Royal Opera House, London
Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera is meticulously revived with Sondra Radvanovsky and SeokJong Baek both stellar in the central roles. In the pit, Rafael Payare brings care and lightness to the intricate score

Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera was a well-flogged warhorse by the turn of the millennium, hugely assisted by the global 1990s popularity of the aria Nessun Dorma . Revived only two years ago it returns again, part of a Puccini-rich season marking the centenary of the composer’s death (the event which left Turandot unfinished). But thankfully this staging is still far from showing its age.

Instead Jack Furness’s meticulous staging, tightly choreographed by Kate Flatt, feels newly minted. When the blood red drapes at the front of the stage are ripped down in the opening bars, the oppressive ceiling-to-floor set looms over everything, severed head masks looking down. The action takes place amid shadowy watchers, seemingly indifferent to the heartlessness that pervades Turandot almost up to its sudden happily-ever-after end, which used the cut version of Franco Alfano’s 1926 completion.

Continue reading...

The county sheriff’s office have confirmed that Betsy Arakawa made the phone call on 12 February disproving their initial belief that she had died a day earlier

A private healthcare clinic in New Mexico has cast doubt on official findings about the timing of the death of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, claiming that she rang them on 12 February – the day after police say she died.

Dr Josiah Child, the head of Cloudberry Health in Santa Fe, where the couple lived, told the Mail on Sunday: “Mrs Hackman didn’t die on 11 February because she called my clinic on 12 February.”

Continue reading...

The wordless aftermath of a global catastrophe sees a cat team up with other creatures in tremendously imagined apocalyptic vision

Humans are nowhere to be seen and the animals have taken over in this gorgeous animated adventure that was the dark horse winner at last month’s Academy Awards . It’s a film full of wonders but not a single word of dialogue in the epic tale of one cat’s adventures after a flood of biblical proportions (presumably a catastrophic result of global heating). As visions of apocalypse go, it’s rather lovely: a world lush with nature, animals learning to get by together. (Charmingly, in his Oscar acceptance speech, director Gints Zilbalodis thanked his cats and dogs.)

Our hero is a slinky black cat with expressive yellow eyes as big as saucers. You get the sense that this feline is more accustomed to the pampered lap of luxury than slumming it in the wild. Alone in the forest, he saunters into a wooden cabin that seems to be owned by an artist. Is this his old home? Where is his human? Then a huge wave crashes through the forest like a tsunami and the cat takes refuge on a clapped out sailboat. Like an ark without a Noah, the boat accumulates beasts: a friendly golden retriever, a mellow capybara, a petulant lemur and a secretary bird.

Continue reading...

Ahead of her 40th birthday next week, we look back over the 25-year big-screen career of the Oscar-nominated actor, from Atonement to Love Actually, Pride & Prejudice to Star Wars

Knightley’s first big role was in this teen thriller, about four private school kids partying in a bomb shelter, where it all goes predictably haywire. It’s a horror, and not just for the sheer dominance of low-rise bootcut jeans. Even in its more hysterical moments, Knightley brings nuance to the posh-girl stereotype.

Continue reading...

In a room stinking of industrial bleach and cooled to the temperature of a morgue, the artist explores pop culture’s voracious appetite for violence – by trapping the viewer in front of 101 hours of drill videos

‘A generation has been completely wiped out,” says Luton-born artist RIP Germain . He’s talking about the UK drill scene, a subject he explores in his latest exhibition . In an image used to publicise the show, we see the faces of 42 rappers, all of them in prison.

“In autumn last year, there was literally no one,” he says. “The scene was actually dead, everyone was locked up.”

Continue reading...

(Dene Jesmond)
Veering from the standard heritage-artist playbook, Ferry pairs unearthed demos from across his career with cool narration from Barratt, to beautiful, unsettling effect

There comes a point in every august artist’s career where they’re forced to make an accommodation with their own past, a tacit acknowledgment that anything new they release exists in the shadow of their own back catalogue. In recent years, Bryan Ferry has done just that, tending his legacy via vast box set retrospectives of his solo work; reconvening Roxy Music for a 50th anniversary tour; and releasing a cover of Bob Dylan’s She Belongs to Me that seemed to discreetly reference the subtler moments on Roxy’s eponymous debut or 1973’s For Your Pleasure.

