Film

One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the Royal Court realises such a confusion can arise. Its new production, RoosevElvis, has been hailed as a thesaurus of fascinating novelties but to me it looks like a classic case of ineptitude posing as originality. It opens with two costumed women perched on bar stools speaking into microphones. One is dressed as Teddy Roosevelt in a cowboy hat and a handlebar moustache with a three-foot wingspan. The other is an Elvis impersonatrix wearing a lazy smirk and a black wig that sags forlornly over her ears, which seem to have

Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine modern chair. Mandy would no doubt have been aware of the ancient historic associations, through bishoprics and universities, that chairs have with power. Since it is a chair much admired by architects, Mandy also looks quite cool, although these things are relative. The chair and its footstool are known as Eames Lounge 670 and Eames Ottoman 671, and they were first manufactured in 1956 by Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan. Curved plywood shells are veneered with Brazilian rosewood, upholstered with shallow black leather-studded cushions and supported, at a meaningful tilt

Even the most down-to-earth people get emotional about Bill Viola’s videos. Clare Lilley of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seems close to tears as she takes me round his new show. Lilley is the show’s curator. She’s usually so matter-of-fact, but when she talks about Viola her eyes light up. When she took her two teenage daughters to his studio in Los Angeles, she tells me, they both cried when they saw his films. I like to think I’m made of sterner stuff, but when she leaves me in the Sculpture Park’s Underground Gallery, where Viola is on show, after a few minutes in there on my own I’m blubbing like

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach

99 Homes is an American drama about house repossession. Bummer, you might think, but here is what you don’t yet know: films about house repossessions can be electrifying. Or at least this one is. Set in 2008 or thereabouts, against the backdrop of the real-estate bust and ensuing foreclosure crisis, this has much to say about a system that allows the rich to get richer while the poor get shat on (basically), but, above and beyond that, it is also nail-bitingly tense, as gripping as any thriller, and it will totally tear your heart out. In terms of impact, it may even be the Cathy Come Home of our times.

If you don’t want to spend hundreds of euros on a good seat, the best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time — decades ago — I arrived early in the apron-shaped Piazza del Campo and sweated out the long afternoon as a tide of tension rose. By early evening, when the horses and jockeys finally entered from the courtyard of the towering Palazzo Pubblico, 50,000 spectators ached for release. I clambered on to a temporary fence for a better view. A Sienese woman who was maybe 19 hauled herself up and, for balance, grabbed me from behind. As the jockeys embarked

When I was at university, Reggie Kray was my penpal. I wrote to him in 1991, asking for an interview for The Word, an Oxford student newspaper. Kray was unavoidably detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. But he sent me a prompt, polite letter back. ‘Thanks for your letter,’ he wrote. ‘I will see you as soon as possible. We only get three visitors a month. Could you send me a copy of The Word?’ I sent him a copy — but I never did get to be among his three monthly visitors before his death in 2000, at the age of 66. Still, I’m ashamed to say, I was thrilled

Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple whose relationship is disturbed by a letter relating to his first girlfriend, a German who died in the Swiss alps 50 years earlier. Aside from that, not much happens. A shopping trip to Norwich is about as exciting as it gets, on the action front. But this is one of those ‘inaction films’, as I call them, in which nothing happens, but everything happens; it is simple yet absorbingly profound. And it will resonate. It will resonate afterwards and it will resonate the next day and it will resonate the day after that. In fact