🚀 Check out this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Classical music,Wigmore Hall,Music,Culture ✅ Key idea: HThe cut is still sometimes described as a rising countertenor. That should certainly now be unconditional. The rate of discount has gone almost to the top, and 2025 has been an excellent year. This enthusiastically performed and received concert, a world off the beaten track of pre-Christmas parties or countertenor gigs, accompanied by the eclectically matched eight-strong Refound Ensemble, showed why.Themed parties are commonplace, but Cutting's program of songs and music, all linked to the night's theme, is built on…
💥 Check out this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Drama films,Julie Christie,Omar Sharif,Alec Guinness,Romance films,Film,Culture 💡 Main takeaway: TThere is no more perfect example of the cinematic crossroads of the mid-1960s than Julie Christie's 1965. First, she starred as an immoral fashion model in John Schlesinger's Darling, a snapshot of swinging London that reflected the fashionable, garish, progressive culture that seduced the young. She then starred as an elusive Russian beauty in Doctor Zhivago, a three-hour historical epic by David Lean that was as dull and old-fashioned as Darling was suggestive of the future. There…
✨ Discover this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Television,Culture,Television & radio,Sex,Michelle Williams,Disney+ ✅ Key idea: DYing for Sex is about a woman in her 40s who leaves her husband and has a lot of experimental sex after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Except of course it is not. It's about much more than that. In the end, the sex scenes - although many and varied - are just trivial things.Partly because there is no false hope here. None of the exciting pieces represent a complete escape from reality. The series is based on a true…
🚀 Discover this trending post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Football,Documentary films,Film,Culture,Sport 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: IIt seems appropriate, after the 2026 World Cup draw featuring small island newcomers Curacao and Cape Verde, to revisit Next Goal Wins, an underdog story I embraced upon first viewing as if it were a team I would follow loyally for the rest of my life.The documentary chronicles the world's worst soccer team (once), American Samoa, and their valiant efforts to qualify for the 2014 World Cup, but to describe it as just a soccer movie is to miss a…
🚀 Read this trending post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Christmas shows,Theatre,Stage,Culture 💡 Main takeaway: YYesterday was salsa class. Next up is the panto. Other days, it might be anything from language lessons to arts and crafts. Today in this multi-purpose space is the turn of the annual Christmas fair, with its brick stalls, grotto and tree. Sitting on four sides of the elegant ballroom at Chadderton Town Hall, a refuge for Oldham's stand during renovations, it doesn't take any leap of imagination to imagine ourselves at a real local fundraiser.This gives Jim Cartwright's 2012 play a…
💥 Read this trending post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Television,Television & radio,Culture 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn: Tea with Judi Dench9pm, Sky Arts I spent a very funny and moving hour with Judi Dench and her old friend Kenneth Branagh. They share a pot of tea at Dench's country house (with a mop of "I've been expecting you, Mr Bond"), where one minute she's introducing her mouthy parrot, the next reminiscing about her career, her beloved husband and her departed star friends. It has become even more poignant as the actress recently announced that she cannot…
🚀 Read this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Television & radio,Culture,Podcasts 📌 Main takeaway: Choose the weekIconsThis series from football website Goal dedicates an episode to each of the last ten World Cups and highlights a special moment. Take, for example, the story behind Brazilian striker Ronaldo's strange haircut in 2002, or a glimpse into the shirts Argentina played in during the 1986 tournament, which were illegal copies of their own shirts. It's all narrated by commentator Martin Tyler, who has covered the last 12 tournaments. Alexey Duggins Widely available, bi-weekly episodesDelilandFrom the national penchant…
💥 Explore this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Film,One Battle After Another,Culture,Jafar Panahi,US politics,Paul Thomas Anderson ✅ Main takeaway: HeyOn March 8, Mahmoud Khalil became the first of many pro-Palestinian protesters on campus to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was detained for three months, without being able to deliver his first child, by an administration that distorted his opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza as encouraging terrorism, while abusing immigration policy to silence him.In movies this year, I was repeatedly reminded of Khalil and others who saw their altruistic activism reframed as…
💥 Check out this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Christmas shows,Theatre,Stage,Culture,Chichester Festival theatre 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn: TIts origin story, about how Saint Nicholas became a gift-giver in the North Pole with an army of elves, began as a children's book by Matt Haig that was made into a star-studded fantasy film with appearances by Maggie Smith and Jim Broadbent. Now we have the stage adaptation, which sings the tale of young Nicholas.At the age of eleven, stranded in grief and loneliness after his mother was killed by a bear, his father set out…
🔥 Read this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Theatre,Stage,Culture,JB Priestley,Donmar Warehouse ✅ Here’s what you’ll learn: SThe tomatoes are tight, the bottles are empty, and the night has just begun. J.B. Priestley's cozy comedy is easy entertainment on a cold evening, and Tim Scheider's laugh-out-loud production conjures the cozy feeling of sinking into an armchair by the fire and rewatching a quaint old classic.Written in 1934 and set in 1908, this deceit-filled drama follows three middle-class Yorkshire couples as they celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. Monied, well-mannered, and stunningly dressed by fashion designer Anna Fleischle…
