5 h. ago Turner & Constable review – boiling portentous skies versus two men and a dog

Tate Britain, London JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show. But who cares when the work is so sublime you can hear the squelching and smell the river?Turner or Constable: who’s the boss? Tate Britain’s exhibition of work by the two artists, subtitled Rivals and Originals, fudges the question. Born a year apart and both alumni of the Royal Academy schools in London, each was keenly aware of what the other was doing, in a British art world that was as febrile and competitive, if immeasurably smaller, than it is today (although you should try the Italian Renaissance if you want full-blooded rivalries and enmities). Sometimes, they sought the same collectors and painted the same subjects. Turner was encouraged from an early age by his father, a Covent Garden wigmaker and barber; Constable was the son of a Suffolk mill owner and grain merchant who wanted him to take over the family business.As well as their contrasting backgrounds, their temperaments could not have b...

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9 h. ago The Hives review – veteran punk’n’rollers fizz with megawatt energy

Depot, CardiffTwenty-five years on from their first UK tour, the Swedish band are at their cartoonish, snarling best, eager to prove themselves rather than wallow in nostalgia‘I’m powering clothes, that’s how electric I am,” Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist quips, the trim on his LED-encrusted suit glowing as he climbs into the crowd. It’s funny, but on this evidence, it’s not really a joke. As an exhilarating Tick Tick Boom crashes back into the room, it’s easy to believe that the Hives could prop up the National Grid.Twenty-five years on from their first UK tour, the Swedish punk’n’rollers are full of piss and vinegar, reinvigorated after breaking a decade-plus recording hiatus with two well-received albums in three years, all while playing some of the biggest shows of their career, from stadium support slots with Arctic Monkeys to an upcoming night at London’s Alexandra Palace. Continue reading...

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11 h. ago Dracula review – Luc Besson’s romantic reimagining of Gothic classic is ridiculous but watchable

While we don’t necessarily need another film version of Bram Stoker’s story, Besson’s has ambition and panache, and Caleb Landry Jones and Christoph Waltz are perfectly castPerhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, including one shot that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.Christoph Waltz plays a witty yet careworn vampire-hunting priest – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 for the French Revolution centenary celebrations. So does the evil Count Dracula, played by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones with a mangled central European accent reminis...

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11 h. ago Crick: A Mind in Motion by Matthew Cobb review – the charismatic philanderer who changed science

Genius and arrogance play leading roles in a new biography of the man who helped uncover the structure of DNAMost people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress...

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28 h. ago Push The Boat Out Festival 2025, Edinburgh review: 'buzzing'

While the organisers of Push the Boat Out are obviously keen to move poetry into experimental new areas, there also seems to be a commitment not to leave traditional on-the-page poets behind, writes Susan Mansfield

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37 h. ago Holbein: Renaissance Master by Elizabeth Goldring review – a magnificent portrait of the artist

The first scholarly biography in more than 100 years of the man who immortalised the Tudor court does not disappointMuch of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Hans the Painter” did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage i...

Culture

39 h. ago Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember review – a heartbreaking attempt to fight his dad’s dementia

The Thor actor and his father try to stave off the latter’s symptoms by taking a road trip to old haunts. It becomes a moving treatise on the sadness of letting go of a parentCelebrities are forever taking their parents on televised road trips, and they’re usually cheap, easy commissions. Look how self-deprecating I am, says the famous person as they try to award themselves national treasure status by moving into light-factual programming: the person who knows me best is about to mildly embarrass me on holiday!Be assured that Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember is a more serious endeavour. It features some intergenerational joshing as the guy from the Thor movies goes on a motorcycle ride with his old fella, but this is a journey filled with a wistful, desperate longing, towards a destination nobody can quite reach. Craig Hemsworth, 71, has early-stage Alzheimer’s. His mental faculties are starting to slip. But his boy is a Hollywood star, with the resources of a TV company beh...

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4 d. ago David Byrne review, Los Angeles: Talking Heads hits are just part of this life

At the home of the Oscars, LA’s Dolby Theatre, the 73-year-old pulls off a dazzling, award-worthy production featuring Talking Heads classics, fresh material from this year’s ‘Who Is the Sky?’ and a celebrity cameo

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4 d. ago Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius album review – Gardner and the LPO’s reading is bold and dramatic

(LPO)Recorded live at the BBC Proms, Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s propulsive performance, with soloists Allan Clayton, Jamie Barton and James Platt, is one to cherishThe Dream of Gerontius may be the unlikely star of Alan Bennett’s The Choral, but it’s hardly in need of a popularity boost: Edward Gardner’s vibrant new recording is one of three released in the last two years, with another due in January.Recorded live at the 2022 BBC Proms, this propulsive reading has a great deal going for it. Allan Clayton captures the febrile nature of the dying man whose every sensation is both a terror and a fascination. His heroic tone thrills in the great prayer, Sanctus Fortis, while an expressive use of text illuminates the philosophical question and answer session in Part Two. Jamie Barton’s luxurious mezzo-soprano possesses a tangible immediacy as well as offering ample reserves of comfort. James Platt’s craggy bass is well-suited to the Angel of the Agony. Continu...

