Every band has to make sacrifices to make a career out of their music, but Kings of Leon’s story is perhaps more arduous than most. Living out of an ’88 Oldsmobile throughout a nomadic, itinerant youth; firing up a southern-rock group with your two brothers; pilfering your cousin from the very bosom of his Mississippi home and making him play bass, just to appease the stipulations of your record company. Fast-forward eleven years, and if your band, forged in such humble beginnings, was playing to sixty-five thousand revellers in London’s Hyde Park, what would your reaction be?

The final note of ‘Black Thumbnail’ has just rung out, and as his fellow band-members saunter off stage, Caleb Followill lingers behind, soaking up every last second of the scene before him. It’s just past ten, and a crimson sun is setting behind a rapt audience, his audience, every mouth screaming and every pair of hands clapping for his band.

The Kings played not only the headliner role, but also that of party organisers for their Hyde Park show. Yet despite a plethora of talented, upbeat sets from the likes of The Drums and The Black Keys, it was a relatively tepid atmosphere not in keeping with the stifling Wednesday heat which greeted the late afternoon warm-up acts.

Yet the semi-apathetic throng becomes a baying horde as KOL emerge from behind what appears to be a wall of crushed cars, before launching into the bass-laden ebb of ‘Crawl’. Caleb, sporting a Springsteen-esque light-blue denim jacket with an extravagant American flag on the back, then proceeds to creakily bleat out ‘Taper Jean Girl’ and ‘My Party’.

The Kings could perhaps be criticised for sticking to their most recognisable material, as a ravaging rendition of ‘Molly’s Chambers’ is followed by more tempered, slower performances of ‘Fans’ and ‘Milk’. Any slight disparagement I flirt with, however, is roundhouse-kicked to the floor by KOL treating us, in typical hot-headed fashion (and against the wishes of their management), to four new songs, ‘Immortals’, ‘Radioactive’, ‘Mary’ and ‘Southbound’, which seem akin to the arena-rock overtones of current album ‘Only By The Night’. The band also chooses to cover the Pixies track ‘Where Is My Mind?’

A pause, and then Matthew nonchalantly starts picking the instantly recognisable riff of ‘Sex On Fire’. There’s a rib-breaking surge forward, and a deafening, sixty-five thousand strong bellowing of the chorus. Jared pouts and swings his hips through ‘Notion’, sunglasses hanging from the neck of his T-shirt, and the Kings encore with a wailing recital of ‘Use Somebody’ and the ear-pounding ‘Black Thumbnail’, to rapturous appreciation.

Caleb flings his guitar picks into the audience, and stares disbelievingly at the legions of the Kings’ adoring subjects. A short while later, Nathan is updating his Twitter page. “London, you cheeky bastards,” he quips, “you just gave us the highlight of our career.” And the highlight of my summer, too.

Last weekend the General Synod of the Church of England met to discuss the issue of women’s eligibility as bishops. Last weekend, newspaper headlines featured the appointment of openly homosexual cleric Dr. Jeffrey John as a nominee for the position of Bishop of Southwark. Last weekend, Drew Pautz’s play Love the Sinner closed after its successful two month run at the National Theatre. The National’s timing could not have been more appropriate in featuring the world premiere of Pautz’s play on the conflict within the Anglican church, as its leaders internationally grapple with the Church’s stance on homosexuality.

The play opens at a conference in an unnamed African country, with African church leaders denouncing the liberal policies of the Western Church, American Anglicans championing the Church ‘evolving’ with the times and a bearded Englishman, obliquely referred to as ‘Your Grace’, refusing to take a side. The story unfolds with a member of the Church conference having a homosexual encounter with a young African man who then turns up in London demanding asylum from the persecution he faces in Africa due to his sexuality. The experience of seeing Pautz’s play at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre was both riveting and refreshingly sympathetic to all the distinct voices and opinions present in the questions of the Church’s role throughout the world.

In a period when theatre is rising to address the issues sensationalized daily by the media, with examples ranging from the London success and New York failure of Enron: the Musical to the mixed response to David Hare’s commissioned play The Power of Yes on the current financial crisis, it is increasingly rare to find a piece of politically and socially relevant theatre that treats all perspectives as respectfully and artistically as Drew Pautz’s work. While I am eagerly anticipating Pautz’s next piece, Love the Sinner succeeded for me most in presenting a model of theatre with a social function that can gain recognition in London and beyond, perhaps even in Oxford.

