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It is never a great sign when a local authority is forced to comment on a music festival. The opening night of the In The Park series of shows at Newcastle's Exhibition Park forced such a reaction from the city council, after claims of overcrowding to see headliner Lewis Capaldi perform, on a day of sweltering heat. Nothing amiss was found according to the council, and by this night, the final one in the series of shows, there were thankfully no issues to cause concern.

The first word of The Iliad is “war”; the first word of The Odyssey is “man”. After that, the twists and turns of Homer’s epic poems veer in wildly different directions. It’s fitting, then, that cinematic adaptations are multi-faceted, too.

In a similar vein to 2024’s Mercury-nominated album Silence is Loud, Nia Archives' latest offering is an appealing blend of jungle and pop. It’s a strange concoction but a successful one. In case you don’t know, Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt is Yorkshire born DJ and singer-songwriter known for melding genres.

The Arts Desk

Ana Mendieta’s work gives me the creeps. This is a deeply unfashionable view, so much so that I may well be cancelled for it. Mendieta is so highly regarded that The Guardian devoted a four-page feature to her while their art critic Jonathan Jones gave her Tate Modern exhibition a five-star review. For me the job of a critic is to be as honest as possible and, although I would love to like her work, it – or rather, the work for which she is most revered – makes me cringe. But more of that later.

There’s a long and rich tradition of scabrous indie rock lyricism from Yorkshire. Sheffield’s Jarvis Cocker and Alex Turner tend to get the plaudits, but the particular kind of gimlet-eyed social observation and pub philosopher’s knack for a toothsome phrase can be found from Hull (Paul Heaton) to Rotherham (Rebecca Lucy Taylor), and Todmorden (Sydney Minsky-Sargeant of Working Men’s Club).

American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a

Dismemberment is a key motif in the writer-director Simon Stone’s The Oresteia. It reflects the treatment of two of the piece’s several dead bodies, as is hinted at when their killer is asked where he buried them. “Many places,” he replies coolly. And it’s what Stone himself has done with his ancient source material,

Buxton’s summer jamboree for opera lovers this year offers a brace of baroque works, written 90 years apart, with the character of sorceress as their common feature.Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula was one of the string of Italian operas created by him for London shortly after his arrival in Britain. First seen in 1715, it has four soloists only and the conventional unities of time and place – though early performances were apparently given with spectacular stage effects.

The man who made Interstellar, Tenet and Oppenheimer can hardly be accused of not thinking big. Now, with The Odyssey, he’s thinking epic. Clocking in at a whisker under three hours and peppered with bankable stars, Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s imperishable poem is a bold attempt to recreate the ancient world of the 12th Century BC, with its gods, monsters and all. And it's the first feature film to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras.