The Secret Agent

From 20 February 

Set during the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, The Secret Agent is a dynamite political thriller from Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Wanted by police for crimes unknown, research scientist Armando Solimoes (Wagner Moura) abandons his home in São Paulo and heads for Recife, in Brazil’s tropical northeast, where his son has been living since the death of his wife. Taken in at a home for political refugees by ahellip;

As he turns 90, Don McCullin has been drawn into reflection. People want to hear from the British photographer – he rejects both labels ‘war photographer’ and ‘artist’ – who survived a gun battle in El Salvador, was imprisoned by the Idi Amin dictatorship in Uganda, and used his camera as a shield under fire during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. His six-decade career has passed through, and recorded, the Bogside gassing in Northern Ireland;hellip;

In photographer Thibaut Grevet’s New York City Ballet Art Series commission, the images are structured in phases – “as a dance is” – moving through preparation, repetition, performance, rest. Each has its own visual language; close crops of a dancer’s focused face; full-lengths of soloists beating limbs; group shots with breezy serpentine asymmetry; and, when colour enters, bodies absorb the chemical yellow of mercuryhellip;

1. Who is it? Lou de Bètoly is a Berlin-based label founded by French designer Odély Teboul
2. Why do I want it? Utilising embroidery, crochet and knitwear, the brand produces couture-inspired upcycled pieces that have a dark, sensual edge
3. Where can I find it? Lou de Bètoly is available to shop via APOC,

It’s been 40 years since Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, beginning his crusade to make scrappy, personal, romantic and boisterous cinema. It’s fitting for a director who first broke out in the 1990s “Indiewood” boom that his latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is an origin story of cinema’s enfant terrible par excellence, Jean-Luc Godard, mounting his iconic debut film Breathless. As Linklater’s first non-English film, Nouvelle Vague feels like ahellip;

Early in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s breezy, black-and-white homage to the making of Breathless, there’s a shot of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows reflecting in the sunglasses of Jean-Luc Godard – a man who famously (almost) never removed his prescription specs, even in the cinema. His mates Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Truffaut have all had their chance to direct, and now Godard is champing at the bit.hellip;

There’s a passage in Ocean Vuong’s second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, where Hai, the troubled protagonist on the verge of personal collapse, finds some temporary balm in the pages of a Diane Arbus photo book. Though Vuong’s novels are only vaguely autobiographical, some details bear more than a passing likeness to reality. As a teenager who enjoyed photographing the localhellip;

One Saturday afternoon back in 2014, Tash Walker was midway through a shift at Switchboard, the UK’s national LGBTQIA+ support line, when their curiosity was piqued. Taking a break from answering calls, Walker wriggled into a crawlspace above the common room that was being used as a makeshift storage area. Here, Walker discovered the charity’s log books: pages and pages of call records written up by volunteers between 1975 and 2003. Collectively, they offered an evocativehellip;

The earliest jewellery ever discovered wasn’t gold or gemstone at all, but fish bones. In prehistoric times, hunters wore bones, teeth and claws from their kills as talismans of luck and prowess. For Italian shoe maestro Giuseppe Zanotti – famous for his sculptural, jewel-encrusted heels – this idea of turning humble scraps into ornamentation has long been second nature; during a seaside dinner in 2004, Zanotti sketched a fish skeleton on a tablecloth.hellip;

The haute couture is a splendid paradox. The same garments can be perceived as expressive of utmost intimacy or absolute spectacle, an innately private pleasure or a public declaration – of aesthetics, value systems, even just largesse. Generally, a couture house pitches itself on one side of those great divides, but Alessandro Michele decided to embrace those contradictions, staging his Valentino show as a remarkable,hellip;

An ant-infested ear lying nestled in the grass; a pair of tweezers slipping beneath the fingernail of a lifeless hand; a red-eyed, scorched-faced figure lurking behind a diner dumpster. Before he was a filmmaker, David Lynch was a painter and, if you’re familiar with his esoteric filmmaking practice – peppered as it is with some of cinema’s most indelible imagery – it all makes a lot of sense. A year after the auteur’s passing, a newlyhellip;

A young mother gets in her car from rural Vermont and drives through the night to New York to find a woman she’s become obsessed with online. This is the basic plotline for Makenna Goodman’s debut novel, The Shame, which some people transposed onto Goodman herself, a young mother living on a homestead in rural Vermont. The book (not autofiction, before you ask) is deeply concerned with what kind of a life we allow ourselves tohellip;

Anthony Vaccarello shows his Saint Laurent menswear collections in a space formerly occupied by the Bourse de Commerce, the stock market of Paris. Which is fitting, in a way, because those clothes always toy with the archetypes and stereotypes of men’s dress, rigid and rigorous tailoring, concealing – with varying degrees of success – a bubbling core of sexuality beneath their grain de poudrehellip;

1. Who is it? Ssstein is the ready-to-wear label from Japanese designer Kiichiro Asakawa
2. Why do I want it? Warm, unisex tailoring that honours movement, memory, and the poetry of the everyday
3. Where can I find it? Ssstein is available via the brand’s website and through select

What is haute couture? It’s an existential, philosophical question that always arises around this fashion as art form, an anachronism in our modern world. Why does couture persist? Why should it exist? It’s something designers are grappling with this week, not least Matthieu Blazy in his Chanel haute couture debut. For him, couture is about intimacy, privacy, and an impossible, almost unbearable lightness. Couture is about doing what has neverhellip;