Miss and the Doctors

MISS AND THE DOCTORS A slight but likeable dramedy about a pair of brothers pursuing the same woman

A slight but likeable dramedy about a pair of brothers pursuing the same woman

This low-budget Parisian dramedy about doctor-patient relations is as odd, timid and well-intentioned as its socially maladjusted protagonists. Miss and the Doctors is writer-director Axelle Ropert's second feature after 2009's The Wolberg Family.

The Past

THE PAST Asghar Farhadi delivers a typically thrilling family drama starring Bérénice Bejo

Asghar Farhadi delivers a typically thrilling family drama starring Bérénice Bejo

It's not often we're told to strap ourselves in for a drama - it takes quite some skill to make the everyday excite and to make ordinary lives seem extraordinary, but these are gifts that the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has in abundance.

Le docteur Miracle, Pop-up Opera, The Running Horse

Bizet's culinary operetta with random seasoning, no elixir and no meat

An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances.

The Brits Who Built the Modern World, BBC Four / The Man Who Fought the Planners, BBC Four

STARCHITECTS AND A MAVERICK Two five-star architecture documentaries on BBC Four

Tales from the starchitects, and a tribute to a brilliant maverick, Ian Nairn

There really was astonishing talent on display in The Brits Who Built the Modern World (*****), as full a television panorama of the work of the five architects whose careers were under examination – Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, Michael Hopkins and Terry Farrell – as we’re ever likely to get.

Lift to the Scaffold

LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD Atmospheric and tense Miles Davis-scored French film noir which anticipated the New Wave

Atmospheric and tense Miles Davis-scored French film noir which anticipated the New Wave

A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.

Daumier: Visions of Paris, Royal Academy

TAD AT 5 - ON VISUAL ART: DAUMIER: VISIONS OF PARIS, ROYAL ACADEMY An exhilarating survey of the French caricaturist and painter

An exhilarating survey of the French caricaturist and painter

From Hogarth through to Gillray and Cruikshank, it was Georgian England that gave rise to a graphic tradition of satire. The powerful were lampooned and the pretensions and avarice of the upper and aspiring classes duly ridiculed. But the poor did not escape moral censure. Far from it. Then as now we had the virtuous and the feckless poor, and it was the love of gin that often bought the latter down.

theartsdesk Q&A: Writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell

THEARTSDESK Q&A: WRITER HANIF KUREISHI AND DIRECTOR ROGER MICHELL Their 20-year collaboration has yielded three films about getting on. Next up, Le Week-end

Their 20-year collaboration has yielded three films about getting on. Next up, Le Week-end

The careers of writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell are indelibly linked, with a collaboration that has now lasted 20 years. In 1993 Michell, then an accomplished theatre director who was relatively new to the camera, directed Kureishi’s adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia for the BBC, with great success.

DVD: Simon Killer

An American in Paris gets up to no good, but uninvolvingly

Arriving in Paris from New York after graduating from university and splitting with his girlfriend, Simon has no idea what he’s going to do there beyond trying to find the focus lost during the break-up. What he actually does is the subject of Simon Killer, an unsettling, atmospheric yet not wholly satisfying second film as director from Antonio Campos, the producer of the more-recent Martha Marcy May Marlene, which also featured Brady Corbet. Simon Killer was devised while that was being completed.

La Bohème, Longborough Festival

LA BOHÈME, LONGBOROUGH FESTIVAL Puccini's concise masterpiece flourishes as Wagner's expansive one did in intimate surroundings

Puccini's concise masterpiece flourishes as Wagner's expansive one did in intimate surroundings

Having spent most of the summer on Wagner’s Ring, Longborough are now giving, as a kind of bergamasque, an opera whose entire length would fit into the first act of Götterdämmerung. La Bohème is everything The Ring is not. It is concise, melodious, playful, sentimental and weepy. Yet oddly enough, it could never have been written without Wagner. Puccini’s ears were open to every kind of influence, and quick to transform everything into a personal expression.

Prom 4: Les Siècles, Roth

PROM 4: LES SIÉCLES, ROTH Fresh and light approach to nearly 250 years of ballet music in Paris

Fresh and light approach to nearly 250 years of ballet music in Paris

You can get away with playing ballet music of the Ancien Régime on Bastille Day so long as you end with a revolution. That was how live wire François-Xavier Roth and his mostly French musicians angled it, covering nearly 250 years of Parisian dance premieres on their way to the Proms centenary performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Roth promised surprises in heading back to Stravinsky’s 1913 autograph manuscript, but those mostly came in the last minute, and plenty of other novelties delighted on the way to the sacrifice.