sat 10/05/2025

Arts News

Listed: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the...

Read more...

Listed: The 10 Most Tasteless Album Covers

OK, R Kelly is gross. We knew that. The number of deeply creepy and abusive acts he's been accused...

Read more...

Listed: Television's long-runners

In the past weeks there has been a frenzy of publicity about the timelessness of a Time Lord....

Read more...

Listed: Who shot/staged/fictionalised JFK?

On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime...

Read more...

Listed: The Best of Joni Mitchell

Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better...

Read more...

Listed: Nights to remember at the National Theatre

The National Theatre tonight hosts its 50th-birthday gala, 11 days after the English-speaking...

Read more...

Listed: Linda Thompson's Top 10 Traditional Songs

"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published...

Read more...

Listed: Jane Austen provides

Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of...

Read more...

Listed: The 20 best movie songs

Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled...

Read more...

Listed: Freudian Analysis

Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th...

Read more...

Listed: Screen Bastards

John Lennon once said, "You have to be a bastard to make it. That's a fact. And the Beatles were...

Read more...

Listed: Poems inspired by paintings

Poetry has always inspired artists. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the...

Read more...

Listed: Sitcoms that became movies

This week sees the release of the eagerly anticipated Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa. And while...

Read more...

Listed: Female buddy crimebusters

There's good cops and bad cops, hard cops and soft cops, old cops and young cops, funny cops and...

Read more...

Listed: International pop-disco hits

As someone detached from pop music (more a world, classical, jazz kind of guy) I conducted an...

Read more...

Listed: Pop tributes to pop icons

Leonard Cohen sang, somewhat indiscreetly, about Janis Joplin “giving head” on his unmade bed, Bob...

Read more...

Listed: Whistleblowers

Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone...

Read more...

Listed: Actors playing themselves

Imagine a scenario in which Daniel Day Lewis is cast as himself. To get into character, he adopts...

Read more...

The best and worst national anthems? Time to award the medals

The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies...

Read more...

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Supergrass, Barrowland, Glasgow review - nostalgia played wi...

It is a family affair at Supergrass shows these days. There were plenty of parents and offspring filing onto the Barrowland’s famous old...

Louis Cole, Roundhouse review - nothing is everything

London's iconic Roundhouse, packed to the rafters, provided the perfect setting for the UK premiere of Louis Cole's groundbreaking album ...

Album: Peter Doherty - Felt Better Alive

Following on from an impressive set with the Libertines – last year’s No 1 album All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade – Peter Doherty...

Here We Are, National Theatre review - Sondheim's sensa...

You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are....

Riefenstahl review - fascinating fascism? Portrait of the Na...

There used to be an unwritten rule among BBC commissioners about how long an interval had to pass before greenlighting a new documentary on a...

Giant, Harold Pinter Theatre review - incendiary Roald Dahl...

When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now they are here,...

'Classic-era prog’s Olympian pinnacle': Pink Floyd...

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, the ineffable progressive rock epic that occupies side two of...

The Surfer review - Nicolas Cage is relentlessly down and ou...

“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the menacing motto (sounds more scary with an Australian accent) of the tanned, muscular denizens of Luna...

Einkvan, Det Norske Teatret, The Coronet Theatre review - al...

Watching the stricken faces on the split screen, I felt at times like callow Farfrae in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: when faced...