Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature is a punkish, gothic, genre-dancing, feminist riot, whose verve, imagination and serious intent don’t really need the enforcement of an exclamation mark. If an extremely enjoyable film suffers from anything, it might be a tendency to overegg.This is a rare and atypically fulsome outing for The Bride herself, a macabre mate for the lonely monster, who was literally never completed in Mary Shelley’s novel, and was a mere cameo in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Here, as manifested by the astronomically ascendant Jessie Buckley, she’s front Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
When an artist as popular as Harry Styles releases an album, it’s inevitable that the noise and expectation surrounding it cloud the music initially, with fans and critics jumping to share their intensely positive or intensely negative long held thoughts about the musician’s place in the cultural landscape, regardless of how the album sounds. Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. feels like it needs more time to land, probably intentionally. The tracks are slow building, casual and subdued but all feel like they’ll mature well, even if the initial spark is missing. As is typical Read more ...
Simon Thompson
If there was love in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Valentine’s concert, then it was very much of the doomed variety. There was Romeo and Juliet, of course, as imagined in Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture, and Zemlinsky’s marvellously strange take on The Little Mermaid. Zemlinsky’s Mermaid disappeared for decades until it was reconstructed in the 1980s, and that long absence might go some way towards explaining why it’s such a rarity in concert halls today. We audiences are the losers in that, though, because this 45-minute orchestral fantasy is a cascade of colours in which the Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A brand new sign in a contemporary font (Centra No.2 I am told) signals my arrival at the wooded grounds of Goodwood Art Foundation. This contrast, between cool, clean design and the timeless but perhaps parochial charms of the English countryside makes for a fascinating morning at this recently renamed and revamped sculpture park in rural West Sussex. Beyond the art world, Goodwood has long been known for horse racing and motor racing. Now, thanks to a progressive landscape gardener, a modernist architect, an outreach programme and media support from Bloomberg Connects, it offers an art Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Arthur Miller is constantly being revived on London stages, and constantly remains relevant. However, his most popular plays are those from early in his career – All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Price even – but what about his later flowering? To fill this gap, the Young Vic is now staging Broken Glass, the playwright’s 1994 drama about Jewish identity, marriage and psychology. Directed by Fiddler on the Roof maestro Jordan Fein, this revival is more timely than ever, given the rising menace of anti-Semitism across the world. But is the show any good? Set in Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
CMAT knows how to make an entrance. The opening of this show, in common with the rest of her tour, featured her band assembling onstage before a spotlight was suddenly shone on the back of the room – and there was Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, in a vivid green outfit and snazzy spectacles, standing on a raised section usually home to seats.It was a fitting entrance that could have nestled on the silver screen alongside the varied tunes from films played over the PA before the gig started. Thompson is an undoubted star these days, a charismatic and energetic mega watt performer. This gig, part of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s that time of year again. The 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne this coming Sunday, and as night follows day, here’s the latest series of Drive to Survive to pump up the global appetite for ridiculously fast cars, backstage dramas, grumpy team bosses and nakedly ambitious drivers. This is also the last time we’ll see the “old” generation of cars before they’re replaced by this year’s models, powered by ultra-evolved, even more eco-friendly hybrid engines. Max Verstappen, for one, doesn’t like them much.Drive to Survive has been instrumental in turning F1 into a vast global Read more ...
India Lewis
Birgitta Trotzig’s Queen is a strikingly poetic, persistently grim semi-fairy tale set at one of the edges of Europe: a strange, windswept shore where pregnant women fall through the ice, family farms are barricaded in the winter to keep out the destitute, and their “great barn doors face the coastal wetlands”. This agrarian community ekes out its existence in a merciless, flat land by the Baltic Sea, and the novel focusses on a family of such farmers: Judit (the titular Queen), her brothers Albert and Viktor, Viktor’s widow, and Judit’s troubled parents. The landscape they inhabit is bleak Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Scream’s commentary on and sly revival of the slasher genre was a phenomenon in the ironic Nineties. If any franchise is alive to the absurdity of six sequels it’s this one, where self-aware characters eagerly annotate evolving horror cliché. The latest “meta-slasher whodunnit”, though, as Scream (2022) handily had it, hasn’t put the requisite thought into justifying its existence.Wes Craven's original trilogy boasted bravura comic-horrific opening scenes in Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997) and confidently opened out a sleazy Hollywood back-story in the Weinstein-produced Scream 3 (2000), Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’ll never forget watching Tracey Emin reduce an audience to tears at the Royal Festival Hall. About 25 people were expected, but some 500 turned up even though she wasn’t well known. It was 1995, four years before she was propelled into the limelight by entering My Bed into the Turner Prize. (The dishevelled bed where she’d spent four days in a state of catatonic despair after a break-up caused a furore. How could such a squalid installation be considered art?)I’d written a feature on her in Time Out, though, and mentioned Whispering Women, the exhibition I’d invited her to take part in. And Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The indomitable Nicolas Kent has devised a new theatre piece to prick our consciences and refocus our minds, after his sterling work on the ugly underbelly of the Afghan wars and the Grenfell inquiry, inter alia. This one is less polished though not lacking in grit.Originally a project much like Kent’s The Great Game, a loose assemblage of full-length plays from leading writers about invasions of Afghanistan over the centuries, this has emerged as five much shorter plays about different aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The series has a chronological sweep, starting with Jonathan Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Pretty much any performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is a special occasion, but this one perhaps more so than most. For one thing, it was a landmark event in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 90th anniversary year - the only concert this season that saw the return of Sir Donald Runnicles, their Conductor Emeritus. Runnicles’ Mahler performances were always highlights during his time in charge of the orchestra, and this is a special work for him, not only one of the pieces that persuaded him to become a conductor, but also one in which he sang as a young member of the Read more ...