Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives; she joined the men on risky forays into other communities “that had never seen a white person before, but she never recorded any animosity from them”. Later, in 1936, she relocated to the remote interior of New Guinea. There she lived among the “remarkably inscrutable” Anga people, fabled for their ritualised violence, in a region feared and Read more ...

Blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) had much more than an astonishingly powerful voice. It may already be almost a hundred years since she made her most significant recordings – she is from an era before amplification –  and yet her unfailing capacity to hold the listener’s attention, to tell stories that sound deeply rooted in her own personal experience still hits home every time.In this time when grieving is all around us, we can sometimes lose any sense of what is real and what is dreamt, and the immediacy of a song like “Graveyard Dream Blues” in which Bessie Smith imagines she is Read more ...

In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo, taken by Malcolm X would make the moment iconic, marking a shift away from the horrors of Jim Crow America to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The events of that evening became the basis of Kemp Powers' 2013 play, and now form the directorial debut for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, who most recently played Sister Night in HBO’s Read more ...

For so much of the year, Tenet was cited as the film that was going to save cinema – the tentpole extravaganza that would draw virus-conscious punters back to the big screen. The assertion was always fanciful, the pandemic being too long a haul; with no disrespect to Christopher Nolan, the fanfare around his latest spoke more of industry desperation than reality.Meanwhile, along comes Mank, David Fincher’s account of the controversial genesis of Orson Welles’ landmark Citizen Kane, oft-cited as the greatest film ever made. It stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Read more ...

This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud. William Feaver spoke with the artist perhaps almost daily for nearly 40 years, visiting frequently, taking notes, recording, and being shown work in progress. The second volume of the resulting kaleidoscope – the two together, the first published last year, come to over 1,100 pages – is a mesmerising, entertaining account of Freud’s life and art. Freud’s own comments on other artists, his own paintings, and art in general, its purposes and his own aesthetic, are intelligent, enlightening and absorbing.Feaver’s Read more ...

A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are so intertwined with their work that their biography as well as their art achieves a kind of mythic status, but outstanding among them is the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). Despite the fact he only lived for forty years and was a fully practising artist for only seven of those, looking at Van Gogh is a ceaseless endeavour.Even more remarkably, major contributions to the appreciation of Van Gogh Read more ...

The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...

Artemisia Gentileschi has definitely had a hard time. Although she was an outstanding Renaissance painter in the style of Caravaggio, and the first woman to become a member of Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno, her work was attributed to her father Orazio for centuries. Since she was rediscovered by feminist art critics in the 1970s, interest in her life and work has increased, but sadly the first major exhibition of her paintings in the UK, at the National Gallery, has had to be postponed because of the coronavirus. For the same reason, Breach Theatre’s drama about her was cancelled, Read more ...

Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and was nominated for an Oscar. Satrapi adapted and co-directed both films. She also wrote and illustrated the comic books on which they were based. Over the past ten years, Satrapi has parlayed her success as a cartoonist into a formidable career as a filmmaker. Her latest film is her biggest. Radioactive is a wide-ranging biopic about the life of Read more ...

“I am not intense.” That declaration arrives early in Feel Good, the new Channel 4 and Netflix romantic comedy fronted by comedian Mae Martin, who plays a fictionalised version of herself. Over Mae’s shoulder, we see a literal trash fire. She’s lit up the evidence of a past drug addiction. It smoulders in the background while she smoulders in the front.This scene is Feel Good in miniature: it encapsulates Martin's brand of vulnerable, quirky comedy, pinned to her appeal as a character and a creator. The series is easy to watch and easy to like. Still, Feel Good has a hindrance. For a Read more ...

When the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison died last year, it was a chance to celebrate the remarkable life of a storyteller who shook the literary establishment. Her work, including her debut novel The Bluest Eye, broke radical new ground in depicting African American life. Now her life is the subject of a new documentary directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.This is a documentary that brims with love and admiration for Morrison’s work and life. All the critical biographical details are correct and present. Still, Greenfield-Sanders’ film is much more than a tick box Read more ...

Watching Dark Waters, the latest film from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven), I kept thinking — what’s the opposite of a love letter? The film is based on the work of Rob Bilott, a real-life lawyer who uncovered a corruption scandal so toxic that it was literally poisoning us. Dark Waters stars Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, and it functions as a dignified takedown of DuPont: the chemical giant responsible for the poison.This is a legal procedural that reads like a horror story. It’s Frankenstein-ish in its terrors. It opens with Bilott — partner at a corporate law firm — lured to his Read more ...