Vanessa Bell, MK Gallery review - diving into and out of abstraction

★★★★ VANESSA BELL, MK GALLERY The Bloomsbury artist breaks free from Victorian mores

A variation of styles as the Bloomsbury artist breaks free from Victorian mores

The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.

Blu-ray: Crumb

Terry Zwigoff's landmark, cracked family portrait of misanthropic comix genius R Crumb

Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.

Extract: Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair

EXTRACT: PARIAH GENIUS, BY IAIN SINCLAIR The troubled mindscape of a Soho photographer

A form-defying writer explores the troubled mindscape of a Soho photographer

Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, alongisde the likes of Ed Dorn and J. H. Prynne, but his work resists easy categorisation at every turn. Reality shudders against and into its incarnation as fiction; documentary is riddled with the imagination’s brilliant glare; genre-bounds are ruinously questioned. Poetry, biography, film, essay: each form ghosts the next in restless disarray.

DVD/Blu-Ray: Priscilla

★★★★ DVD/BLU-RAY: PRISCILLA Disc extras smartly contextualise Sofia Coppola's eighth feature

The disc extras smartly contextualise Sofia Coppola's eighth feature

There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just confronted him about a letter she found from the actress Ann-Margret, confirming her suspicion that the King of Rock'n'Roll has been unfaithful. Elvis's legs in their white trousers tower before her like the pillars of Graceland.

Spencer Jones: Making Friends, Soho Theatre review - award-winning comedian mines his post-lockdown escape to the country

★★ SPENCER JONES: MAKING FRIENDS, SOHO THEATRE Quirky, personal and absurd

If big chickens scare you, this is your thing!

Lockdown feels more like a dream now: empty streets; bright, scarless skies; pan-banging at 8pm. Did it all happen? One part of our brains insists that it did; another resists such an overthrowing of what it means to be human. Try recalling events of 2019, 2020 and 2021, and you’ll find them hazy, ill-defined and you reach for a phrase I say more often than I ought, “I don’t know whether it was before or after the pandemic…”

DVD/Blu-ray: Padre Pio

Shia LaBeouf stars in Abel Ferrara's latest grungy spiritual quest, earthed by landscape and politics

Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political period film set in his adopted land.

Richard Schoch: Shakespeare's House review - nothing ill in such a temple

Scholar makes the Bard's house a home in his history of dramatic domesticity

Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously proclaiming truly never-before-seen revelations – I suggest patience. Schoch is aware of the balance that writing this kind of book demands. He also has the sort of well-oiled experience that reassures us of a pair of safe hands.

Adam Sisman: The Secret Life of John le Carré review - tinker, tailor, soldier, cheat

Catalogue of the author’s infidelities doesn’t quite feel justified

This book is quite a sad read. I had been looking forward to it, as a posthumous supplement to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré/David Cornwell, which, at the time, quite clearly drew a discreet veil over his later private life. But the central section of the new book is little more than a catalogue of Cornwell’s many, many affairs, which is repetitive, a bit tawdry, and hard to find the will to plough through.