With 13,000 advance tickets sold, the first substantial exhibition in Britain of the 17th-century Spanish master Velázquez, which opened yesterday, is certain to be a bigger draw for the National Gallery than any of its previous blockbusters - including Vermeer, Titian and Caravaggio.

But the work that is absorbing devotees of Spain's greatest painter and pre-eminent exponent of baroque is to be found a short distance across London, in the former French embassy building which houses the Wallace Collection. Here resides Velázquez's work Lady with a Fan (c1630-1650), which has been the source of long arguments over the identity of the elegant sitter who betrays the faintest hint of décollete.

The received wisdom is that she is one of the many Spanish courtesans painted by Velázquez during his 43 years as court painter for King Philip IV of Spain.

But a British art historian, Zahira Veliz Bomford, has presented a robust challenge, claiming the subject...

“THE COAST Of UTOPIA,” Tom Stoppard’s sweeping three-part epic that will be populating Lincoln Center for the next six months, contains, among other things: 35 years of 19th-century Russian intellectual history; more than 70 roles; discussions of Hegel, Schelling, Pushkin and Kant; adulterous affairs, both secret and permitted; the revolution of 1848; scenes in Moscow, Paris, Nice, London, under a large chandelier, at a picnic, beside an ice skating rink. It examines the lives, public and domestic, of five forefathers of the Russian Revolution: Alexander Herzen, a writer and pioneering socialist; Mikhail Bakunin, an aristocrat turned anarchist; Ivan Turgenev, a poet and novelist; Nicholas Ogarev, a poet and close friend of Herzen’s; and Vissarion Belinsky, a brilliant literary critic. It also includes their lovers, families, colleagues, antagonists, hangers-on and one ominous, cigar-smoking cat.

Emilio Estevez, once best known for his roles in the Brat Pack movies St Elmo's Fire and The Breakfast Club, has written and directed Bobby, an impressively kaleidoscopic movie about [Robert] Kennedy's assassination. The film is not a reconstruction but the recasting of a certain historical moment, the repercussions of which, it is implied, add up to the present one. (Kennedy was murdered by a Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan, who said he had acted in retaliation against Kennedy's views on Israel.)

SOURCE: Guardian

There can't be many people under 40 for whom the lost convention of the"seventh-term" Oxbridge exam means anything, and even among the over-40s, it isn't exactly a cultural touchstone, like the 11-plus. But until 20 years ago, this was how post-A-level teenagers at top schools prepared for the now abolished entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities: they came back after the summer for one more term of cramming - sometimes in a daringly relaxed, proto-collegiate style - before sitting the papers just before Christmas. It is this arena of callow and precocious learning in which Alan Bennett set his smash-hit 2004 play about a bunch of bright young lads at a Sheffield grammar school, going all out for Oxbridge glory. This has now been turned into a stagey and oddly contrived movie directed by Nick Hytner, with the kind of elaborate, highly worked...

With a cornucopia of sex, politics and religious conflict, the life of Henry VIII seems well suited to dramatization on screen. After all, even in the rollicking 16th century, it is impossible to find another king who had six wives, executed nobles and prelates at a whim and provoked the Vatican into ordering his excommunication.

Yet if high drama seems assured, casting the right actor to play the lead is trickier because, unlike the case with most English monarchs before Queen Victoria, we know exactly what Henry Tudor looked like. And he was no matinee idol. As seen in Hans Holbein’s famous portraits, he was square-headed, bearded and seriously overweight.

In other words, he did not look at all like Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, the handsome 29-year-old Irish actor who is playing Henry in “The Tudors,” Showtime’s 10-part series, currently being filmed in and around here [Dublin] and scheduled to be broadcast in the United States early next year.

“I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong,” the president of the United States is saying peevishly, his mouth puckering into a lemon-sucking moue. “They gave me so much power, why are they surprised I used it?” Care to guess the name of the president in question, who is currently being depicted spewing self-justification from the stage of the Lucille Lortel Theater?

You might be inclined to choose the White House’s current occupant. After all, according to some analysts, George W. Bush has presided over the biggest power grab by the executive branch in American history. And certainly he’s a favorite punching bag of Off and Off Off Broadway theater these days.

But I’m afraid you’d be wrong. The cranky figure braying excuses for his role in the crisis enveloping his country is actually Richard M. Nixon, as portrayed with captivating relish by Gerry Bamman in the MCC Theater revival of Russell Lees’s play “Nixon’s Nixon.”

SOURCE: NYT

The queasily enjoyable fiction film “The Last King of Scotland,” based on the novel by Giles Foden and directed by Kevin Macdonald, creates a portrait of the famous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin from inside the palace walls. Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader’s personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say. The film makes the case that Amin was rational enough to understand his country’s tangled relationship with British imperialism and to inject that sociopolitical understanding into words.

SOURCE: NYT

Writer and director Sofia Coppola puts a new spin on the life and times of one of Europe's most infamous monarchs in this lavish historical drama which fuses a contemporary sensibility with painstaking recreations of the look of the 18th century. Born to Austrian nobility, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is only 14 years old when she's pledged to marry Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), the 15-year-old king of France, in an alliance that has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with love. Sent to France and literally stripped of her former life, Marie weds Louis, but to the consternation of the royal court, he seems either unwilling or unable to consummate the marriage while their advisors clamor for an heir to the throne. (News Story: Historians Blast Kirsten Dunst's 'Marie Antoinette')

Few things in a democracy are more sacrosanct than the right to vote, and in his furious documentary “American Blackout,” Ian Inaba assembles compelling evidence to support his claim that African-Americans — who are traditionally more likely to vote Democratic — are being deliberately and systematically excluded from the political process. Interviewing Congressional leaders, journalists and regular voters, Mr. Inaba begins by addressing the Florida debacle of 2000, arguing that behind the exhaustive coverage of hanging chads and faulty voting machines lies an underreported and more complex story of black disenfranchisement. In a strong middle section, the movie examines the political troubles of Representative Cynthia McKinney, a vocal critic of the Bush administration, suggesting that her ouster in 2002 was engineered by Republican crossover voting. A particularly powerful segment shows how at least one of Ms. McKinney’s statements about the Sept. 11 attacks was edited by some...