Maureen Paley, London
In six enigmatic images, the photographer explores the way the camera is used both by against women

A series of visual conundrums awaits at Maureen Paley ’s London gallery in the form of six large-scale C-type prints by Hannah Starkey . In this small and surreptitious show, Starkey destabilises the certainty of seeing and complicates the act of looking, poking at the paradoxical nature of photography.

The first image in the show is Untitled, January 2023, a riveting and complex scene that incisively describes women’s particular relationship with photography – a subject Starkey has pursued for more than 25 years. The image shows a group of young women – students at Capa College, Wakefield – each engaged in a form of looking. One subject stands on a chair to photograph another, who poses. Two other young women engage in this loop of looking – one gazes up at the subject, the other, her back to the camera, is cast as a silhouette. Behind them, through a window, we glimpse more young women – apparently happily unaware of their subjecthood.

Fall, who currently runs Theatre Royal Stratford East, will succeed Kwame Kwei-Armah in January

The Young Vic, one of London’s foremost theatres, has appointed Nadia Fall as its new artistic director, succeeding Kwame Kwei-Armah. Fall, who currently runs Theatre Royal Stratford East, will join the organisation in January and also become the Young Vic’s joint chief executive alongside Lucy Davies.

Fall said she was thrilled to be returning to the theatre “where I was first taken into the fold as a young student director”. She said the Young Vic was “not afraid to ask the difficult questions, and it’s particularly exciting to me that its audiences have an appetite for that provocation”.

Artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe says much of the anger about a non-disabled actor playing the role has been misogynistic

Michelle Terry, the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, has called the backlash to her casting as Richard III “disproportionate” and said much of the anger aimed towards her in recent months has been misogynistic.

The Globe faced widespread criticism when it was announced that Terry, an Olivier award-winning actor and writer, would play Shakespeare’s “deformd, unfinish’d” king in its summer production opening on Tuesday night.

Shot on 16mm, Marija Kavtaradze’s quiet drama tells a mature and moving story about the many ways people can be in love

A delicate love affair blooms in the new film from Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze, which explores attraction and intimacy with intelligence and compassion. It tells the story of Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė), a contemporary dancer leading a workshop for deaf teenagers, who falls for sign language interpreter Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas). When Dovydas tells her he is asexual, she assumes she is being rejected. He clarifies that he is telling her because he likes her. They decide to try and make it work.

Shot on 16mm film, Slow looks grainy and pleasingly tactile, a fitting look for a film that is interested in many sides of the human touch – how it can soothe, arouse and even spark discord. The gentle naturalism of Slow’s style – full of long takes, restrained dialogue and a moving handheld camera that makes liberal use of closeups – gives the story a homespun, intimate feel. Dovydas’s experience of asexuality, an underrepresented subject on screen, is portrayed with care. With strong performances by Grinevičiūtė and Cicėnas, Elena and Dovydas’s relationship unfolds at a gentle, unhurried pace, their growing attraction indicated by small details – coy glances, long, loaded pauses between conversation – that reward attentive viewing.

Cannes film festival
Moore plays a fading Hollywood star whose career is set to be axed by misogynists when she’s offered a secret new medical procedure

Coralie Fargeat, known for the violent thriller Revenge from 2017 , now cranks up the amplifier for some death metal … or nasty injury metal anyway. This is a cheerfully silly and outrageously indulgent piece of gonzo body-horror comedy, lacking in subtlety, body-positivity or positivity of any sort. Roger Corman would have loved it. It’s flawed and overlong but there’s a genius bit of casting in Demi Moore who is a very good sport about the whole thing. And as confrontational satire it strikes me as at least as good, or better, than two actual Palme d’Or winners: Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness .

The Substance is a grisly fantasy-parable of misogyny and body-objectification, which riffs on the crazy dysfunctional energy of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda with borrowings from Frankenheimer and Cronenberg. It’s about successful careers for women in the media and public life being contingent on being forced to keep another, older, less personable self locked away. But unlike Dorian Gray’s portrait, this can’t simply be forgotten about, but continually tended to. Fargeat saves up an awful reckoning for an odious media executive called Harvey, but in an interesting way locates her horror in women’s own fear of their younger and older selves.

Costner writes, directs and stars alongside Sienna Miller and Sam Worthington in a big vain slog up familiar old west alleys

After three saddle-sore hours, Kevin Costner’s handsome-looking but oddly listless new western doesn’t get much done in the way of satisfying storytelling.

Admittedly, this is supposed to be just the first of a multi-part saga for which Costner is director, co-writer and star. But it somehow doesn’t establish anything exciting for its various unresolved storylines, and doesn’t leave us suspensefully hanging for anything else.

