Features
Soraya Mafi
Anyone concerned about making the arts accessible regardless of where they live should be concerned by the recent announcement from Glyndebourne that it’s having to cease touring across England.That painful decision, and Welsh National Opera’s announcement that it can no longer visit Liverpool with immediate effect, are the inevitable result of Arts Council England’s baffling decision to cut funding to both companies while simultaneously talking of ‘”levelling up” and supporting the arts outside of London.Like many British opera singers, I was introduced to the art form by a touring company. Read more ...
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood
Why is it important for a music conservatoire to make recordings? What is the educational context? These are questions we have continued to reflect upon at the Royal Academy of Music – celebrating its bicentenary this year – since we took our first steps towards what has become an established and invigorating part of Academy life.Twenty five years ago, we made a conscious decision to equip young musicians with the particular skills required for "the studio". There was also the belief that giving students greater artistic agency would only yield exciting results, empowering them to take a Read more ...
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...
David Nice
“Visionary,” I’m told, is a clichéd word these days. But so long as you don’t fling it about too freely, it’s apt: for me, there are only two visionary directors working in opera right now. One is our own Richard Jones – though even he can get it wrong occasionally – and non-Czechs probably won’t know much about the other as yet.Jiří Heřman, for seven years the Artistic Director of the National Theatre Brno’s Janáček Opera, whose new production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead in an unprecedented yoking with the Glagolitic Mass I was there in to see, along with a revival of his 2020 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)3= Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen); and3= Happening (Audrey Diwan)5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel)6. Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)7= The Duke (Roger Michell); and7= Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)9. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) Each critic’s first choice was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
1. Nightmare AlleyIt’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power), it’s the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose journey starts with his miserably paid job at a travelling carnival.It could have used a trim here and there. But once you get sucked into the narrative, it’s a wild ride – like a ghost Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).Which makes me feel slightly less guilty for going back this year again and again to the softest cinematic comfort blanket I know, Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1969). In new films I didn't review, I was entranced by the compelling performance of Renate Reinsve as the woman whose Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin and Nope are marvellously mad in their own ways.The Quiet Girl, Playground and Petite Maman, all films of great beauty, are focused on the difficulties of growing up, as, in a more extreme way, is Nitram, the story of a mass-shooter whose parents are powerless in the face of their deeply disturbed son. And The Wonder, a strange, beautifully lit story Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’m struck by how many of my 2022 picks deal with relationships in extremis: a love story disguised as a Hitchcockian murder mystery, a long friendship gone suddenly surreally awry, an unlikely romance that unfolds on a sub-zero train journey, a married couple whose shared obsession with mortality is piqued by a toxic dust cloud, a father-daughter bond that’s finally understood through the prism of bitter-sweet memory.It’s as if all the conflict and uncertainty in the world is being reflected in these personal stories; there even seems a correspondence between a costume drama about a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In what feels like a less than stellar year for cinema, some films stand out. In some instances it was because I stepped a little outside my normal fare of blockbusters or star-driven vehicles and saw some films I might have thought a little too arthouse for my tastes. I'm very glad I did because otherwise I might not have seen a couple on this list.I chose as number one a film version of a stage musical that I loved; I'm often not a fan of transformations (in either direction) as I think they can be lazy or reductive. But not Matthew Warchus's Matilda the Musical, a joyous reincarnation of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Diwan’s French abortion drama Happening was the year’s hardest but most luminescent watch, as a fiercely intelligent young woman fights for her future survival as an artist in 1963, when illegal abortion requires wartime subterfuge and bloody violence to female bodies.Similarly humane social concern motivated the poetic realism of Li Ruijun’s Chinese peasant saga Return to Dust, and migrant children’s struggles in the Dardennes’ gripping Tori and Lokita. Nina Hoss’s portrait of a disintegrating piano teacher in The Audition also brought icy thriller techniques to the arthouse, while a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Empires rise and fall; every dog has its day. The increased awareness of and need for diverse voices – together with the series-driven streaming revolution – has made Hollywood less relevant now than it has been at any time since the industry colonised Southern California's orange groves. Even stars have become an endangered species.I enjoyed Licorice Pizza, The Fabelmans, and Bullet Train (until its awful last scene), but the films listed below speak with an urgency avoided by American mainstream movies with their escapist imperative – She Said being a grave, classy Read more ...