Coming Attractions
Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.
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The Arts Fuse Currents
Music
Pianist Jonathan Biss and the Brentano String Quartet animated Dvořák, Haydn, and Beethoven with emotional urgency and tonal finesse.
Visual Arts
A Provincetown exhibition pairs data and aesthetics to reveal how artists and scientists alike are driven to understand—and protect—the ocean’s shifting world.
Film
The power of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s film stems from its deep repugnance at an acceptance of the aesthetic and moral poverty of dictatorship.
Books
Denise Kiernan’s accessible book restores the often overlooked figures who shaped America’s founding.
Poetry at The Arts Fuse
This week’s poem: Joe Elliot’s “after No Other Land”
Dance
Shakia Barron’s “The Gathering” transforms the stage into a shared space of rhythm, improvisation, and release.
Theater
Despite striking choreography and a tour-de-force lead, the A.R.T.’s adaptation of Black Swan can’t escape the film’s excesses—or its own thin score.
Television
In the series “Alice and Steve,” Nicola Walker anchors a dark comedy that’s less about laughs than about longing, aging, and emotional dysfunction.
Podcasts
Host Elizabeth Howard moderates a conversation about whether the arts can provoke, reflect, and sustain cultural dialogue in a period of disruption and transformation.
Short Fuses
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Spotlight
About the Arts Fuse
The Arts Fuse was established in June, 2007 as a curated, independent online arts magazine dedicated to publishing in-depth criticism, along with high quality previews, interviews, and commentaries. The publication's over 70 freelance critics (many of them with decades of experience) cover dance, film, food, literature, music, television, theater, video games, and visual arts. Support arts coverage that believes that culture matters.
Arts Commentary: The Kennedy Center and the Boston Symphony Orchestra — A Tale of Two Crises
A court-ordered reset in Washington and a self-inflicted rupture in Boston expose deeper failures of leadership, transparency, and trust.