In a university setting dominated by endless reprisals of Shakespeare’s canon, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Chekhov’s depressed families, I wonder if Oxford’s thesps can be inspired by the young Pautz to produce their own versions of socially relevant theatre. Yes, we’ve all applauded Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and Churchill’s multiple dissections of gender roles, but Pautz’s play appears to have provided more than just another politicized approach to discussing the meta-theatricality of theatre and performance itself. Didn’t Ibsen, Shaw and even Shakespeare write their masterpieces on the pressing social, political and ethical challenges of their times? I would challenge Oxford playwrights to do the same: pick up a newspaper and write a play based on a headline.

An upcoming OUDS production is already leading the way: Frank McGuiness’ play Carthaginians is being staged 4^th week of Michaelmas in the O’Reilly Theatre and echoes The National’s timing with Love the Sinner with its retelling of the events of Bloody Sunday in the wake of the Saville report from this June. I hope we can see many more similiar departures from the standard fare of Oxford drama in the future.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a French composer, organist, teacher, ornithologist, and synaesthete. Although he has yet to enter the mainstream, among musicians his reputation soars higher than the upper register of his instrument. And a year-long festival of his music, held in 2008 in venues across London to mark the centenary of his birth, at last earned him some popular recognition.

Messiaen is the only major composer in history whose style has never been closely imitated. One reason for this is the curious tonality of his music. Like most of his avant-garde contemporaries, Messiaen generally did not compose in major and minor keys. Yet unlike them, he chose not to join Arnold Schoenberg’s then-fashionable school of atonal “serialism”. He instead devised his own “modes of limited transposition”: jarring, luminous scales that had no harmonic precedent in Western music, and which he all but trademarked.

These scales are one of the features behind the “colourfulness” of Messiaen’s music. As a synaesthete, Messiaen “experienced” colours (though he emphasised that he did not perceive them visually) upon hearing certain harmonies, and cited Mozart, Wagner and Stravinsky as particularly “colourful” composers. By associating each of his modes with a different hue, he effectively “painted” his music. And often on gigantic canvases. Just listen to the skyscraping opening theme of the Turangalîla-Symphonie (1948), or to La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1969), a piece scored for one hundred and eighteen instruments and a ten-part choir.

Though a devout Roman Catholic, Messiaen did not write conventional liturgical music. Instead, he studied Japanese gagaku, Indonesian gamelan, and Hindu and ancient Greek rhythms, and was inspired by the unusual colours and birdsongs of Bryce Canyon in Utah to compose his orchestral piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles (1974). Encouraged by his teacher (the composer Paul Dukas) to “listen to the birds”, Messiaen would embark on solitary nature walks, transcribing birdsong as he went. These strolls resulted in the Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1958) for solo piano, a collection of thirteen tone poems based on the songs of thirteen different birds. Even when writing religious music, he overlooked all the doom and gloom in the Christian tradition in favour of extolling with messianic joy the figure of Christ. Typical is the title of the organ piece Transports de Joie d’une Âme devant la Gloire du Christ qui est la Sienne (1933), which translates as “Ecstasies of a Soul before the Glory of Christ, which is its own Glory”.

One of Messiaen’s works stands apart from the others. Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941), the “Quartet for the End of Time”, is remarkable for the circumstances of its composition. Working as a medic in the French army during World War II, Messiaen was captured by the Germans and imprisoned at the camp Stalag VIII-A. Among his fellow prisoners he found a clarinettist, a cellist and a violinist; with himself as pianist, he assembled an unconventional quartet and composed the Quatuor. The premiere was given on a freezing January day in 1941, before an audience of prisoners and guards, and the piano which Messiaen had received from the Nazis was out of tune and missing keys. The composer later recalled of the occasion, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”

Throughout his later career, Messiaen supplemented his composer’s income by teaching and serving as the organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris. Yet – drawing inspiration from his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod – he continued to compose. Of his late works, the oddly static Saint François d’Assise (1983) is notable for being his longest and calmest work as well as his only opera. It is a fitting coda to a totally unpredictable career, which ended in 1992 with Messiaen’s death by very old age.

On Friday, Christopher Nolan’s Inception hits our screens and sees Leonardo DiCaprio star alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page. But if you can’t wait until then to see DiCaprio’s long-awaited return to the silver screen, then this week Film4 might just be your saving grace. To celebrate the eagerly anticipated release, Film4 are showing the four iconic films that catapulted DiCaprio into the limelight in which he basks today.

