Culture

Night at the Museum

As the guardians of the souls of our communities, local cultural institutions must fight and adapt in the face of budget cuts.

Cold war modern

Remnants of the wall are luring tourists to Berlin

Waking the dead

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future

3 comments

End of the irony age

Once shocking, much of the work in Tate’s latest survey of pop art now seems tired. It shows how inured we’ve become to big-bucks banality

1 comment

She’s lost control

When Sophie Calle’s lover dumped her by email, she turned life into art. Fisun Güner on a woman who binds the helpless and confessional to the coolly conceptual

Paranormal Activity (15)

Simplicity is a highly effective tool in horror films

Dawn of the dead

The dark shadow of history has always loomed over Stephen Poliakoff’s dramas. But Glorious 39, set on the eve of war, is bleaker than ever

A Serious Man (15)

Bodily revulsion is at the heart of the Coens' work

The White Ribbon (15)

Ryan Gilbey detects a new tenderness in the darling of European cinema

Chinese whispers

Xiaolu Guo on the voices of a changing country

2 comments