Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea.The End is a dystopian musical about a rich family that found refuge in a bunker 20 years after an environmental catastrophe. The parents (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon), their grownup son (George Read more ...

Henry Gee’s previous book, A Brief History of Life on Earth, made an interestingly downbeat read for a title that won the UK’s science book prize. He emphasised that a constant feature of that history is extinction. Disappearing is simply what species do. A few endure for an exceptionally long time (hello, horseshoe crabs), but all suffer the same fate in the end. Some at least go down as ancestors of succeeding species. Many more just vanish. Evolution permits gradual development of more complex forms. That’s how we got here. But the way it works – by reproduction with variation, then Read more ...

Can Francesca Moody do it again? Fleabag’s producer has brought Weather Girl to London, after a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, mirroring the path taken by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creation. But the new show is a much tougher assault on modern mores.Comparisons will be inevitable, though, as both shows are comic monologues, delivered in that conspiratorial way to the audience that became a Fleabag staple. And Stacey, immaculately portrayed by Julia McDermott, is equally personable, though even more out of control. She’s a weather girl for a Fresno TV station, a superslim blonde Read more ...

The score is effective, and rewarding to perform, but derivative. The libretto uses every cliché, or truism, about save-the-planet youth activism in the book; it’s didactic, not dramatic. Direction, design and lighting sometimes feel unfinished. Yet as a youth/community opera, Glyndebourne’s latest educational project hits the mark; the commitment of singers and players young and old, professional and amateur, makes the ends justify the means.The only other Glyndebourne education project of this sort I’ve seen live, Nothing by David Bruce with a libretto by Glyn Maxwell, began, like this one Read more ...

Sebastian Copeland’s images of the Arctic may look otherworldly – with their tilting cathedrals of ice, hypnotic light, and fractured seascapes that seem to stretch to infinity – but it would be a mistake to see them that way.For Copeland’s whole mission is to make us see how intimately our lives are caught up with a region which – for all its frozen austerity – is in flux. In his most recent book of photographs, The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White (winner of an International Photography Award), he writes that Arctic sea ice has just lost “more volume in 30 years than it has in the Read more ...

How old were you when you first had an image of the Arctic? When you first had that image, what was it that most resonated? Was it its remoteness, the endless snow and ice, the polar bears? Did it seem like a mythical place of mirages and monsters? Or was it a place you thought you might travel to or even work one day?For young readers of the beguiling, illustrated books by fast rising children’s author Chloe Savage, there’s a chance to encounter the Arctic both as a place of magic and as a fascinating scientific proposition. In The Search for the Giant Arctic Jellyfish – which won the Read more ...

Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...

If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come across references to the “energy transition”. Example? Look, here’s one in this week’s New Scientist, a full-page ad from Equinor, the rebranded Norwegian state-owned oil and gas giant. Why is Equinor, now styling itself an energy company, still exploring for new oil and gas deposits?Because, they say, demand will persist for decades to come, so it’s “the responsible thing to do” – even though the company is also investing in renewables, albeit only a quarter as much, to help “speed up the energy transition”. Read more ...

“The ocean is our home… Even in my next life I will dive again,” says Geum Ok, one of a band of female divers from Jeju, a volcanic island 60 miles south of the Korean peninsular.Sue Kim’s documentary follows these brave Haenyeos as they plunge into the chilly waters to harvest sea urchins, conch, abalone and octopus. Wearing only a wet suit, mask and flippers, they descend into the depths, holding their breath for minutes on end before surfacing to store their catch in floating nets.It’s hard work and extremely dangerous, points out Soon E Kim, a member of the committee tasked with Read more ...

As hurricanes rip into the American Gulf states with increasing ferocity, Eastern Europe disappears underwater and even the gentle British rain becomes a deluge, the arrival of Daisy Hall’s debut play Bellringers at Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs space couldn’t be more timely,The scene throughout is a belfry, with bell-ringing ropes hanging overhead, where two men in monks’ habits have just arrived. Outside, rain is beating down. The two men, Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) and Clement (Luke Rollason, pictured below), begin to argue about when they should ring the bells, whether they actually need to Read more ...

Bellringers, Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★ Dystopian climate-crisis dramas seemed ten-a-penny at the Fringe a few years back, but they’re far thinner on the ground in 2024. Which makes this deliciously elusive, oblique debut drama from Daisy Hall all the more intriguing, and valued.Clement and Aspinall appear in monk-like cassocks in a church belfry, apparently summoned by a fast-approaching storm. It’s their job to ring the tower’s bells, perhaps to alert residents of their Oxfordshire village to the impending deluge, or even act as some kind of community-protecting talisman simply by Read more ...

Planet of the Apes is the most artfully replenished franchise, from the original series’ elegant time-travel loop to the reboot’s rich, deepening milieu. Director Wes Ball again offers serious sf, just as much as Dune, considering the consequences of another species’ dominance, and outraged humanity’s resistance.We are unspecified centuries after Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), with Caesar’s reign now a font of vaguely remembered ape faith. Human civilisation – and its weaponry – has fallen away, leaving a green world, with mysterious skyscraper skylines sheathed in Read more ...