At 7.20pm on Wednesday 14th July , ‘DiCaprio Week’ opens with Titanic; the film which marked the birth of an icon. Straight after at 11pm, This Boy’s Life proves that DiCaprio can also do small and interesting. It’s a film in which some critics claim he ‘very nearly out-acts De Niro’. On Thursday 15th July there is an 11.45pm offering of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. This film is not only Shakespeare at its most dynamic but Craig Armstrong also offers us one of the most poignant musical scores ever composed. The saga concludes on Friday 16th July at 10.45pm with Scorsese’s Gangs of New York: messy, powerful and triumphant.

But this is not the end, my friends. Film4 somehow managed to secure an exclusive interview with DiCaprio himself. Aired on Wednesday 14th July, he reflects on both his past career and his latest epic Inception which, I’m sure, will be another blockbuster under his already bulging belt.

To go into the cinema knowing next to nothing about a film is a rare thing indeed these days; even rarer if the film in question is one of the biggest of the year, both in length and cost (148 minutes and $200 million respectively), with a huge cast of familiar and, in general, really really ridiculously good-looking stars. Yet though Inception is perhaps the summer’s most anticipated film, hardly any plot details have been available in the run-up to its release. The trailers have been cryptic, the posters more so, while the writer/director Christopher Nolan has refused to reveal anything remotely resembling a spoiler in interviews, smiling that he likes to ‘keep things a little close to the chest.’ Such extraordinary secrecy is with very good reason – not only does it ensure that the film itself is a surprise (and an extraordinary one at that), but the plot is so ambitious, so utterly balls-to-the-wall ridiculous, that any attempt to explain it would send you laughing from the room. At the risk of sounding like a tagline, it needs to be seen to be believed.

As such, there is little alternative for this review to be anything other than ambiguous – perhaps frustratingly so. Nevertheless, to provide a plot synopsis would be to do a severe injustice to the film itself, so, to put it in the vaguest possible terms: Inception centres on dreams and their connection with reality. This initial concept is one that allows for seemingly limitless invention from Nolan, and he embraces this with one of the most ambitious and complex scripts in recent years, piling on twists and complications from the first frame to the last. Such complexity is a hugely risky endeavour, as at any point there is the possibility that the film might lose the audience completely, and it is to Nolan’s credit that we never feel too perplexed. Indeed, he seems to have an innate trust of, and respect for, his audience, and never slows the plot down to make sure everyone’s keeping up (though Ellen Page’s Ariadne is perhaps a little too blatant in her role as a surrogate audience, there to have the plot explained to her). It’s intensely cerebral, and insists that the viewer keeps their wits about them. However, the film is by no means a dry or academic affair, and while it explores fascinating ideas and themes, it never skimps on the spectacle. Inception contains some truly groundbreaking action scenes, including a gravity-defying fist-fight similar (though superior) to those in The Matrix and an epic climax at a snowy mountain base, reminiscent of Bond at his best.

Indeed, Christopher Nolan rams his film full of cinematic, literary and artistic references – from Greek mythology to 2001: A Space Odyssey, M. C. Escher to Edith Piaf – and seems happy to acknowledge the debt this film owes to others. Perhaps most unexpected are the similarities that Inception bears to both Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Scorsese’s recent Shutter Island; indeed, Leonardo DiCaprio’s role in the latter is remarkably similar to his role here, though Nolan has coaxed a marginally superior performance from him. He is effortlessly stylish yet internally fractured as Dom Cobb, a father just trying to get back to his children, and it is in his hands that the film becomes more than just a hyper-intelligent action flick. A common complaint of Nolan’s films is that they lack emotion, with a coldness reminiscent of Kubrick, yet while such a comparison is, in many ways, highly complementary, it falls down with Inception. One of the crucial reasons this film is Nolan’s best is because, while he has retained his tendency to produce a carefully calibrated and precisely engineered film, he has finally embraced the more raw, emotional punch his previous work lacked. Thanks both to his script and the powerful performances of DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard, the film becomes a surprisingly and gratifyingly moving experience.

If nothing else, Inception will go down as one of the riskiest endeavours ever undertaken by a filmmaker. Fresh off the record-breaking success of The Dark Knight, Nolan became the golden child at Warner Brothers, and was finally allowed to develop what had been his dream project (in more ways than one). Yet it could so easily have all fallen apart, collapsing into a self-indulgent, incoherent vanity project under a director drunk on success. Happily, nothing could be further from the truth. That the ideas behind the film have obsessed him since he was sixteen says a lot for their complexity and, more importantly, their quality, and the decades he has spent developing the script have clearly paid off. Challenging and often surreal ideas are presented far more clearly than they might have been, as Nolan consistently displays a steady-handed grip on the material. The audience is never allowed to be too bewildered, and much of the credit for this must also go to the editor, Lee Smith, whose ability to find coherence amongst the four simultaneous set-pieces at the film’s climax is nothing short of a miracle.

