Mr Trump goes to the movies
What might an evening at the flicks with the 45th President look like?
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
September 26, 2018
The real Durrells of Corfu
The family drama behind the PBS show
September 25, 2018
The very public review of the New York Review of Books
Surely supposed editorial issues at the NYRB could have been addressed without taking the step of dismissing Buruma
September 22, 2018
The coddling of American journalism
The snowflakes aren’t melting as they get older and wiser. They now have jobs in publishing and media and are marching through the institutions they work for
September 20, 2018
No-one comes off well in the Allen-Farrow family drama
We could believe either Allen’s version or Farrow’s, but that would get us no closer to the truth, because neither is trustworthy and both are proven fantasists
Ian Buruma and the age of sexual McCarthyism
The New York Review of Books editor is the latest casualty of the identitarian mob
September 19, 2018
Big Jay McNeely brought joy to millions with his music
The legendary tenor saxophonist died last weekend aged 91
September 18, 2018
It’s the blood that gets you
Delacroix in the flesh, at the Met
September 7, 2018
2001: A Space Odyssey still gets better as it goes along, 50 years on
The critics who disliked 2001 on its initial release found the characters empty and the plot thin — but it’s their criticism that has dated badly
Hank Mobley, the greatest sax player you never heard
Jazz may be an egalitarian, collaborative music, but jazz musicians honor their best with the laurels of hierarchy. Everyone knows the royal monikers of ‘Duke’ Ellington and ‘Count’ Basie, and most people know that Billie Holiday was ‘Lady Day’. But there’s also a whole aristocracy of hip name-drops: ‘The Baron’ (Charles Mingus), ‘Pres’ (Lester Young),
September 6, 2018
Sensation seeking
This adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play is handsomely mounted, as they say, and features a stellar cast (including Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss and Saoirse Ronan), but it won’t be setting the world alight. It is not a waste of 90 minutes, and Bening is superb, as if you even needed me to tell you that.
September 3, 2018
Any storm in a port
Reports of the death of bookstores are fiction. In 1931, there were about 4,000 bookstores in the United States. Almost all of them were gift stores, selling a limited stock of paperbacks. Only about 500 of them were specialist bookstores, and almost all of them were in major cities. True, between 1995 and 2000, the
August 30, 2018
Idris Elba’s directorial debut is a patchy disappointment
Yardie is Idris Elba’s first film as a director and what I have to say isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I love Elba and wanted this to be terrific. I wanted him to be as good from behind as he is from the front, so to speak. I wanted this to absolutely
August 27, 2018
The Precisionist Impulse: in search of the first American art movement
The group melded the materialism of the urban landscape with what was idealistic and essentially Romantic about the city
August 25, 2018
Handling Pooh with kid gloves
Christopher Robin reviewed
August 21, 2018
Where did all the Chippendales go?
Time to buy brown
August 20, 2018
Life ‘n’ Arts podcast: celebrating American audacity with William Giraldi
William Giraldi, author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark ahead of publishing his first collection of essays,
The backlash against Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman leads towards a divided America
David Duke would be proud of Boots Riley ’s argument
August 17, 2018
The poetry of Tommy Robinson
They said politics couldn’t get verse, but now it has…
August 14, 2018
Azealia Banks is telling the truth
Online life is no life at all
August 9, 2018
Thank God for the return of the generation gap in pop
In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the
August 2, 2018
Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?
The former British Shadow Chancellor’s new documentary is more favourable of Trumpsters than anyone at the BBC could have ever imagined.
The artist who breathes Technicolor life into historic photographs
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering Technicolor Oz. When Howard Carter leans over Tutankhamun’s open sarcophagus (1922), he does so in the glare of pharaonic gold. A photograph of fallen American soldiers on the Gettysburg battlefield (1863) shocks the more when
July 31, 2018
The Black Arrows come for Zadie Smith
The furore around the Teeth author’s latest short story shows the risk of keeping your politics slightly to yourself.
July 29, 2018
Ben Brantley isn’t transphobic – he’s pitiful
The New York Times critic has nothing to apologise for. Yet he has apologised.
July 26, 2018
A plot not so much paper-thin as soggy and smeary like used toilet paper
Mission Impossible: Fallout reviewed.
Westering
In which our correspondent strikes out for the territory.
Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t funny – especially when he’s mocking the powerless
Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric
July 21, 2018
Film review: Netflix’s The Skin of the Wolf
Paws for thought
