Arts Reviews

Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to any living person is purely intentional. (Hello, Sir Philip Green.) Plenty to work with, you would think. Low-hanging fruit and all that. But as the characters are so feebly sketched and the ‘jokes’ — ‘jokes’ in quotation marks; always a bad sign — are so heavy-handed it drags (and drags) rather than flies. Greed is good, greed works, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street. But in this instance it isn’t. And doesn’t. Greed is good, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street. But in this instance it isn’t It

The new Emma film by Autumn de Wilde is the latest in a very long line of Austen adaptations, but by no means the strangest. Even in Austen’s lifetime there were pirated editions and translations of her books that took liberties with the originals, and the first illustrated editions raised howls of objection, too, at their ‘lamentable’ interference (as E.M. Forster thought) with the sacred text. Early stage versions all made free with ‘Divine Jane’ according to whim. The very first motion picture of an Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice (1940), rather flaunted its carelessness about accuracy, transposing the action into the 1850s to accommodate the costume designer Edith Head’s

We know tantalisingly little about Jan van Eyck, but one thing is sure. He once spent a week in Falmouth. In 1428 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent a formal delegation of nobles and courtiers to negotiate his marriage with Isabella, daughter of the King of Portugal. One of these was Van Eyck. The official party set off from the port of Sluis in Flanders on 19 October, and arrived the next day in Sandwich, where they then spent a fortnight waiting for two Venetian ships to get there from London. Once embarked, they were driven by gales to take refuge in ports on the English coast, including Falmouth.

‘Plunderers of the air’, Naum Gabo called the Luftwaffe planes. In Cornwall, during the second world war, Gabo kept cuttings of the attacks over London. One newspaper photo, pasted in his diary, was taken from the Golden Gallery of St Paul’s after a night of incendiary bombs. London looks like Pompeii. Enemy planes were a betrayal. Gabo was entranced by flight. His sculptures are spiralling tributes to air, light and lift-off. After an hour in the Naum Gabo retrospective at Tate St Ives, the first major show of the artist’s work for more than 30 years, you feel a certain springiness about the knees as if you could push off