Inception is outstanding in almost every way conceivable, from Hans Zimmer’s brutally dramatic and modern score to Wally Pfister’s magnificent cinematography, which makes the most of the astonishing and hugely varied locations that the film travels to. No-one makes a false step amongst the ensemble cast, all of whom deliver fantastic work, with Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy proving particularly impressive. Ultimately, however, this is Nolan’s film, having written and directed it with apparently limitless creative freedom. The world can finally have unfiltered access to his vision, and it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. Although it owes huge debts to a vast number of different films and works of art, and though it even embraces genre to some extent – it is, in many ways, a heist film, though by no means a conventional one – the greatest and most striking virtue of Inception is its fierce originality. It functions at once as a superior thriller and a self-referential tribute to the infinite possibilities that face a true artist. Against all odds, and in a summer of well over twenty remakes and sequels, Christopher Nolan has delivered a phenomenal action film of extraordinary intelligence. There aren’t enough superlatives in the world.

Lebanon, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and representative of a new vein in Israeli cinema alongside the excellent Waltz with Bashir, is in a tricky position. A highly personal account of the director’s experience of the Lebanon war, it makes no claim to impartiality (and nor should it need to). Consequently, it has attracted some controversy, both from those who claim it is a damning portrayal of the Israeli army, and those who decry the film as exaggerated and untrue. In reality, the film is a visceral and claustrophobic condemnation of war in general, rather than any specific conflict. Phalangists and phosphorous aside, it could be set in any modern war.

Filmed entirely in the tight confines of an Israeli tank, the film follows a tank crew through a day in Lebanon. We sit in on tense conversations between the crew, receive icy radio orders from afar and stare down the tanks sights with Shliumik, the gunner and almost silent protagonist. It’s not war, but rather a perception of war distorted through a periscope- the outside world is a fiction.

At times, the film seems on the brink of degenerating into horror. The crew are uniformly out of their depth, unaware of the politics of the conflict, and scared. The tanks interior steadily deteriorates with the situation, and the final panic stricken scenes suggest a nightmare.

More complete explorations of the Lebanon war exist, and the film is by no means unique in its portrayal of conflict. But Moaz has nevertheless crafted a harrowing slice of fear. To view the film as anything more would be to put words in its mouth.

The British Museum’s Reading Room is an imposing space. It takes quite an impressive exhibition to live up to that high domed structure. And the latest collection of objects to occupy the space is nothing if not impressive, including pieces by Michelangelo, Botticelli, Da Vinci and Titian. A collaboration with the renowned Uffizi Gallery, the exhibition features original, restored drawings by the masters of Italian Renaissance Art.

What is first apparent about the exhibition is that it has been designed with a certain intimacy in mind. A one way maze through the circular space prevents excessive over crowding around the more popular pieces and encourages visitors to examine each drawing. More importantly, an intimacy is achieved simply by the fact that as an observer, you are allowed to stand extremely close to the sketches, separated only by an unobtrusive glass frame.

This means that each crack and fold and even the small holes pierced in the paper used to “trace” the sketches are visible. All of this lends a personal aspect to the exhibition, giving the viewer a chance to put aside the superhuman status of the featured artists and instead see their work as the result of practice, error and redraft. Looking at the pencil studies of hands, the repositioning of limbs and the occasional erased line, many of which were never meant to be seen, you feel as though you are seeing the raw secret of each artist’s talent.

The exhibition is full of interesting and noteworthy pieces. There are many sketches which include writing, such as indications of the colours to be used in a finished painting or Leonardo Da Vinci’s descriptions of the curious tortoise-like war machines he had designed. There are also sketches of women by Botticelli which foreshadow his iconic painting, The Birth of Venus. These drawings are able to humanize a work of art that had become iconic and far from detracting from the masterpiece, they add an extra dimension.

You may find yourself looking far closer at these sketches than any great masterpiece and you’ll find that each piece has a sense of fragility and humanity. And although the British Museum has gathered an extensive collection of drawings, brimming with sketches made by numerous artists, mediums and depicting different subjects, this endearing frailty is the common theme. Simultaneously impressive, subtle and deeply affecting, this is a very different experience than that offered by most exhibitions and it is undeniably worthwhile.

Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings is at the British Museum until July 25. £12 fully price, £10 concessions