VENICE — The Venice Biennale – art’s forever fraught answer to the Olympics – provides a precious opportunity to take the culture’s temperature and speculate on where things are headed. It’s where the art world announces new talent, revives becalmed careers and, just as often, submerges dreams of stardom in lagoons of indifference. This year’s […]

Burdened by mountains of debt, Nicolas Cage spent much of the last 15 years saying yes to just about any offer. He appeared in some 50 films, at least half of which were low-budget, direct-to-video schlock that typically vanished into the single digits of Rotten Tomatoes reviews. Yet Cage remained Cage, outrageous and outsize, strutting […]

The new East Wing drama, “The First Lady,” exists to illustrate a fact most of us intuitively know: The women asked to play hostess, decorator, fashion plate and champion for unobjectionable causes as part of each administration’s political theater tend to be much more interesting and complicated than the manicured images they project. That’s certainly […]

“The Northman,” an ambitious deep dive into 10th-century Viking myth by Robert Eggers, is many movies at once: Bold and beautiful, bloody and completely bonkers, it marks a visionary and visceral high point in the post-“Game of Thrones” action-fantasy sweepstakes, whose main metric of success seems to be packing in as many beheadings, blood feuds […]

Ocean House Gallery & Frame has moved to South Portland, and Mayo Street Arts has reopened after renovations.

A spring show at the Met features Homer’s works that are centered along the Gulf Stream include themes of race relations in the post-Civil War era.