Arts Reviews

Stateside critics, who panned Jennifer Lopez’s new film The Boy Next Door on its US release last month, may be unaware of the ability of the British to enjoy a film so bad it’s almost good. I suspect many Brits will shamefacedly delight in this so-called erotic thriller’s camp silliness, its truly dreadful script and its almost mockingly implausible premise. This is a film where a bespectacled Jenny from the Block plays a classics teacher (yes) who receives a pretty copy of Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem ‘The Iliad’ as a gift and quite sincerely exclaims, ‘Wow, is this a first edition?’ How can you follow a gem like that? The answer

The third series of the American adaptation of House of Cards, which stars Kevin Spacey, will see the programme go in a different direction to the political trilogy on which it is based. Despite this, the House of Cards author Lord Dobbs is confident that he will be happier with the end product than he was with the BBC adaptation, which aired in the nineties. Speaking to the Radio Times, Dobbs says that he fell out with the production team during the final series over their treatment of the death of Baroness Thatcher. Dobbs was so appalled by the BBC’s changes to his political thriller that he asked for his name to

It is the end of an era — the Royal Ballet’s extravagant Fabergé-egg Swan Lake production by Anthony Dowell is on its last legs. When this 28-year-old production finishes the current run on 9 April, that will be it for one of the most controversial classical productions of the past half-century. It’s the one set in Romanov Russia, festooned with ribbons and golden squiggles, with swans in champagne ball-gowns rather than pristine white feathers. Hallucinatory, glamorous and opulently symbolist? Or hectic, fussy and tatty? Adjectives divide between the adoring and the withering for Yolanda Sonnabend’s Gustave Moreau-esque designs and for Dowell’s hyperactive staging. Last month marked 120 years exactly since

There was outcry last month when it was announced that ‘Dippy the Diplodocus’ is to be removed from the Natural History Museum’s vast Hintze Hall, where he has been greeting visitors for the last 35 years. Instead a giant skeleton of blue whale will be suspended from the ceiling, in what they spin as an ‘important and necessary change’. Officially, ‘the blue whale symbolises’ the museum’s ‘desire for people to be completely engaged in current issues about humans’ impact on the natural world and our chance to build a sustainable future.’ Or so a spokesman of the museum says. However, a source tells of a more cynical explanation for the

Iolanta / Duke Bluebeard’s Castle  Met Opera Live The Met’s antepenultimate relay of the season was an enterprising pairing of two operas, one of which we should see more often, and both of them done with intelligence and care. Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, his last opera, inconveniently lasts about 100 minutes, so is especially hard to find a partner for. It is a strange, touching piece, though it has few of the characteristics we associate with him. There is hardly a memorable melody in it, and little that is overwrought, indeed the colours are pastel. Iolanta is a princess, blind from birth, but skilfully kept in ignorance of her condition, and surrounded in this production by bored