Category : Culture

A Swayze and the Ghosts: Paid Salvation review – a faultless debut

(Rough Trade)Angry, tuneful and woke – this Tasmanian punk band dazzle on all countsNo one turns to garage punk for its compositional originality. The genre’s evergreen swagger rarely fails to supply uplift, however, and newcomers A Swayze and the Gh...

Danh Vo: Chicxulub; Flow review – artists of the floating world

White Cube Bermondsey, London; Modern Art OxfordDanh Vo lights fires in the gallery with his moving new meditation on God and nature. And what does it mean to be lost in the moment?My heart stopped to see a familiar letter in this deeply affecting ne...

Issa Rae: ‘It’s astounding that our talent hasn’t been recognised’

The woman behind cult HBO comedy Insecure has been making and starring in her own series for years. What took Hollywood so long to notice?Issa Rae, one of the first black women to create and star in a premium cable series and potentially the hardest-...

Rocks review - empowering, uplifting teenage girl power

An east London schoolgirl abandoned by her mother struggles to survive in this gritty yet irrepressible ensemble movieWhat a wonderful, heart-breaking, life-affirming gem of a movie this is. Having proved a crowd-pleasing hit at the London film festi...

The big picture: hard times in Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Gregory Crewdson’s meticulously staged landscapes explore post-industrial decline in small-town AmericaGregory Crewdson’s photographs understood social distancing before it became reality. His landscapes, which have a broken-down, apocalyptic cast, u...

Hottest front-room seats: the best theatre and dance to watch online

From live-streams of new plays to classics from the archive, here are some of the top shows online now or coming soonOne has mouldy cereal in his beard; the other has a possible case of the dreaded shrinks. Their domestic life involves frogs in the b...

Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave review – top one, nice one, sorted

A history of UK acid house and rave recreates the scene’s drug-fuelled intensity, despite the BBC’s ‘newshound’ approachEcstasy: The Battle of Rave (Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave is not your usual hands-aloft-blow-yer-whistle...

Tim Garland: Refocus review – a classic 60s fusion revisited

(Edition)The saxophonist takes Stan Getz’s unique collaboration with Eddie Sauter in a bold new directionFocus was a 1961 album by Stan Getz, wildly adventurous at the time, in which Getz improvised tenor saxophone solos to music composed by Eddie Sa...

Bill & Ted Face the Music review – surf dudes still lift the spirits

The middle-aged dads have to save the universe and their marriages in a shambolic but big-hearted sequel Few 80s cultural artefacts have accrued the same level of enduring audience goodwill as the time-travelling adventures of the sweet-natured Calif...

On my radar: Tom Hollander's cultural highlights

The actor on Zadie Smith’s lockdown thoughts, Louis Theroux’s podcasts and his favourite local restaurantBristol-born actor Tom Hollander, 53, began his career in theatre. His film credits include Gosford Park, Pride & Prejudice, In the Loop and...

Diversity dance group 'proud' of ITV backing in newspaper ads

Ashley Banjo thanks people for support after Ofcom dismisses complaints about BLM routineAshley Banjo has said his dance group Diversity has “never been prouder” after ITV took out full-page newspaper adverts to show support for their controversial B...

Sweet Mother review – sorrow, joy and self-reliance in Toxteth

St Luke’s Bombed Out Church, Liverpool theatre festivalPrejudice and passion powers Maria Paul’s oral history of three white women who married black men in Liverpool 8Performers are the public face of the arts’ response to coronavirus but, behind the...

How do you remake a classic like Utopia? With big budgets – and John Cusack

The cult conspiracy drama is given a flashy US revamp, starring Cusack as a cult-of-personality CEOA delicious little pleasure of mine is when a TV show kills off an interesting character within minutes of introducing them. A squalid little treat for...

The housewife, the ghost hunter and the poltergeist

In 1938, 34-year-old Alma Fielding reported objects mysteriously flying around her home. Eighty years on, Kate Summerscale, author of true crime classic The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, set out to investigate the unexplained case of the Croydon polterge...

TV tonight: gruesome tales of the Australian outback

Noir-laced detective show Mystery Road returns for a new season. Plus: the best of Strictly’s movie-themed dances. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading...