathetically told and endlessly entertaining
Clint Boon lovingly recalls those baggy, funky, sinsemilla-scented Madchester days
visual arts
Everything reduced to meaningless mush
Relentlessly cheerful paintings - like too much chocolate
It doesn’t get any better than this: the New York abstractionist, in a pristine and beautiful hang
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