Events

4 d. ago Debit: Desaceleradas review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Modern Love)The producer’s second album is a granular dissection of cumbia rebajada, forcing the listener to focus on the strangeness of every moment in her ambient soundworldMexican-American producer Delia Beatriz, AKA Debit, has a talent for making historical sounds her own. Her 2022 breakthrough, The Long Count, featured woozy, ambient soundscapes made from electronically processed samples of ancient Maya flutes. On her latest record, Desaceleradas (Decelerated), Beatriz turns her attention to the 90s trend of cumbia rebajada. Slowing the Afro-Latin dance genre of cumbia to a sludgy tempo, cumbia rebajada is a dub-influenced take on a typically upbeat, party-driven sound. DJ Gabriel Dueñez popularised the style with his bootleg cassettes; two of his earliest releases now form the basis of Beatriz’s experiments.Landing somewhere between composer William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops and DJ Screw’s chopped’n’screwed production style, Desaceleradas slows the shaker-rattling, synt...

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4 d. ago Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck review – a kaleidoscopic study of transience

A collection of columns by the German Booker winner reveals a keen eye for details that mark the passing of timeJenny Erpenbeck wrote the pieces collected in this compact yet kaleidoscopic book for a column in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; published in German in 2009, they now appear in an English translation by Kurt Beals, following the immense success of Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, which won the 2024 International Booker prize.It’s interesting and instructive to reflect on what German newspaper readers made of the column in the early years of the new millennium, nearly two decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall. For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form – apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrötchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele – she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of e...

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4 d. ago Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures review – this vaccine documentary is so inspirational it’ll make you weep

The tale of Prof Sarah Blagden’s attempt to find a treatment that stops the disease is the rarest of things – TV that makes you dare to hopeCancer Detectives: Finding the Cures should come with a rare warning: may make you feel hopeful for humanity and marginally less convinced that we are all willingly leaping into a handcart and smoothing our own paths to hell.This is an hour that outlines the work being done to create vaccines against cancers. Lung cancer, specifically, at the moment – 50,000 cases of which are diagnosed each year in the UK and which is the most common cause of cancer-related death – but with the potential to prevent many more types in the future. Continue reading...

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5 d. ago Brahms: Symphony No 1, Tragic Overture album review – Petrenko and the Berliners give Brahms organic momentum

(Berliner Philharmoniker)Brahms’s Tragic Overture leaps to life while there is much interest in a careful reading of the composer’s First Symphony in this new recording from the Berlin Philharmonic with their chief conductor The Berlin Philharmonic’s in-house label continues its mission to document chief conductor Kirill Petrenko’s considered interpretations of the classical canon. In this case, it’s Brahms’s First Symphony, captured live at the Philharmonie just two months ago, coupled with the Tragic Overture, recorded last year.For this performance, Petrenko examined Meiningen Court Orchestra scores marked up with specific directions given by the composer himself. The results may strike some as interventionist, however there’s an organic momentum here that is hard to resist with a pronounced flexibility that, according to the excellent booklet essay, clarifies Brahms’s “furious struggle against the bar line”. Balance is impeccable, although solos seem over spotlighted at times by...

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5 d. ago Stevie Nicks review – rock legend dazzles Brooklyn with anecdotes and classic hits

Barclays Center, New York CityA rescheduled date, after an accident earlier this year, sees the 77-year-old take on sparkling form, regaling fans with tales and fan favourite anthemsStevie Nicks would like to get the matter of her possible near-death experience out of the way as soon as possible. A few months ago, the Fleetwood Mac singer and rock legend suffered an accident that forced her to postpone a string of tour dates, including this show in Brooklyn which was rescheduled from August to November. “I was airborne,” she recalls of the incident around five minutes after hitting the stage tonight. “I thought: ‘Is it over?’” A voice at the back of the arena lets out an animalistic yell. “No!!!!”It’s a safe bet that everyone in the 17,000-capacity Barclays Center arena shares the sentiment. Tonight, a noticeably varied audience of fans has shown out for Nicks’s rescheduled date, ranging from witchcore-styled teens to longtime fans who retain a love for the 70s’ bohemian style as we...

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5 d. ago Liars by Sarah Manguso audiobook review – livid tale of marriage gone awry

Rebecca Lowman narrates a superb, claustrophobia-inducing plunge into a relationship descending from bad to worseHalfway through Liars, the story of a new relationship that becomes a marriage, our protagonist, Jane, is asked by a neighbour: “Why are you with him?” It’s a question that has been on the listener’s mind for some time.Jane’s partner, John, lies about his feelings, his financial status, where he is going and where he has been. He is chaotic, lazy, resentful, entitled and given to getting drunk and spending money he hasn’t got. At the start of their marriage, Jane’s career as a writer and academic is on the up, while John – a visual artist and aspiring film-maker – has hit a professional wall. Time and time again, he insists they move cities for better work opportunities, which soon puts a spanner in his wife’s working life. It comes as no surprise that, after their son is born, Jane is left to do the parenting while her husband absents himself from his responsibilities.Av...

