Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Watch the 1978 version instead: Superman reviewed

Cinema

My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film was Superman. I remember it vividly, and I remember it as thrilling, but hadn’t seen it since so I rewatched it and it is everything a superhero movie should be, the gold standard. It has

A delight: Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park reviewed

Pop

We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not ‘customers’; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do

Lloyd Evans

More drama-school showcase than epic human tragedy: Evita reviewed

Theatre

Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the steps of a football stadium where they race through an effortful series of dance routines accompanied by flashy lights and thumping tunes. It’s more a drama-school showcase than an epic human tragedy. There are no

Dua Lipa sparkles at Wembley – but her new album is pedestrian

Pop

If, as is said, there are only seven basic narratives in human storytelling, then there should be an addendum. In rock and pop there is only one: the dizzying rise, the imperial period, the fall from grace (either commercial or ethical, sometimes both), and the noble return (historically prefigured with a glossy music mag cover

The politics of horror

Arts feature

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian

Jarvis Cocker still has the voice – and the moves

Pop

For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of

Damian Thompson

Astonishing ‘lost tapes’ from a piano great

Classical

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was

The artistic benefits of not being publicly subsidised

Dance

Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them

Lloyd Evans

Superb: Stereophonic, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

Stereophonic is a slow-burning drama set in an American recording studio in 1976. A collection of hugely successful musicians, loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, are working on a new album which they hope will match the success of their previous number one smash. This is an absolute treat for anyone who appreciates subtle, oblique and

Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed

Cinema

First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later  (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last

The charm of Robbie Williams

Pop

What could it possibly feel like to be a sportsperson who gets the yips? To wake up one morning and be unable to replicate the technical skills that define you. To suddenly find the thing you do well absolutely impossible. Golfers who lose their swing, cricketers whose bowling deserts them, snooker players who can’t sink

Summer opera festivals have gone Wagner mad

Opera

Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man

Lloyd Evans

Ingenious: the Globe’s Romeo & Juliet reviewed

Theatre

Cul-de-Sac feels like an ersatz sitcom of a kind that’s increasingly common on the fringe. Audiences are eager to see an unpretentious domestic comedy set in a kitchen or a sitting-room where the characters gossip, argue, fall in love, break up and so on. TV broadcasters can’t produce this sort of vernacular entertainment and they

Compelling: Little Simz’s Lotus reviewed

Pop

It is not uncommon for (predominantly male) music critics to invert the ‘great man/great woman’ dictum in order to suggest that behind the success of every powerful female artist there simply must be a moustache-twirling Svengali pulling the strings. It’s less common for the artist themselves to pose the question. On ‘Lonely’, the penultimate track

Thrilling: Garsington’s Queen of Spades reviewed

Opera

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It’s hard to summarise the plot in a way that makes it sound theatrical, even if you’ve read Pushkin’s novella, and I’ve never found a recording that really hits the spot. And yet, time and again, in

Sincere, serious and beautiful: Glyndebourne’s Parsifal reviewed

Opera

‘Here time becomes space,’ says Gurnemanz in Act One of Parsifal, and true enough, the end of the new Glyndebourne Parsifal is in its beginning. We don’t know that, at first: the sickbed image that’s glimpsed during the prelude doesn’t resolve itself until the opera’s closing scenes. In between, characters appear on stage in multiple