Review

Ivo van Hove, the Bowie collaborator with a taste for the spectacular, returns with a timely, bloody war epic at the Barbican

A definitive, exhaustive exhibition of the Renaissance artist is a once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster of a show

A new Netflix film is a worthy and sometimes dazzling new addition to the canon of horrifying ballet depictions

A play about Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole is hectoring and polemical rather than a serious examination of a character and her motivations

Bertie Carvel triumphs as Trump very much in spite of Mike Bartlett’s script, rather than because of it

The latest – and last? – novel by Michel Houellebecq, France’s most controversial writer, takes on politics

New album Hair of the Dog captures something of our primitive selves who looked for expression of our hopes, desires and search for new beginnings through the sound of a beat

A new exhibition celebrates - and questions - the brief flowering of creativity in 1960s Lebanon

Netflix's new Amsterdam-set drama addresses the potential tedium of over-familiarity with sex, as well as its liberatory capacities

I, Claudius is remembered as a BBC classic, but it started a trend for historical European-set dramas with extra helpings of sex and violence

Great set design created high expectations for this drama and it failed to live up to them

This production has promise but becomes a little too surreal when actors clown around to reveal a fearful reality

This version adapted for younger audiences portrays the Shakespeare classic without patronising viewers while keeping adults entertained at the same time

The National Gallery’s new Raphael exhibition hints at where the artist’s talent might have led him had he not died young

Deprived of the opportunity of having collaborators in the studio, the Danish experimental electronic chamber pop band have self-produced their new album

A collection of artworks all have one thing in common: it only takes paste or Sellotape to make public the anger, horror and pity felt at events in Ukraine

This Welsh detective drama is a restorative tonic to the kind of frantic television seen elsewhere

An exhibition at Bodleian Library traces 600 years of Anglo-Dutch history through beautiful medieval manuscripts, prints, maps and animal stories

The surprising European roots of stories like Beauty And The Beast reach back to the Bronze Age

The unexpectedly timely Postwar Modern at the Barbican showcases the ability of refugee artists to create great work after escaping conflict

A new museum dedicated to the Swedish dance star has more in common with its earnest predecessors than at first seems the case

The Johnny Hallyday who took the Albert Hall stage one night 10 years ago was the culmination of 50 years of myth-making

The actual stand-up in Netflix's new dramedy is rarely as funny as it is supposed to be, but the characters are so vivid it barely matters

Ruth Wilson is a serious actor, but this is a singularly boring piece of theatre

In Testament, an exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, contemporary artists have set about ripping up the traditional concept of statues

The Norwegian singer's new album is an undeniably dreamlike, immersive experience

A Netflix biopic of the woman considered Poland's Marilyn Monroe fails to delve in any satisfying way into the interesting story it has to tell

Reasonably daring when first performed in 2009, Mike Bartlett's Cock now feels all mouth and no trousers

A former journalist’s debut novel explores our fascination with the partners of dictators

The German version of Netflix's hit makeover series looks cheaper and more like a world I can recognise, says MEGAN NOLAN

The National's staging of Small Island shows a theatre that has now totally lost its way

Max Webster's production revels in warfare when his audiences are sick to death of it