Having survived what you might call his boy-band years, Jude Law has emerged as a truly substantial actor, and his role here as Lenny Belardo, the newly-elected Pope Pius XIII, may prove to be a defining moment. Created by a multinational consortium including HBO, Sky Italia and Canal+, The Young Pope confronts the viewer with something of a learning curve, with its mysterious Vatican setting and arcane multi-lingual clerical hierarchy, but by the end of this opening double episode you could sense that this is going to be a weird and wild ride.Director Paolo Sorrentino didn't make it easy on Read more ...

No living composer writes more compellingly for choir or for strings than James MacMillan (a surprisingly accepted "Sir" is now an optional addition to the name). This beautifully planned programme's first half gave us the former, a cappella choral music at its most masterly in the setting of the Miserere premiered by The Sixteen in 2009, before Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis lay down the gauntlet for the latter. Both were matched - though it would be hard to surpass them - in the world premiere of a masterpiece combining the two forces, MacMillan's Stabat Mater.Post- Read more ...

“Existential realism” is a term, contradictory though it might sound, that comes to mind when describing the work of the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. The films he made in the last five years of his life – The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colours trilogy – may be his best-known, but the director had already been exploring the same fundamental concerns for a quarter of a century by then. Working in both documentary and short-film forms, some of those earlier works are as distinctive as anything that Kieślowski went on to create after the changes of the late 1980s Read more ...

Can Louis Theroux bring anything new to the Scientology party? If you’ve seen Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s detailed documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book, or watched Tom Cruise acting weird on YouTube, you already know that the Church’s great secrets are not so secret any more. We’ve heard about the aliens and the galaxies, the E-meters and the Operating Thetans, the elite Sea Org and the hellish conditions in the Hole.No Scientology members are going to open up to Theroux, however charmingly open-minded he may be, and he doesn’t want to do another Going Clear, with disillusioned ex- Read more ...

If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the first two series in Netflix’s supremely realised and blood-spattered depiction of Marvel Comic’s Hell’s Kitchen, it’s as well to do it with conviction. By hosting Preacher, based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Amazon went in swinging – low and hard, fighting dirty from the off.WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS!The series concluded on the streaming service this week, but even before it had aired there were concerns about whether it could ever do the comics justice. In fairness, the story of a man of the Read more ...

There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...

The last time but one that the Three Choirs Festival was in Gloucester the main offering was Elgar’s oratorio The Kingdom, and there’s a kind of inevitability about the same work turning up again, same place, same occasion, six years later. After all, the Three Choirs has not survived for almost 300 years by a fidgety policy of constant renewal. The festival may be a much more varied affair now than in its Barchester days, but the core image is still of a packed cathedral listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams or Mendelssohn – and all these composers figure this time, with the bold, slightly Read more ...

Notes on Blindness is an extraordinary film that wears its original genius lightly. The debut full-length documentary from directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney, it may seem complicated in its assembly, but has a final impact that is luminously simple. And to speak of a film whose immediate subject is the loss of sight – and by extension, of the visual element that comprises cinema itself – in terms of luminousness is finally no paradox at all.It’s the story of John Hull, an Australian-born theologian whose acclaimed 1990 book Touching the Rock recorded his experience of going blind. Read more ...

The wish to return to a place of past safety after a traumatic event is understandable. It helps if that place is remote and possibly beyond the reach of any authorities which may want to investigate the event, or even hold someone accountable. In the case of Iona, it’s a return from mainland Scotland to the Inner Hebridean island of the same name where she grew up. It’s not instantly clear what caused her to come back but when she does, it’s apparent that memories are long and the welcome is not as warm it might be. She has a son whom no-one has previously met. The past has to be faced and Read more ...

Why do young British Muslims go to join the so-called Islamic State? Since the entire media has been grappling with this question for ages now, it is a bit puzzling to see our flagship National Theatre giving the subject an airing, especially as this is a verbatim drama, which uses the actual words of interviewees, and is thus not so very different from ordinary journalism. But if Gillian Slovo’s Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State aspires to be a stage piece, how does it work?The interviewees’ accounts are never questionedThe 95-minute show begins with examples of IS Read more ...

In Jaco Van Dormael’s black comedy, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is an alcoholic arsehole living in 21st-century Brussels, who maliciously causes destruction across the world while bullying his silent wife and daughter Éa. As with much of Dormael’s work, the surreal, in his own words “not yet civilized” vision children have of the world inspires the lens through which we experience the film. Éa (Pili Groyne), God’s rebellious but moral 10-year-old daughter, narrates chunks of the story and is its strong protagonist. Accompanied by her gaggle of eccentric apostles, she flees her prison and sets out Read more ...

The Chilean director Pablo Larrain completed his loose trilogy about his country confronting the legacy of its Pinochet years four years ago with No. Striking a distinctly upbeat note after the two films that had preceded it, Tony Romero and Post Mortem, its title came from the unexpected referendum result that deprived the dictator of an anticipated extension of his mandate, and was seen through the story of the advertising men behind that epoch-changing vote.But new times do not bring new morals. His new film The Club (El Club), which took the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Berlinale, may Read more ...