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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Sue Steward's rating
Reader rating
Description: Classic images from the 20th century, including photographs by Annie Leibovitz and Cecil Beaton.
Phone: 0207312 2463
Website: www.npg.org.uk
Trains: Tube: Leicester Square; Rail: Charing Cross 
, Tube / Bus: 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 23, 24, 29, 53, 77A, 88 
Extra info: Pub, Telephones, Party Hire, Food, Air Conditioning
Naked truth: Actress Julianne Moore poses for Michael Thompson's Maja
Cry Woolf: This picture of Virginia Woolf, taken in 1924, is on show
Hollywood glamour: Gloria Swanson, captured in 1924
Launched in New York in 1913, Vanity Fair rapidly became the most intelligent fashion magazine in the world: a beautiful, stylish window on the stars of the century's new movements in cinema, art, music, literature and science.
This irresistible exhibition follows portrait photography through its changes - technical and aesthetic - from small, hand-printed studio shots to today's complex operations with huge budgets.
Vanity Fair's first resident photographer, Edward Steichen, dominates the exhibition's early years, 1913-36. He was an exhilarating stylist who reveals in his lighting and compositions influences from modernist movements.
The show's early portraits offer fascinating insights into legends - a youthful Einstein, D H Lawrence and Chaplin, a surprisingly dandy James Joyce - but, inevitably, Hollywood dominates.
The surprisingly tender moments in Nickolas Muray's beach scene with Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Joan Crawford in 1929 is matched by Bruce Weber's collusion with playwright Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange, nose-kissing in a garden, more than half a century later.
The possibilities of colour explode in the late Thirties, with Steichen's tableaux at Radio City Music Hall.
His leaping dancers in acid-sharp colours pioneered the use of centrefolds. Once the magazine resumed publishing - it had ceased from 1936 to 1983 - there was a rebirth, with Annie Liebowitz assuming Steichen's role, and new epic scales and sophisticated scenarios.
Liebowitz's tableaux and themed groups (of big-shot directors and Hollywood legends) are intriguing, but elsewhere the magazine edges towards the risqué and erotic, with new surnameonly-celebrity photographers: Penn, Newton, Weber, Ritts, Meisel.
Mario Testino's shot (1997) of Princess Diana epitomises a perennial love of timeless elegance, while Liebowitz's pregnant Demi Moore was a deserving bestseller.
Balancing these are the occasional photojournalists acting as time-markers, like Jonas Karlsson's fire-fighters at Ground Zero, conflating glamour and heroism.
Representing the blatant art - historical line, Michael Thompson's Maja - with Julianne Moore naked on a bed amid sumptuous silks - is an irresistible reference to the great portrait painters who fill the galleries around this unmissable exhibition.
• Until 26 May. Information: 020 7312 2643, www.npg.org.uk
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