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5 d. ago Víkingur Ólafsson: Opus 109 album review – pianist’s concept album opens up transcendent vistas

(Deutsche Grammophon)Olafsson’s account of Beethoven’s Op 109 is one of the most beautiful on record, the centrepiece of a recording that links the composer to Bach and SchubertDisinclined to follow the herd and record Beethoven’s three final piano sonatas as a job lot, Víkingur Ólafsson has chosen to circle one of them, No 30 in E major, Op 109, locating it in a musical timeline that reflects both the composer’s past and the Viennese milieu of the early 18th century.For Ólafsson, looking backwards means turning to Bach, whose musical fingerprints he detects all over late Beethoven. The latter’s uninhibited invention, he argues, has its roots firmly in the baroque with its improvisatory elements and enthusiasm for the dance. Continue reading...

Culture

5 d. ago Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Warp)Made using a cache of Y2K sample CDs that Daniel Lopatin salvaged from the internet’s fringes, the kaleidoscopic result speaks to contemporary information overloadIt should come as no surprise that the new album by Oneohtrix Point Never comes with a concept attached. They usually do. When not composing film soundtracks, or producing an eclectic range of other artists – the Weeknd, Anohni, Charli xcx, Soccer Mommy – Daniel Lopatin has released a string of acclaimed works, each with their own overarching idea.The “hyperreal world music” of 2010’s Returnal was inspired by the fact that people now see more of the world than ever without actually leaving their homes. In 2015, Garden of Delete had an accompanying origin story about an adolescent humanoid alien called Ezra; 2018’s Age Of imagined artificial intelligence attempting to recreate human culture after humans themselves had been rendered extinct. Lopatin also has an all-consuming obsession with nostalgia and forgotten pop c...

Politics

5 d. ago A Man on the Inside season two review – Ted Danson’s despicably bland show is everything wrong with TV

Only our current tech hellscape could create a comedy so insidiously inoffensive. Prepare to be pummelled into submission as your time is siphoned off by OK entertainmentThis is a cosy, lighthearted whodunnit about a retired professor who gets a second wind as a private eye. It’s also a bingo card for just about everything that makes streamer-era TV so patronising, uninspiring and mind-numbingly dull.On the surface, A Man on the Inside’s crimes might seem negligible: it’s a little schmaltzy, a little too pleased with itself in that wisecrack-stuffed American comedy way. Yet it’s exactly that inoffensiveness that makes this strain of television so insidious. When the New York Times critic James Poniewozik coined the term “mid TV” to describe the current “profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence” that has come to dominate our screens, it wasn’t so much a vicious takedown as a shrug at the blah-ness of it all. The tech giants have pummelled us into submission by siphoning of...

Culture

5 d. ago Jeeves Again review – new Jeeves and Wooster stories by celebrity fans

This collection of new short stories about Bertie and his valet pays homage to the genius of PG Wodehouse – just in time for ChristmasAs with most of the giants of late 19th- and early 20th-century English literature, the vast majority of PG Wodehouse’s readers today are non-white. Perhaps it was brutal colonial indoctrination that ensured the modern descendants of the aspirant imperial middle classes from Barbados to Burma, with their tea caddies, gin-stuffed drinks cabinets and yellowing Penguin paperbacks, still devour Maugham, Shaw and Kipling. Perhaps they just have good taste.Wodehouse’s detractors are many – Stephen Sondheim (“archness tweeness flimsiness”), Winston Churchill (“He can live secluded in some place or go to hell as soon as there is a vacant passage”), the Inland Revenue – but for millions around the world he remains the greatest comic writer Britain has ever produced. And he clearly still sells here, as this collection of a dozen new officially sa...

Politics

5 d. ago Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks review – the sheer number of pornographic drawings is a big shock

JMW Turner left behind some 37,000 sketches when he died, many of which have rarely been seen. Do they – including a huge collection of explicit sketches – reveal truths about the elusive man?The hook for Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks is meant to be that many of the 37,000 sketches left behind by the great British painter JMW Turner have rarely been seen and never been filmed; therein may be hints at the nuances of his elusive character that his main oeuvre kept hidden. Equally remarkable, though, is the documentary’s bold choice of contributors. As well as the art historians and present-day British artists who would dominate a standard art film, there are famous laymen, from the obviously somewhat qualified – Timothy Spall played the artist in Mike Leigh’s biographical film Mr Turner; Chris Packham is well placed to comment on Turner’s reverence for the natural world – to the more surprising hire of Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones.Neither the sketchbooks nor the celebs turn th...

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