Five of the best ... films
My Friend Dahmer (15)
(Mark Meyers, 2017, US) 107 mins
A serial-killer origin story? It certainly makes for a different kind of teen movie. Disney graduate Ross Lynch fits the bill in a story that suggests the signs – family troubles, repressed sexuality, interest in dead things –were already there in high school. However, a brush with social acceptance hints that things might have turned out differently.
Zama (15)
(Lucrecia Martel, 2017, Arg/Bra/Spa …) 115 mins
Set on the fringes of Spain’s south American empire, this singular film casts a strange spell but also serves as a sharp critique of colonialism. Our subject is a bored, embittered 18th-century official (Daniel Giménez Cacho) with little to do beyond dally and scheme, until he unwisely decides to hunt down a local bandit.
Jeune Femme (15)
(Léonor Seraille, 2017, Fra) 97 mins
This modern French drama generates immense sympathy for its troubled heroine: broke, heartbroken, scatty and barely qualified to do anything, she wavers between sunny ebullience and animated despair – or is it something closer to mental illness? Laetitia Dosch’s spirited, nuanced performance carries the day.
That Summer (PG)
(Göran Olsson, 2017, Swe/Den/US) 80 mins
Assembled from rediscovered footage, this is as close as you can get to a prequel to the documentary Grey Gardens, even if it’s really more a fascinating collage of cultural ephemera. We see another side to Big and Little Edie, as well as the Hamptons set who surrounded them, including Andy Warhol, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote and, especially, Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill and photographer Peter Beard.
Solo: A Star Wars Story (12A)
(Ron Howard, 2018, US) 135 mins
Despite production troubles and story predictability, this prequel turns out to be better than anyone expected. For one thing, there’s a succession of chases, heists, fights and space battles to keep things moving along. Alden Ehrenreich (pictured, right) fits the bill as a younger, less jaded incarnation of the lovable rogue.
SR
Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs
Jay-Z & Beyoncé
Two years after Beyoncé aired her husband’s dirty laundry via Lemonade, and a year on from his 4:44 album affirming that, yes, their marriage had been in a pickle, fans are finally able to analyse the minutiae of this pair’s love life on stage. As well as Crazy in Love, Deja Vu and Drunk in Love, expect loaded looks and spectacle from this megastar experience.
Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Wednesday 6; touring to 16 June
Courtney Barnett
It is nice to know that even Grammy-nominated artists can hate themselves. Take Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence, a scrappy, sniping track on the Aussie songwriter’s lauded new record. Expect I’ve Got a Weird Rash on My Armpit But Nobody Will Look at It some time in 2020.
Glasgow, Saturday 2; London, Sunday 3; Manchester, Monday 4; Bristol, Tuesday 5; London, Wednesday 6 June
Inner City Electronic
House DJ Ralph Lawson has curated this new festival in Leeds, enlisting the neo-jazz expansiveness of Floating Points, warped techno artist Avalon Emerson, the poppy deep house stylings of Peggy Gou, Andrew Weatherall, Crazy P and more. It also takes place in venues around the city, which means relatively decent toilets, access to chairs and a mattress at the end of the night.
Various venues, Leeds, Saturday 2 June
Thom Yorke
The Radiohead frontman has been tweeting oblique messages of late (sample: “i’m in a room full of robots”). Is another solo album on the horizon or is he just expressing himself like the abstract, tech-fearing riddler we know and, in many circles, love? Fans will find out at his upcoming shows, which are sure to be filled with glitching noises, ominous samples and lots of trippy lasers.
Roundhouse, NW1, Friday 8; touring to 10 June
HG
Loz Speyer’s Inner Space
Nobody writes jazz-fuelled world music quite like Loz Speyer, the trumpeter who has lived in both the UK and Cuba, and joins Latin jazz, US postbop and European improv with vivacity and edge. This tour features his pieces with input from a fine band including saxophonists Chris Biscoe and Rachel Musson.
London, Saturday 2; Birmingham, Tuesday 5; Sheffield, Wednesday 6; Manchester, Thursday 7; Wakefield, Friday 8; touring to 9 June
JF
Four of the best ... classical concerts
Siegfried
Mark Elder began the Hallé Ring nine years ago with the last work in the tetralogy, Götterdämmerung. Now he’s ending it with a concert performance of the work preceding it, Siegfried, with Simon O’Neill in the title role. Unfortunately, it’s spread across two evenings, but the Hallé are playing it in full at the Edinburgh festival in August.
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, Saturday 2 & Sunday 3 June
Choral Pilgrimage 2018
The two composers juxtaposed in the Sixteen’s latest tour are Benjamin Britten and William Cornysh. However, in the 15th century there were two composers called William Cornysh, perhaps father and son, and who wrote what is hard to establish. Conductor Harry Christophers has thankfully opted to ignore the distinction.
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, Thursday 7 June; touring to 9 November
Lohengrin
It is 41 years since the last new staging at Covent Garden of what was arguably Wagner’s first great opera. The new Lohengrin is directed by David Alden and conducted by Andris Nelsons, with Klaus Florian Vogt as Lohengrin and Jennifer Davis as Elsa.