Anniversary tours, deluxe box sets, slyly referential cover versions: these are the things almost all artists of a certain vintage and standing indulge in. But Ferry has also taken a more idiosyncratic parallel approach to his history. On 2012’s The Jazz Age and 2018’s Bitter-Sweet, he reworked his back catalogue in the style of late-20s jazz, replete with knowing references to standards of the era: Love Is the Drug in the style of Duke Ellington’s The Mooche; 1977’s This Is Tomorrow appended with a reveille that nodded in the direction of Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues.

Continue reading...

The gut-wrenching crime drama is so poignant it will leave you in pieces. But it’s far from the only televisual masterpiece to deliver a devastating emotional punch …

Adolescence, as the world seems to agree, is a perfect piece of television. However, even perfection has its problems. Adolescence is the sort of show that needs some breathing space afterwards; it’s so comprehensively shattering, and will leave you in such a state of emotional despondency, that you can’t simply hop straight into the next show. I tried – after episode four, I had to watch a reality show for work – and it was horrible. It was like stumbling from a funeral straight into a circus.

Perhaps what we need here is an off-ramp. A bunch of shows that, while they might leave you in pieces, may not pack quite such a devastating punch as Adolescence. Here’s a selection of the most heartbreaking television.

Continue reading...

Sadler’s Wells, London
Merce Cunningham’s demands on dancers are the stuff of legend, but as in the celebration of two of his classic works here, utterly essential

Merce Cunningham was always ahead of his time: as a dancer with the pioneering Martha Graham; at the forefront of mid-20th-century experimentalism with partner John Cage; and using computer power to create choreography in the 1990s, three decades before the AI boom. Cunningham died in 2009, aged 90, and one of his dancers, Cédric Andrieux, now leads Lyon Opera Ballet, which pays tribute to Cunningham revisiting two works, Beach Birds (1991) and Biped (1999).

Beach Birds is a classic. The dancers wear white unitards with a black stripe extending across the chest to gloved hands, and they do look bird-like, arms curved away from the body like wings or flippers. They jump and hop and tilt in balances, with quirky twists of the head. It is fiendishly difficult work, such careful placing of every limb, the absolute muscle control. The purity of form could seem detached, and yet with the peacefulness of Cage’s sparse score, there’s so much breathing space, a deep plié (bend) in second position can feel somehow emotional. The whole thing engenders intense curiosity, like watching animals in the wild.

Continue reading...

From serious injury and coping with different levels of fame to resentment and ping-pong – a powerful insight into a life shared by two charismatic creatives

It’s hard not to wonder why this excellent documentary about an older married couple – writer and artist Maggie Barrett and photographer Joel Meyerowitz – is getting released just as Meyerowitz’s Tate Modern show is coming to end; you’d think there would be an overlap, if only to enhance traffic to both. Certainly, having got to know affable, driven, sweet-tempered Joel personally in this intimate portrait, it’s a natural desire to want to see even more of his extraordinary work: 60 years of photographs encompassing street photography, official documentation of the 9/11 disaster site in New York, still lifes and more.

At the same time, it’s also entirely apt that this feature isn’t just an adjunct to Meyerowitz’s career, given it is so profoundly about Joel and Maggie’s marriage, a kind of passionate truce (as its title suggests) between two equally forceful and charismatic characters. As we see here, the two struggle with the way Joel’s fame and career so often overshadow Maggie’s, personally and professionally. It’s a constant push-pull friction-producing mechanism that suddenly flares up into a massive dressing down from a furious Maggie, invoking decades worth of resentments and slights, when Joel carelessly refuses to take a phone call in another room from the one she’s resting in. The sequence is pure magic: fascinating, compelling and repellent in equal measure, spontaneous and just a bit performative too. It’s the kind of material that’s a cinematic Rorschach blot, capable of being read any which way, depending on the viewer’s perspective. And how apt it is that the film was itself made by a married couple, Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter – who, like Maggie and Joel, come from different cultures and disciplinary backgrounds.

Continue reading...