Pedro Almodovar's new film Pain and Glory has been hailed as his most personal to date The Doctor at London's Almeida Theatre is Robert Icke's latest production. Freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, it's a play about ethics, morals and the repercussions of decisions both personal and professional. And how does what we say we are affect other people's perceptions of us? Peter Pomerantsev's "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality" is a book exploring ...
Aug 24, 2019•51 min
Quentin Tarantino's 9th offering to the world (he's said he'll only do 10, then retire from directing) is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, part fable, part historical love letter to LA in the 60s. It deals with the point when The Manson Family drove a stake through the heart of the 1960s peace and love movement. Actually is a play by Annie Ziegler at London's Trafalgar Studios, dealing with the aftermath of an accusation of rape on a college campus Dora Maurer was born in Hungary in 1936 and has a...
Aug 17, 2019•50 min
We're at the Edinburgh Festivals, including the Pet Shop Boys/Jonathan Harvey musical starring Frances Barber: Musik. Also the stage adaptation of Kate Grenville's best-selling novel about the collision between settlers and Indigenous Australians, The Secret River. As well as the Bridget Riley retrospective at The National Gallery of Scotland and Blinded By The Light - the film of Safraz Mansoor's story about growing up in Luton and his love for the music of Bruce Springsteen. Also we find out w...
Aug 12, 2019•50 min
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, Scenes From The Luddite Rebellion has just opened at Manchester Royal Exchange. Combining verbatim recreations and imagined encounters, it looks at Manchester and England at the beginning of industrialisation Animals is a new film based on the novel by Emma Jane Unsworth. Two friends messily drift along and apart and back together in Dublin Colson Whitehead's new novel The Nickel Boys fictionalises the true story of a reform institution in Florida where crue...
Aug 03, 2019•47 min
Bridges of Madison County began life as a novel, then became a film and is now a musical. Opening at London's Menier Chocolate Factory, it stars Jenna Russell in the lead role. How does it work on the stage? Thai film Die Tomorrow sounds like it might be a Bond movie but is a thoughtful look at death and mortality; mixing different formats: documentary, drama, interview, but never showing any death Fosse/Verdon begins soon on BBC2. It's an American drama which tells the story of the astonishingl...
Jul 27, 2019•57 min
Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole has made his feature film debut with Making Noise Quietly; a triptych of stories about the effects of war. Tennessee Williams' play Night Of The Iguana is based on his 1948 novel and has just opened in a new production at London's Noel Coward Theatre, featuring Clive Own and Lia WIlliams An exhibition looking at mankind's relationship with The Moon begins at The Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich Laura Cummings' biography of her mother's peculiar upbringing; On...
Jul 20, 2019•48 min
The Manchester International Festival is a biannual event, enveloping the city in a wide range of arts events across the genres. We'll be casting our critical net as wide as possible Film director David Lynch has curated a series of events at the venue Home, including an exhibition of his artwork and a series of concerts There's been controversy around the Idris ELba/ Kwame Kei Armah play Tree, but will our panel think it's any good? An exhibition by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama; Parliament of...
Jul 13, 2019•51 min
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's first film The Lives Of Others won the best Foreign Language Oscar, his follow-up The Tourist was a critical disaster. How will his latest - Never Look Away - fare critically and at the box office? Jack Thorne's latest play The End Of History has just opened at London's Royal Court Theatre. It's the story - over three decades - of a left-leaning family who love each other and love to bicker. 8 Days To The Moon on BBC TV follows the progress of the three astrona...
Jul 06, 2019•53 min
American indie film Support The Girls is set in a sports bar in America where the manager's day just keeps getting worse The Hunt stared life as a multi award winning Danish film. Its been adapted for the stage at The Almeida Theatre in London Cut and Paste; 400 Years of Collage in Edinburgh explores the sticky multi-shaped world of collage Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad was his successor to Life and Fate. The first translation into English is eagerly awaited. Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Viv ...
Jun 29, 2019•53 min
Toy Story 4 hits the cinema screens. Featuring the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Keanu Reeves, and Annie Potts - as the kick-ass heroine Bo Peep - what does the Toy Story franchise have to offer the new generation of toy loving kids? John Malkovich returns to the stage after a 33 year absence to star in David Mamet's Bitter Wheat about a depraved Hollywood mogul . The play's protagonist Barney Fein is described "as a bloated monster – a studio head, who like his predecessor, the minotaur, devo...
