Arts Reviews

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. “All he can say is, ‘Go, then. I can’t hold you any more,'” says Christopher Maltman, who

Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th-­century Manchester who joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or “Shaking Quakers.” In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden. Ann then had a series of visions that, according to subsequent Shaker accounts, identified her as the “woman clothed with the sun” whose appearance in the Book of Revelation heralds the end of the world. In 1774, “Mother Ann” and a

Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.” On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.” If JFK Jr. had a single physical flaw – I am grasping at straws here – it was a head

Few connoisseurs of the image are unfamiliar with the great French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). But his name is, unfortunately, unfamiliar to the lay person. This is a shame: his gloriously detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images of late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris evocatively conjure the shadows and lights of the boulevards, parks and alleyways of the Belle Époque. His astonishing close-ups of finely crafted architectural details are as striking as his sometimes surreal views of storefront windows and food-stall displays. Whether training his bulky large-format view camera on scenes interior or exterior, he reveals an aesthetic sensibility exquisitely sensitive to the world around him. His close-ups of architectural details

Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably know the macabre legacy of Martin Scorsese’s early masterpiece Taxi Driver. Released 50 years ago this month, the tale of the eponymous cabbie Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, still has something potent to say about what can happen when a brooding loner finds himself adrift amid the menace and jammed chaos of New York’s streets with a .44 Magnum for company. Perhaps one of the reasons Taxi Driver resonates with so many people is because of this human void that lies at its center. At one time or another, we’ve all felt as alone as Travis Bickle. Fortunately, most of us are

This year marks the anniversaries of two of David Bowie’s most compelling and powerful albums: 1976’s Station to Station and 2016’s Blackstar. Given that they are often – rightly – described as Bowie’s crowning artistic achievements, amid severe competition from his other releases, they also have the intriguing fillip that both were originally released in January: a fortunate time for the musician, who was born on January 8, 1947, even if it was also the month in which he finally departed this Earth. Yet the comparisons between Station to Station and Blackstar, which came out 40 years apart, are far more pervasive – and persuasive – than the serendipity of

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in

The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse. Jonathan Pine is pretty

Woody Allen once sardonically described the fans of his films as being divided between those who liked the “early, funny ones” and the later, darker pictures. Much the same might be said of another famous WA: Wes Anderson, who has established himself as one of American cinema’s most significant auteurs despite no longer living in the country – he hops between England and France. Like most auteurs, his films are more succèss d’estime than they are succèss de box office, but he has the cream of Hollywood lining up to work with him and commands respect among actors young and old. Anderson is rightly celebrated – or castigated – as

“WAITING FOR GODOT IS A RUBBISH PLAY.” So declared Keith McNally in an Instagram post that caught my eye. “I urge you not to see Waiting for Godot.” Accompanying the statement was an image of the two stars who headlined this fall’s production at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. The play is the latest in what regular theatergoers and visiting tourists may have started to recognize as a recurring theme in New York’s theater scene: an overwhelming number of big-name Hollywood screen actors dotting their playbills. These players are here to make their bones and increase their prestige as “true” thespians, often by attaching themselves to tired

Orson Welles (1915-85) considered the notion of posterity vulgar, but he knew that he’d be loved once he was dead. That death came suddenly, just over 40 years ago, on October 10, 1985. There was a poignancy to the way death took him – sitting at his typewriter after appearing on Merv Griffin’s talk show. By then, the co-writer, director and star of the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane (1941), hadn’t finished a film since 1973’s ignored but now quietly loved F for Fake. At the end of his life, he may have been better known as the guy in Paul Masson wine commercials than as a cinematic genius.

Which is your favorite Jane Austen novel? OK, maybe not a conversation prompt appropriate for every setting, but a reliable one, I find, to break the ice at DC dinner parties where I’m not well acquainted with my fellow guests but spy someone who seems likely to know her work. I also ask it of younger fiction writers who come looking for advice about plot construction. I once resorted to it with a stranger, a woman of a certain age, to distract me from my irritation, sitting on an Acela train inexplicably halted outside Wilmington, Delaware, for two hours. She chose Persuasion, Austen’s elegiac account of late-in-life love. All hew