mon 10/02/2025

Italy

Dominique White: Deadweight, Whitechapel Gallery review - sculptures that seem freighted with history

It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White,...

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ll Segreto di Susanna/Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park review - on with the motley, out with the fags

Could “Cav and Pag” give way to “Sue and Pag”? As a double-bill partner for Leoncavallo’s backstage shocker Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park have scheduled not the standard Cavalleria Rusticana but an entirely different one-act work. Premiered in...

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Il Trittico, Welsh National Opera review - another triumph for a hard-pressed company

It’s somehow typical of the Welsh National Opera I’ve known now for the best part of sixty years that it should confront its current funding difficulties with brilliant productions of two of the more challenging works in the repertory.The company’s...

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Album: Jack Savoretti - Miss Italia

It’s a long way to the middle. Jack Savoretti has worked hard to get there. He’s grafted. His first album, 2007’s Between the Minds, hinted that his musical DNA bestrode early-Seventies Los Angeles, those Topanga Canyon strummers and such, but...

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La Chimera review - magical realism with a touch of Fellini

Italian director Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Happy as Lazarro), ploughs a charmingly idiosyncratic furrow that might be described as magical realism, combining as it does vivid depictions of rural communities with shafts of fantasy and fable...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Marco Bellocchio - the last maestro

The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco Bellocchio was a Marxist firebrand when he made his iconoclastic debut with Fists in the Pocket (1965). Now aged 84, he makes intellectually and emotionally muscular, hit epics about abused...

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Aci by the River, London Handel Festival, Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse review - myths for the #MeToo age

“Site-specific” performance locations rarely come more atmospheric, or evocative, than this one. Beyond the East India Dock basin, with the hedgehog-backed dome of the O2 looming just across the Thames on a gusty spring evening, a cavernous “chain...

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Ripley, Netflix review - Highsmith's horribly fascinating sociopath adrift in a sea of noir

There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film. One this new adaptation presumably had in mind...

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Io Capitano review - gripping odyssey from Senegal to Italy

Io Capitano works on several levels. At first glance, it’s a ripping yarn – two optimistic Senegalese teenagers embark on a dangerous journey, across the Sahara, through the hell of Libya and on to an overcrowded boat across the Mediterranean...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Padre Pio

Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political...

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Immaculate review - grisly convent horror is timely but flawed

Immaculate marks Sydney Sweeney’s complete takeover of the big screen. This year alone she has brought back the rom-com with Anyone But You, showed off her acting chops in whistle-blower drama Reality, and joined the Marvel universe with Madame Web...

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La Strada, Sadler's Wells review - a long and bumpy road

Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of...

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