Review

Jack Thorne's telling of an early BBC struggle is unfocused, often boring and poorly realised

Too many books about the countryside are over-written and nostalgic. But Rebecca Smith’s brilliant new memoir gets it just right

Divided by a continent and a generation, they never met. But a new exhibition shows the ties between Leon Kossoff and Chaïm Soutine

There was much to enjoy at Cannes – but the same old players doing the same old things hints that cinema may be due a shake-up

Pirelli’s vast Milan gallery is a temple of daring contemporary art

An Aspects of Love revival feels uncomfortable three decades on

The stage version of Brokeback Mountain is well-meaning, well-acted and well, pointless

A new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum captures the experience of everyday people who lived through the years of conflict

Decades from now, this once-in-a-lifetime series will still be watched as a cultural artefact of a particular moment in history

Martin Scorsese, Steve McQueen and the late Martin Amis deliver the goods at an unexpectedly soggy Cannes Film Festival

The rivalry and respect between Manet and Degas

1990s musical Once on This Island gets a sensational revival

Based on a WWII deception that fooled the Nazis, Operation Mincemeat is a deft pastiche

Is The Ugly Duchess a work of misogyny, a portrait of deformity or the mocking of an aristocrat? Or all three?

East Germany’s first black policeman started the 1990s as a media phenomenon, but ended it in jail. A new series tells his story

A new exhibition explores whether Ancient Greece's labyrinth existed or was a confection of the imagination cultivated over the centuries

Many TV comedy actors come a cropper when they turn to serious stage roles, but the League of Gentlemen star captures Sir John magnificently

One of the greatest Impressionists, Berthe Morisot’s work offered perceptive, unusual glimpses of domestic life

A new book eschews cosy nostalgia to explore the fractures that Europe’s picture postcard tourist traps keep hidden

A new play about Sidney Poitier is a fitting allegory for our immoral times

Two new novels evoke the eeriness thrumming through small coastal towns, where lives wash up like the debris on the beach

Painstakingly plotted, the Swedish author’s bestselling debut Collected Works weighs in at 733 pages – over a quarter of a million words

A new show at the National Gallery maps startling changes in pre-first world war European art

The Brexit architect follows in a long line of stage heroes who are morally questionable or downright loathsome

Noel Coward's play is funny now in a way that is tragic

Thirty years on, the key to the enduring legacy of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy is creativity and love

Even the greatest of writers – from John Steinbeck to Maya Angelou – suffer from the idea that they’re about to be found out

This musical is a joyous explosion of colour, light and good humour

There’s almost certainly a great play to be written about gay black and mixed-race men but this sadly isn’t it

How Brigitte Reimann, once an idealistic socialist, wrote one of Germany’s great post-war novels

The late Israeli actor and singer performed If I Were a Rich Man more than 3,500 times in multiple productions of Fiddler on the Roof

It’s nothing short of terrifying that Tom Basden has managed to shift a story of Italian police corruption so effortlessly and convincingly to a metropolitan police station in this country