The critics

How a ruined religious complex became a modern university faculty

God is in the detail of David Kohn’s artful, quirky and level-headed reimagining of Hasselt Beguinage

Sunday, 30 November 2025

Nico Muhly and the danse macabre

Three Sadler’s Wells premieres set to the US composer’s music – plus new works by Ballet Black – show the surprise joys and struggles of commissioning new work

Sunday, 30 November 2025

Murder most fowl: Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas

This lively but rambling new musical, with songs by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, follows Holmes and Watson as they solve the murders of the drummer, piper, lord, lady…

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Albums of the week: The Bug vs Ghost Dubs, Jerkcurb, Stray Kids, Manizeh

The Bug goes head to head with Ghost Dubs on an album of abstract, menacing bass music

Saturday, 29 November 2025

My Child New Beginnings is a game about raising traumatised children

The sequel to the Bafta-winning work about the Nazi Lebensborn programme folds child psychology into its design

Sunday, 23 November 2025

The Rest is Science gives a lesson in chemistry

Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens spark off each other in the latest Goalhanger show on science; and the Reith Lectures are a stirring call to arms

Saturday, 29 November 2025

Wendy Ide’s picks: Blue Moon, Wake Up Dead Man

This tale of Richard Rodgers’s drunk and bitter former writing partner Lorenz Hart is elegantly witty and melancholic

Saturday, 29 November 2025

Turner and Constable as they’ve never been seen before

World-famous masterpieces and rarely exhibited works by the two artists are put side by side in this monumental, thrilling show at Tate Britain

Friday, 28 November 2025

Prisoner 951 is a Kafkaesque hostage nightmare

The BBC show takes viewers on the British charity worker’s harrowing journey

Friday, 28 November 2025

Ivo van Hove’s All My Sons is a revelation

The director shines new light on the Arthur Miller play, starring Bryan Cranston

Friday, 28 November 2025

Pillion shows the hard and soft sides to leather culture

This ‘dom-com’ about a timid traffic warden who meets a surly, leather-clad alpha finds humour in the transgressive and the mundane

Friday, 28 November 2025

How My Bloody Valentine became an arena band

This chaotic noise outfit has grown big enough to fill large venues, 40 years since its inception

Friday, 28 November 2025

I’m a novelist who’s just bought a video games company. Here’s why you should care about games writing

Video games still occupy a strange cultural position, so all many people know about them is that they don’t want to know about them

Monday, 24 November 2025

The place where music history is made

Over 25 years, stars from Nina Simone to Thom Yorke and Dua Lipa have passed through this east London cafe next to a recording studio – an unflashy hub nourishing artists and a whole creative industry

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Albums of the week: Oneohtrix Point Never, De La Soul, Ella Eyre, Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest

Tranquilizer is a lush, woozy record about digital impermanence

Sunday, 23 November 2025

The ice-cold movie to spoil your Thanksgiving

Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm is the perfect holiday killjoy with its fractious families and middle-class discontent

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Mutton: the story of the Yorkshire Witch

This new play about the life and death by hanging of Mary Bateman needs more meat

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Bridget Riley and the pleasure of looking

The British artist hopes the eye can travel over the surface like it “moves over nature”

Saturday, 22 November 2025

The Black Swan is an extraordinary courtroom seat in a real-life Scandi noir case

The Danish docuseries – which provoked a crisis of national identity – is one of the most unsettling programmes I’ve seen

Saturday, 22 November 2025

Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: The Ice Tower, The Thing with Feathers, and more

There’s a chilly, uncanny magic and dream logic to Lucile Hadžihalilović’s story of a diva movie star played by Marion Cotillard

Saturday, 22 November 2025

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