Jun 22, 2019•48 min
Sweat, starring Martha Plimpton was a sel-out success when it premiered at London's Donmar Warehouse last year. Now it's got a West End transfer to the Gielgud Theatre Asif Kapadia won an Oscar for his biopic about Amy Winehouse. Now he's looking at Diego Maradona's extraordinary career as the finest footballer in the world and also his unravelling life off the pitch George Clooney appears in and is a producer and director for a new TV adaptation of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 on Channel 4 In Elif ...
Jun 15, 2019•52 min
Chilean director Sebastián Lelio's 2013 film Gloria has been remade for an English-speaking audience as Gloria Bell. Starring Julianne Moore it's extremely faithful to the original; what's new about it? Wife is the latest play by Samuel Adamson which has just opened at The Kiln in London. Drawing on many influences including Ibsen's A Doll's House, it explores many decades of gay history Guyana-born artist Frank Bowling OBE has lived in then UK since he was a teenager and been a painter almost a...
Jun 08, 2019•52 min
Matthew Broderick and Elizabeth McGovern in the London premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's play The Starry Messenger Thunder Road was made for $200,000 and went on to win awards at international film festivals. What was it about the film which beguiled jurists and audiences? Niven Govinden's novel This Brutal House looks at the New York drag scene of the 1980s and 90s Hauser and Wirth Somerset's latest exhibition ‘Unconscious Landscape: Works from the Ursula Hauser Collection’ is focused entirely on ...
Jun 01, 2019•51 min
Memoir Of War,based on Marguerite Duras's book “La Douleur” is set in Occupied France. Critical opinion has varied widely from 'dreadful' and 'empty' to 'masterpiece'. What will our reviewers make of it? King Hedley II starring Lenny Henry, has opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East Gerald Murnane's novel A Season On Earth tells the tale of a lustful teenager in Melbourne in the 1950s. It was originally published in 1976 and is now reissued as was originally intended; with two previously uns...
May 25, 2019•50 min
Colombian film Birds of Passage explores the emergence of illegal drug trading in the 60s and 70s and it's ghastly effects and lasting legacy on family. Corporate black comedy White Pearl has opened at London's Royal Court. About 6 Asian women in an office in Singapore who try to fix a problem when their advertisement goes viral by mistake. And then things spiral out of control. New novels from Thomas Harris - Cari Mora: set in Miami, monsters lurk in the crevices between male desire and female ...
May 18, 2019•55 min
The latest production at London's Young Vic Theatre is Death of a Salesman. It recasts the Lomans as an African-American family with Wendell Pierce as WIlly Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway play female con artists in Chris Addison's directorial debut, The Hustle. It's a gender-swap reworking of 1988 comedy film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; but is it funny? Shane Meadows has created a new 4 part drama for Channel 4: The Virtues, starring Stephen Graham as a traumatised young man who grows up and become...
May 11, 2019•50 min
Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen star in Long Shot playing an American presidential hopeful and a lovable doofus. Take a wild guess who plays which part? Howard Brenton's new play Jude -at The Hampstead Theatre - is a re-imagining of Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure with a Syrian cleaner who possesses a prodigious skill set in the classics and ancient languages - as the title character Writing: Making Your Mark is the newest exhibition at The British Library. It charts 5,000 years of human innovati...
May 04, 2019•49 min
Youtube star/standup comedian Bo Burnham has now turned his hand to film directing and his debut work is a coming-of-age tale: Eighth Grade. It's about a 15 year old girl dealing with the trials and tribulations of high school life, discovering how the world works and why. Arthur Miller's All My Sons was his breakthrough work when it debuted on Broadway in 1947. A new production at London's Old Vic theatre stars Sally Field and Bill Pullman Lux is the latest historical novel by Elizabeth Cook, i...
Apr 27, 2019•53 min
Josie Rourke returns to the work of Cy Coleman, who wrote the music for City of Angels; with the Broadway classic Sweet Charity. With choreography from the world-renowned Wayne McGregor, Rourke reunites with Anne-Marie Duff as Charity, and Arthur Darvill makes his Donmar debut as Oscar, for her farewell production as Donmar Artistic Director. During Sweet Charity, multiple guest actors will play the role of Daddy Brubeck including Shaq Taylor, Adrian Lester, Le Gateau Chocolat, Beverley Knight a...
Apr 20, 2019•49 min
In her new film Wild Rose, rising star Jessie Buckley plays a Glaswegian country singer with dreams of making it big in Nashville. The trouble is that she has two small kids and is just out of jail. The Mary Quant exhibition at London's V&A shows a wide selection of her vibrant daring designs, made to be worn by real women and girls in the 60s and 70s A new play by one of France's brightest new names has just opened at London's Park Theatre; Intra Muros by Alexis Michalik is set in a drama w...