In fact, the ploddingly paced epic ends by suddenly accelerating into a very peculiar preview montage of part two, with Costner speeding around punching people we’ve never seen before – as if someone had accidentally leant on the fast-forward button and we got to watch the whole of the second section in 25 seconds.

It certainly starts at a gallop. The various plot strands in Montana, Wyoming and Kansas entwine around a new white pioneer settlement in the 1860s American west, called Horizon, attracting any number of hardy or naive souls who don’t know or haven’t been told that the Apaches will not surrender this territory without a fight.

After a mysterious attempted slaying of a man in a remote shack (the storyline which is subject to the most conspicuously deferred explanation) we witness, on one terrible night, apaches attacking the Horizon settlement and burning it to the ground, killing many, and making a widow of a homesteader’s wife: Frances (Sienna Miller) leaving her children fatherless. It is a genuinely gripping sequence.

A retaliatory raiding party is organised by vindictive trackers who don’t care if they capture the actual apaches responsible – just any native Americans – to get the bounty cash. They are reluctantly permitted to do by the Unionist soldiers, exasperated by the existence of the Horizon township which is situated in open country almost impossible for them to defend.

They are led by modest, handsome First Lt Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) who supposedly experiences a romantic connection with Frances – and Miller has to pivot her character on a dime from the grief and horror of seeing her husband killed, to a state of simpering, skittish flirting with hunky Trent.

Meanwhile, the apaches are deeply divided about how to handle the thread from the settlers; hotheaded young Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) is furious at his father’s lack of direct action.

Another plot strand has a gruelling wagon train led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) having to deal with food and water shortages, the ever-present risk of attack and a couple of lazy entitled Brits who won’t pull their weight.

While some feel that allowing live performances to be photographed or filmed adds to the buzz, others hate it

Since an outbreak last year of rowdyism in musical theatre, the question of how audiences should behave during live performances has been burrowing its way into the heart of the cultural establishment. It has now popped its head up in the classical music world, where it is not about sprayed beer and dancing in the aisles, but phone etiquette at concerts.

The debate was sparked when the tenor Ian Bostridge halted a recital in Birmingham because he was being distracted by people recording him. He later discovered that he was out of line with policy at the Symphony Hall, home to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), which welcomed its audiences to take photographs and short video clips. The resulting set-to, with supporters deluging the orchestra with complaints about the policy, and its management promising to clarify and refine but not withdraw it, casts an interesting light on efforts to build new audiences in a sector that has been struggling to find its way in a straitened economy at a time of rapidly changing habits.

The former New York Times journalist exposes the excesses of hyper-‘woke’ culture and the suffocating impact of groupthink in this enjoyable study of a topsy-turvy world

M orning After the Revolution by the American journalist Nellie Bowles is a wickedly enjoyable book about the madness that seemingly began to inflame the brains of a certain cohort of the liberal intelligentsia about four years ago (its author dates the fever to the pandemic, but I think – personal information! – it began some time before then). It was a delirium that took her, as it did many people, a little by surprise, not least because she in theory belonged to this subsection herself: at school, where she was for a while the only out gay person, she ran around sticking rainbows all over the place; after college she was known to go to readings at Verso Books (“my God, I bought a tote”); when her girl Hillary was “about to win” she was “drinking with I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar”. But once she’d noticed it, she couldn’t ignore it. Her instinct was to whip out a thermometer and ask a few pertinent diagnostic questions.

Asking questions, though, is (or it certainly was… things may be shifting now) verboten in the time of madness. Either you’re for the ideological buffet – every single dish – or you’re against it, and must eat at the bad restaurant where all the mean people hang out, a place that is otherwise known as “the wrong side of history”. When the insanity started, Bowles was working in Los Angeles for the New York Times , a job she’d dreamed of since childhood, and there her curiosity soon began to piss off some of her colleagues. When she went on to fall in love with a full-blown dissenter, the columnist Bari Weiss, who’s now her wife, she found herself on the outside of something, looking in. Morning After the Revolution is an account of her adventures in this topsy-turvy realm, in both the period before and after she left the NYT in 2021 (she and Weiss now run the Free Press ). It comprises a series of reported colour pieces in which she touches on such things as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, the campaign to defund the police, trans rights and (briefly) the crystal display she noticed when Meghan and Harry did pandemic Zooms from their home in Montecito.

The two literary greats wrote 400,000 words to each other in letters that now reveal rare insights into their friendship - sometimes affectionate, intimate, cool and resentful

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Elizabeth Harrower’s trip to Italy in 1984 should have been pure joy. She was invited by her friends Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller to join them, at their expense, in Rome, Naples, Capri and then New York.

The couple wanted to thank Harrower for her years of care for Hazzard’s mother, through mental illness and decline in Sydney, and they had been urging her – pleading with her – for years.

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