There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...

Adaptations of Henry James have often failed to click over the years. The author’s private, introspective works – sightseeing trips around people’s souls – seem hard to transpose into a crowded gathering where someone keeps yelling “Action!”.So it’s a bit surprising that three reworkings of his ever-so-subtle 1903 story, The Beast in the Jungle – by Brazilian, Dutch and Austrian directors – have reached the screen since 2017, one of them last year. You might think this proves that buses always arrive in threes, but you’d be wrong. For here comes a fourth version of the story from France’s Read more ...

Beth Gibbons, once the voice of Portishead, and later a wonderful solo singer and songwriter, hasn’t been on stage for a long while. She makes the most of a paradoxical yet magical mix of being at once fleeting and totally present.Something of Miles Davis's cool refusal to play for the gallery, often turned away from the audience at the close of each song, as if drawing strength from the back line of her orchestra. This may be one of the keys to her unique appeal. All of this was very much in evidence at her recent Paris show, a spectacle delicately built on brave self-revelation and self- Read more ...

One hundred and twenty sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work since 1995, provides an exhilarating and in many ways definitive perspective on one of the founding figures of 20th century modernism.“Beaubourg”, as the great tourist attraction is known, will undergo major changes in 2025, including a new setting for Brancusi’s studio, which the artist gave to the French state, along with all his papers, sketches and studio contents, when he died in 1957. In the meantime, we are given a Read more ...

Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a beat at this real-life accident, consumed already by The Dreamers’ closed world of a Left Bank apartment in May ’68, where sexual transgression stands for the barricades and baton charges outside.Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents emphasises straight over gay sex, and further infuses it with cinephilia. Naïve American Matthew, bee-stung lips pursed and head tilted towards adventure, crosses the Seine to the Read more ...

Justice are a couple of super-suave rock star analogues. Leathers and aviators, yes, but with a very Parisian insouciance. Their music is the same. It has a rocker-friendly je-ne-sais-quoi, but air-brushed with the glitzy sci-fi futurism one might expect from a couple of guys whose origins lie in design. Their new album, their fourth and first in a leisurely eight years, retains their usual slightly-gnarly-but-smartly-turned-out vibe, but reaches towards new and entertaining musical directions.Justice blew up with Noughties monster remix “We Are Your Friends”, then rode the proto-EDM wave, Read more ...

“Fashion has a very short memory. Maybe that’s part of its charm,” says Robin Givhan of The Washington Post in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary. Whether anyone can forget John Galliano’s drunken anti-Semitic and racist outpourings at La Perle, his local café in the Marais in Paris in 2011, followed by his sacking by Dior, where he’d reigned as creative director for 14 years, is doubtful.But will people, or rather the fashion world, forgive him? It seems, judging by the acclaim for his recent Maison Margiela show in Paris, a spectacular, strange event (lots of corsets and cinched waists - on the Read more ...

At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...

The downstairs of the Whitechapel Gallery has been converted into a ballroom or, rather, a film set of a ballroom. From time to time, a couple glides briefly across the floor, dancing a perfunctory tango. And they are really hamming it up, not for the people watching them – of whom they are apparently oblivious – but for an imaginary camera.We seem either to be witnessing a film in the making or the reenactment of a well known scene from an old movie. There they are again, upstairs. This time the couple appears on screen performing the same sequence (main picture), but for a camera on a dolly Read more ...

The frocks, the pearls, the chicest branding of any perfume in the world… Sorry, this is not what The New Look is about, for those who swooned at the V&A’s recent Chanel exhibition. The title promises a different focus, on the designer who in 1947 was credited with the “new look” in his first solo collection: Christian Dior. His creations were intended to make France dream again after the miseries of the four-year Nazi occupation. Corsets were resurrected, waistlines cinched-in, full skirts swirled in sumptuous fabrics. The look spoke of a romantic elegance lost during the war years Read more ...

It’s 50 years since the first, damning reviews of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon declared it to be too long and lumbered with terrible music. One of them also said that the title role was an appalling waste of the ballerina who, in the title role, was reduced to “a nasty little diamond-digger”.Roll on half a century and that teenage seductress is up there with Juliet, Giselle, Aurora and Odette-Odile – the most coveted as well as the most technically challenging roles in the canon – while the ballet has become a global money-spinner. A fast-moving love story set in an early 18th century Read more ...

“I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it, please?” says film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) to his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw), a printmaker. Tomas is full of excitement about his night with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos); Martin is resigned, pale, doesn’t want the details. This always happens when you finish a film, he says. Take a nap, relax. But Tomas has thrown their relationship into crisis.Relaxing is not something that comes easily to Tomas, who’s driven by his impulses and expects everyone to be endlessly indulgent of his mercurial desires. When they’re not, he crashes. He Read more ...