sun 10/08/2025

LGBT+

Album: Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You

This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud on sex, love, and confusion in the modern world

"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world....

Read more...

Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams review - love lessons

Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo...

Read more...

Album: Reneé Rapp - Bite Me

The stage musical update of Mean Girls, and the film adaptation, pushed Reneé Rapp into the public eye. She played queen bitch Regina George. She’s become well-known for her forthright public persona, especially since coming out as a lesbian last...

Read more...

Album: Wet Leg - moisturizer

War, pestilence, famine, death. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of them all. So what better time to visit the genuinely sunny uplands – the long-anticipated second album from Wet Leg.My, those seemingly demure, Amish-styled girls have...

Read more...

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, Whitechapel Gallery review - cool, calm and potentially lethal

Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his...

Read more...

The Great Escape Festival 2025, Brighton review - a feast of music from across the world

Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.Quarter of...

Read more...

DVD/Blu-ray: In a Year of 13 Moons

A longshot of transgender Elvira (Volker Spengler) circled by gay men, assignation turning to assault as dawn mist rises from Frankfurt’s Main river, suggests Pasolini’s brutal 1975 assassination. Rainer Werner Fassbinder instead had in mind the...

Read more...

Four Mothers review - one gay man deals with three extra mothers

An Irish adaptation of Garcia Di Gregorio’s acclaimed 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, director Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is the story of Edward (James McArdle) and his 81-year-old mother Alma (the excellent Fionnula Flanagan), who has had a stroke...

Read more...

Misericordia review - mushroom-gathering and murder in rural France

“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his...

Read more...

Album: Perfume Genius - Glory

I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t...

Read more...

Edward II, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford review - monarchs, murder and mayhem from Marlowe

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and...

Read more...
Subscribe to LGBT+