Apr 13, 2019•49 min
Award-winning Italian film Happy as Lazzaro is a tale of human unkindness in a remote Italian Village where time stands still, but not in the same way for everyone Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls is revived by The National Theatre; is it hard not to view it nowadays as a period piece? Damian Barr's debut novel: You Will Be Safe Here is set in two separate parts of South Africa's troubled history The Victim is a new 4-part drama on BBC1., following the plaintiff and the accused in a Scottish cou...
Apr 06, 2019•49 min
Disney's latest live action remake of one of their classic cartoons is Dumbo, reimagined by Tim Burton. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers was a novel by Max Porter and has now been adapted for the stage by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy. It has just opened at the Barbican in London. Vincent Van Gogh lived in London for a few years and Tate Britain is staging an Exhibition Van Gogh and and Britain looking at the artists who influenced him, his own work and the artists he has influenced. Ew...
Mar 30, 2019•50 min
Jordan Peele’s debut feature film, Get Out, won him an Oscar for best original screenplay. His new film Us is also a horror film, features a score by Michael Abels and stars Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson whose childhood obsession with the Hands Across America commercial reverberates through the film. American tv drama Pose on BBC 2 features the largest transgender cast of any commercial, scripted TV show and trans writers Janet Mock and Our Lady J worked on the script alongside the show’s cr...
Mar 23, 2019•54 min
Simon Amstell directs his first cinema release - Benjamin. The title character is a thinly-disguised version of himself with nervous lack of self esteem who is directing a film about himself. It's all very meta but is it marvellous? Milton Keynes has just reopened its art gallery. Much enlarged and architecturally improved, the first exhibition there is The Lie Of The Land, charting how the British landscape was transformed by changes in free time and leisure The bicentenary of Queen Victoria's ...
Mar 16, 2019•50 min
Nicholas Hytner's new production at London's Bridge Theatre is Lucinda Coxon's play Alys Always, based on Harriet Lane's novel. A journalist decides to set her sights on a joining the exalted circle of a grieving best-selling author. Ray and Liz is the debut film from photographer Richard Billingham; weaving a story from his 1996 collection of autobiographical portraits of his hard-drinking and hard smoking parents living on the margins of society in a Black Country council home. Max Porter's ne...
Mar 09, 2019•48 min
Hilary Swank stars in What They Had; a film which deals with the effects Alzheimer's Disease can have on the family of a loved one Dressed was a big hit in Edinburgh last year, winning a Fringe First Award. It investigates the healing power of clothes. Following a traumatic experience, a young woman decides to create her entire wardrobe of clothes herself as her own way of coping The latest exhibition at London's Royal Academy looks at Renaissance Nudes. Transferring from The Getty Centre in LA,...
Mar 02, 2019•52 min
Capernaum was filmed on the streets of Lebanon, using non-professional actors including the child lead. It has gone on to win the Palme d'Or winner and is hotly tipped for the Foreign Language Oscar Shipwreck is American plawright Ann Washburn's latest play to premiere at London's Almeida Theatre. It's vehemently anti-Trump, but does the polemic get in the way for our reviewers? Nico Walker's novel Cherry tells his own - thinly disguised - life story. Born in Cleveland served in the US military ...
Feb 23, 2019•48 min
To mark 350 years since Rembrandt's death The Rijksmuseum's in Amsterdam is staging a major exhibition of all his works in their collection.22 paintings, 60 drawings and more than 300 best examples of Rembrandt’s prints A Private War is a film about the war correspondent Marie Colvin, who reported on conflicts around the world and was killed in Homs in Syria in 2012 Arthur Miller's play The American Clock, set in New York City in 1929, has just opened at The Old Vic Theatre in London. It's not r...
Feb 16, 2019•50 min
Oscar-tipped If Beale Street Could Talk is directed by Barry Jenkins who won Best Picture in 2016 for Moonlight... A woman in Harlem embraces her pregnancy while she and her family struggle to prove her fiancé is innocent of a crime Katherine Parkinson stars in Home I'm Darling, recently opened at London's Duke of York Theatre, as an ideal 1950s housewife living in the present day Tessa Hadley's newest novel Late In The Day. The death of a close friend in a tight circle of long-term friends thro...
Feb 09, 2019•49 min
In Can You Ever Forgive Me? Melissa McCarthy stars as Lee Israel, the best-selling biographer of celebrities such as Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, Estee Lauder and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. In the early 1990s - when she was in her early 50s - Lee found herself unable to get published because she had fallen out of step with the marketplace. Unable to pay the rent (or the vet bills for her beloved cat) she turned her art form to deception, aided by her loyal friend Jack Hock (Richard E...
Feb 02, 2019•52 min
