It's not an album without hope and there's plenty of softness and warmth to be found in the fragility and sadness.

The Block is back, but is committing to four nights a week like starting a lengthy prison sentence?

Rachmaninov's Vespers holds a special place in the composer's output, far removed from the popular concertos that reflect his international career as a concert pianist.

With America's heartland falling under the spell of an unlikely saviour, a local revival of Evita couldn't be better timed.

Enso String Quartet still has the freshness and attack that spurred one critic to rationalise the group's smouldering power as half honey and half molten lava.

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling's 70s crime comedy suggests a Tarantino revival of Jake and the Fatman.

Take a bonkers ride into a bizarre and astonishing world of fringe fetish.

Neeme Jarvi and his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande have been immersing themselves in French music lately, with noteworthy albums of Massenet, Chabrier and Offenbach.

It's nww surprise these albums by Bob Dylan (who turned 75 yesterday) and Eric Clapton (71) don't have much, if anything, to do with rock.

Emerging in the 1980s, the Blue Man Group is a curious hybrid of neo-Dadaist happenings blended with acid-house video-lighting effects

Like its predecessor, it's a visually stunning and imaginative film, but fails to woo emotionally.

David Farrier climbed into a story you would never buy if it was fiction.

COMMENT: Doco Why Am I? unravels vast findings from Dunedin study following 1000 babies born in 1972.

COMMENT: Veteran film-maker Bryan Bruce delivered one of NZ's worst hours of television last night, as he took a ''rambling, incoherent" look at NZ's school system.

This is more of an illustrated lecture than a play; our presenters are purportedly two members of the first successful Everest expedition, but we don't really get to know them properly.

Experiencing Stephen Hough's magisterial Brahms Second Piano Concerto brought back a conversation in which the Englishman talked of the power that came from the work's sense of emotional containment.

In contrast to his usual doom-and-gloom, Michael Moore takes a more optimistic path.

Back in 2004, when he was visiting this country, Steven Isserlis told me categorically that Elgar and Walton had written two of the finest cello concertos of the 20th century.

Until last year 'competitive forklift driving' sounded like a TV idea Alan Partridge would have pitched to the BBC's Chief Commissioning Editor along with 'inner-city sumo' and 'monkey tennis'.

James Blake's new album is a spellbinding mixture of glorious vocals and spare electronica, which somehow manages to play in the dark side of life while also remaining light and free

It's no spoiler to say that the title character of this powerfully affecting true-life drama dies at the end.

Anohni here fully embraces her femininity and leaps straight into brittle and often dazzlingly appropriate electronica.

The crux of the game is shooting demons and running out of ammo. Constantly.

Much of it is awfully familiar, this isn't quite as inventive a period piece as the franchise was in previous decades.

R&R and Back Benches are seriously entertaining - but you need commitment to catch them, writes Duncan Greive.

Eve de Castro-Robinson introduced her Karlheinz Company programme as music that was vivid, visceral and singular.

This Tadpole production is an endearing tale of marital betrayal, more entertaining than one might expect for a romantic dramedy more than 40 years old.

COMMENT: The sad fact is that, after the events of this week's episode, there isn't any real threat in Game of Thrones at all any more.