Royal Opera House, WC2, Thursday 7 June
Aldeburgh festival
In recent years, Aldeburgh has opened with an opera. That tradition is preserved this time with the premiere of Emily Howard’s To See the Invisible. But before that there’s an orchestral concert, with the BBC Scottish Symphony conducted by John Wilson in Bernstein, Copland and, inevitably, Britten.
Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Friday 8 to 24 June
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
Animals and Us
Local artists Tracey Emin and JMW Turner show their softer sides in this survey of our relationship with animals. Emin’s encounter with a fox and Turner’s studies of dogs and donkeys share a respect for nature that also shines from medieval bestiaries, pet portraits by Warhol and Freud, and Shimabuku’s experiment in octopus art.
Turner Contemporary, Margate, to 30 September
Whitstable Bienniale
This year, the south coast art festival takes its title and theme of global journeying and the elusiveness of home from Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home. There are performances and screenings all over town by the likes of Rebecca Lennon, Phoebe Cunningham and Sophie Lee. No sand sculptures, then.
Various venues, Saturday 2 to 10 June
Alexander Calder
This tinkering inventor-artist’s mobiles are among the modern world’s most joyous artistic creations; all the more marvellous given how little joy there was in the age he lived through. Calder was a politicised artist who showed at the 1937 Paris Universal Exhibition alongside Picasso’s Guernica. His mobiles translate surrealism into abstract endless motion. His art is a gesture of freedom.
Hauser and Wirth Somerset, nr Bruton, to 9 September
At Altitude
It is a simple but eye-opening insight that everything looks different from above. Even before the invention of flight, Leonardo da Vinci drew stunning imagined bird’s eye views. Tacita Dean, Wolfgang Tillmans and Cornelia Parker are among the artists following Leonardo skyward here. Was flight the true motor of modernism? Within a few years of the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, art had changed for ever.
Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, Saturday 3 June to 30 September
Giuseppe Penone
Arte povera was one of the most inspiring episodes in postwar European art. In the 1960s, Italian society was modernising fast. Surely, nostalgia for a rural past inspired Penone – along with Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis – to use simple, natural materials. He has been celebrating trees for five decades and continues his exploration of their magic in this fittingly rustic setting.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, nr Wakefield, to 28 April 2019
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
Phobiarama
Dries Verhoeven’s show has the feel of a ghost train, but what exactly is it that we should be scared of? The bears that haunt the tracks? Or the politicians such as Donald Trump who use rhetoric to make us afraid? If you enjoyed Punchdrunk’s It Felt Like a Kiss, you’ll love this multi-layered show about how prejudice makes us vulnerable to manipulation.
West Handyside Canopy, N1 Friday 8 to 18 June
Nightwalks With Teenagers
As part of LIFT 2018, Mammalian Diving Reflex, the company that brought us Haircuts By Children (in which a child cut and restyled your hair), now puts audiences in the hands of teenagers. Upending the traditional relationship between adults and adolescents, it gives agency to the latter during this ramble in the dark.
Secret location, E8, to Sunday 3 June
These Rooms
The trauma of the past can echo down through the years. It does in this remarkable collaboration between two Irish companies: ANU and CoisCéim Dance Theatre. Originally seen in Dublin in 2016, it raises ghosts as it offers up some of the events of the final days of the 1916 Easter Rising, seen largely through the eyes of women. A play that reminds that, even if the history books teach otherwise, we can only ever know part of the story – and maybe not the most important one.
Shoreditch Town Hall, EC1, Monday 4 to 22 June
Consent
Empathy, class, language, marriage, rape and whether the law is an ass are just a few of the subjects covered in Nina Raine’s play. Following a rape case that turns on the issue of consent (the victim says she didn’t; the man in question believes she did), Raine’s niftily crafted drama focuses on the private lives of the lawyers involved. Sharply observed, neatly written and one to remind us that life is messy, complex and hard to reduce to binaries.
The Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1, to 11 August
Sunshine on Leith
You may not walk 500 miles to see it, but James Brining’s revival of the Proclaimers musical is fresh as a daisy and a thing of joy. Telling the story of two soldiers returning to their home town of Edinburgh, and finding themselves unsure what home really means, this one comes straight from the heart.
His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, Saturday 2; Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, Tuesday 5 to 9; touring to 30 June
LG
Three of the best ... dance shows
Acosta Danza
A rare chance to see the excellent Carlos Acosta leading his new Cuban dance company. Heading this mixed programme of contemporary and neo-classical work is Mermaid, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s witty and wonderful take on the Andersen fairytale. Other pieces come from Marianela Boán, Jorge Crecis, Goyo Montero and Justin Peck.
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Monday 4 June
English National Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty
There is some fine casting for ENB’s revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s opulent 1987 production of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky classic, including Alina Cojocaru and former Bolshoi ballerina Maria Alexandrova. Gavin Sutherland conducts.
London Coliseum, WC2, Wednesday 6 to 16 June
Dance@TheGrange
Choreographer Wayne McGregor and Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson are joint programmers for the Grange festival’s first ever dance event. McGregor’s own obliquely beautiful Atomos is performed alongside extracts from the classical repertory.
Northington, near Alresford, Thursday 7 & 10 June
JM
