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.
Read the Latest
The Arts Fuse Currents
Music
Singer Caroll Vanwelden’s “Shakespeare Revisited” brings a flexible voice and adventurous textures to the sonnets, but its melodies and production too often overwhelm the poetry.
Visual Arts
Three international artists add new granite works to the New Hampshire sculpture park, continuing a tradition of creative freedom, community support, and art in the landscape.
Film
Julia Loktev’s six-hour portrait of exiled TV Rain journalists headlined a festival program along with a tale set in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s corrupt provincial Russia and Emmanuel Marre’s understated study of collaboration under Nazi occupation.
Books
In this ambitious Czech novel, a detective’s inquiry into an apparent suicide becomes a meditation on violence against women, historical memory, and the possibility of joy.
Poetry at The Arts Fuse
The week’s poem: Josette Akresh-Gonzales’s “Cop City”
Dance
The Boston dance community is reeling.
Theater
A satirical musical that offends everyone equally hides its real argument until the final minutes.
Television
Ed Perkins’s documentary finds a fascinating story in America’s 2016 creepy-clown craze, then buries it beneath sweeping analogies and frantic editing.
Podcasts
Guest host Jessica Khan talks to DJ and broadcaster Kwame Daniels about his immersive live musical performance, “North Star.”
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: Superman, Spider-Man, and the American Art of Slugging Nazis
William Nicholas Love’s punch heard round the internet belongs to a long comic-book history of fighting homegrown fascism—from Captain America to “The Clan of the Fiery Cross.”