RICHARD MURGATROYD is intrigued by a study that asks why the ability to diagnose outstrips the ability to cure
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Cold comfort farm
MARIA DUARTE sees a drama about a fraught rural family that's raw, visceral and relentlessly bleak
SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a sweeping survey of the world's biggest desert and the people who live there
MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray
The Bard commutes to work for the first time in 45 years
DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead
GEORGE FOGARTY relishes the music of black British artists that channels Carribbean, Latin and club sounds, along with contemporary west African radicalism
Dark River (15)
Directed by Clio Barnard
AFTER the evocative The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, Clio Barnard returns with a searing and grim Yorkshire drama about sibling rivalry, the effects of child abuse and burying the past, juxtaposed with a rural community in decline.
Inspired by Rose Tremain's novel Trespass, it stars the outstanding Ruth Wilson as Alice, a contract sheep shearer. Following the death of her father (Sean Bean), she returns to the family farm on the Yorkshire Dales for the first time in 15 years to claim the tenancy she believes is rightfully hers.
Her older brother Joe (Mark Stanley) is furious because he has been the one managing the farm in the meantime — and running it into the ground — while taking care of their dying father.
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