Today’s highlights
Art
A year of unmissable exhibitions
2025 looks like being an outstanding year for art
‘Poor art’ in rich places
A defunct commodities exchange in Paris, owned by a billionaire, is the setting for an exhibition of a radical art movement that used lowly materials to react against consumerism
Ukraine’s painful beauty
A Kyiv gallery has defied Russian missile attacks to stage a visceral but tender art competition for artists under 35
Helen Frankenthaler and the colours of Europe
A honeymoon on the continent changed everything for American artist Helen Frankenthaler, whose work is being celebrated in Florence and Bilbao this year
The birth of art history
The almost unbelievable artistic riches of renaissance Florence form the basis of an unmissable exhibition
A farmer’s protest
Three parallel exhibitions celebrate a great Dutch artist whose career began after a great deal of crying over spilt milk
Books
How to wake up woke
The clamour for social justice got waylaid by too much virtue-signalling and too little action. Trump says it’s dead. But it is needed more than ever
Trump’s burning ambition
MAGA’s resurgence means that works by George Orwell, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Frank and even Agatha Christie are under threat
Shelter from the storm: the books to get through 2025 with
We’ll need mechanisms in place to keep us sane and what better mechanism is there to achieve that than getting stuck in to a really good book?
Hey, politician! Tell us your story
If you don’t someone else will tell it for you – and chances are you won’t like what you hear
The best fiction reads of 2024
The story of a family’s French holiday interrupted by the apocalypse tops our round-up of the best books of 2024
A literary year of grifters and drifters
A beautiful memoir about the ugly side of Europe tops our round-up of 2024’s best non-fiction
Music
Keith Jarrett: The agony and the ecstasy
How a grumpy star, a broken piano and an improvised set added up to a timeless jazz classic recorded 50 years ago – the legendary Köln Concert
How Edinburgh’s music beats the January gloom
Despite the grey skies and dreariness of winter, Scotland’s capital retains its allure in the colder months
Eurovision’s first breakout success
The daughter of a songwriter and from a long line of composers, the woman born Isabelle Gall was predestined for a career in music
All that jazz: a guide to the top 10 European summer festivals to look forward to in 2025
For those who want tunes with their travel, Europe is home to an astonishing plethora of annual summer jazz festivals
What Eurovision did next
A whole host of alumni from the contest will release new music, and perhaps lift spirits, in 2025
The Telegraph goes radio gaga
The ailing broadsheet has become fixated with a losing candidate for the top position – and not for the first time
Film
Against the odds, A Real Pain is a triumph
As Jesse Eisenberg’s second outing as writer-director, this plangent reflection of the legacy of the Holocaust is a tremendous accomplishment
How We Live in Time gets cancer right
John Crowley’s beautiful film doesn’t shy away from the gut-wrenching reality of cancer, instead it embraces it
The big-time film mogul who saw the importance of making art
Many directors might not have scaled their creative heights without Ponti’s recognition that one could make daring and challenging cinema and still turn a profit
2073, the feel bad movie of the year
Oscar-winner Asif Kapadia on his new docu-drama and the road to dystopia
Nickel Boys is a stunning achievement
This adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel deserves – at minimum – an Oscar nomination for best picture
The stakes are high for Nosferatu
Has director Robert Eggers bitten off more than he can chew with a remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 classic?
Theatre
Life after Death
Death of England, one of the cultural highlights of 2024, is coming to streaming. But what’s next for playwright Roy Williams?
A Bad Sister’s very good stage return
The Little Foxes confirms Anne-Marie Duff as a true great
The best interpretation of The Tempest I’ve ever seen
Sigourney Weaver shines in her west end debut in Jamie Lloyd’s powerful new production of Shakespeare’s final solo-authored play
What’s the point of reproducing this Mel Brooks classic?
Patrick Marber’s unremarkable revival delivers polite laughs only
Black Doves is festive fun at its most lethal
Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s streaming, cinema, theatre and books
An Oscar Wilde reboot that’s not earnest enough
Max Webster’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest fails to commit to doing something truly innovative
Great European Lives
The big-time film mogul who saw the importance of making art
Many directors might not have scaled their creative heights without Ponti’s recognition that one could make daring and challenging cinema and still turn a profit
Eurovision’s first breakout success
The daughter of a songwriter and from a long line of composers, the woman born Isabelle Gall was predestined for a career in music
Soviet cinema’s reluctant dissident
There were huge advantages to being outside the Soviet Union, but the filmmaker’s love of Russia bound him to home
Silvana Mangano, the star who shunned the spotlight
For a woman who never desired the limelight, Silvana Mangano achieved cinematic immortality almost in spite of herself
The little machine with a higher gear than the rest
The intensity he displayed in the saddle was an extension of his personality. He was spiky, surly and could bear a spectacular grudge
The needle through which Europe was threaded
An adventurous romantic life lent almost a Zelig-like quality to the writer, constantly drawing her towards the centre of events