Five of the best ... films
Bohemian Rhapsody (12A)
(Bryan Singer, 2018, US) 134 mins
After all the trials and tribulations, the Queen biopic has finally made it to the screen. It’s got Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury impersonation (rather than Sacha Baron Cohen’s), and has weathered accusations of “straightwashing” and the departure of original (but still credited) director Bryan Singer. Be that as it may, it certainly has the legs to be a major hit.
Possum (15)
(Matthew Holness, 2018, UK) 83 mins
Undeniably creepy folk-horror yarn from the man behind Garth Marenghi, adapted from his own short story. Sean Harris stars as a damaged, disgraced man returning home to backwoods East Anglia, carrying a mysterious bag containing an apparently sinister, bloodthirsty creature. Comes on like The League of Gentlemen meets Stephen King.
The Hate U Give (12A)
(George Tillman Jr, 2018, US) 133 mins
After much hype, and one or two near misses, Amandla Stenberg finally gets her star-making performance in this angry, politicised adaptation of Angie Thomas’s YA novel. Stenberg plays a high-schooler whose comfortable life is turned upside down when she witnesses a friend being shot dead by police, in a drama that very much channels the rage of Black Lives Matter.
Utøya: July 22 (15)
(Erik Poppe, 2018, Nor) 97 mins
The “other” Utøya film – ie, not the Netflix Paul Greengrass treatment – is a more local affair. Norwegian director Poppe recreates, with a Victoria-style single continuous shot, the bewilderment and terror triggered by mass killer Anders Behring Breivik’s assault on a teenagers’ camp on Utøya island, which would claim 69 lives. This is relentless, stomach-churning terror, from the victims’ perspective, without the wider focus Greengrass’s film brought.
Bad Reputation (15)
(Kevin Kerslake, 2018, US) 94 mins
She loves rock’n’roll … Joan Jett, that is. The rocker gets her own documentary, tracing her early years as a rebel in the male-dominated music world, through 70s punk act the Runaways, to the pomp of her 1982 hit I Love Rock’n’Roll, and her solo work. Hard not to like.
AP
Five of the best ... rock & pop
Tove Styrke
After enduring the identity crisis that most ex-TV talent show contestants go through (she finished third on Swedish Idol in 2009), Tove Styrke has finally found her feet. This year’s excellent third album, Sway, is loaded with idiosyncratic electropop, while recent single Vibe suggests that streak is continuing.
Bristol Sunday 28; Manchester, Monday 29; Brighton, Tuesday 30 October; Birmingham, Thursday 1; London Friday 2 November
John Grant
Three years after his third album, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, jumped into the UK Top 5, increasingly experimental torch singer John Grant is back with Love Is Magic. Continuing his ability to tap into the human condition, the title track is a meditation on depression, regret and, ultimately, the healing power of love. Brighton, Monday 29; London, Tuesday 30; Bath, Wednesday 31 October; Sheffield, Friday 2; touring to 3 November
Little Dragon
After 2017’s hazy Season High saw the Gothenburg-based experimentalists move further away from the pop sweet spot of 2011’s Ritual Union, they’re back with a new label and a more dancefloor-focused new EP, Lover Chanting. This one-off show will see them showcasing all that, plus a deep dive into their back catalogue of almost-but-not-quite hits.
The Printworks, SE16, Friday 2 November
The Black Eyed Peas
Having dabbled in the murky world of EDM for their last four albums, The Black Eyed Peas – now sans Fergie – have gone back to their early roots of conscious hip-hop on new album, Masters of the Sun. Chief Pea Will.i.am referred to the album as a GPS system, claiming that the world “wants some direction”. Whether you want that from a band who wrote Boom Boom Pow is up for debate.
London, Saturday 27 & Sunday 28; Birmingham, Monday 29 October; Manchester, Thursday 1; Glasgow, Friday 2; touring to 3 November
MC
Sons of Kemet
Since their arrival in 2013, Sons of Kemet’s hooky anthems, mutated African-Caribbean ideas, London club beats and jazz-horn sounds have made the 2018 Mercury nominees trailblazers on a UK new-music scene. They’re touring their fast-evolving work, including material from this year’s Your Queen Is a Reptile album.
Cardiff, Saturday 27; Manchester, Sunday 28; Bristol, Monday 29; Brighton, Tuesday 30 November
JF
Four of the best ... classical concerts
Maudite Soit La Guerre
Film has played an important part on Olga Neuwirth’s career as a composer. As well as incorporating footage in her own music-theatre works, she has composed music for silent classics; two of those scores get UK premieres in November. The London Sinfonietta introduces the first of them, written for Alfred Machin’s 1914 pacifist film.
Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, Thursday 1 November
Edgar
One of the ideas that music director Stuart Stratford brought to Scottish Opera was an annual series of concert performances of rare operas. The latest season of those gets under way with Puccini’s second opera, conducted by Gianluca Marcianò, with Peter Auty, Claire Rutter and Justina Gringyte.
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Sunday 28 October
Nicolas Hodges
Pianist Nicolas Hodges has dozens of premieres to his credit, many of them specially composed for him. But the world premiere in his Wigmore programme is of a work from 1977, Elisabeth Lutyens’s Five Impromptus. Hodges includes it alongside music written for him by James Clarke and Hans Thomalla, and pieces by Brahms and Liszt.
Wigmore Hall, W1, Tuesday 30 October
Bristol keyboard festival
There are few better places in Britain to listen to pianos than St George’s, and a festival in the newly renovated space celebrates its precious acoustics. The concerts include harpsichord and Moog recitals as well as solo piano: the third of Paul Lewis’s Haydn-Beethoven-Brahms programmes, and a first UK recital by the winner of last month’s Leeds piano competition, Eric Lu.
St George’s, Bristol, Tuesday 30 October to 7 November
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
NOW
Monster Chetwynd – the artist formerly known as Marvin Gaye Chetwynd – stars in a survey of contemporary art that focuses on her sprawling aesthetic of revolution and liberation. The mystical assemblages and installations of Betye Saar also feature. Prepare to be discombobulated.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, to 28 April
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War
This is a sumptuous hoard of treasures, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the manuscript of Beowulf, that brings to life the lost world of Britain before the Norman conquest. It turns out to have been not so much a Brexit idyll of autonomy as a sophisticated culture plugged into a wider European world.
British Library, NW1, to 19 February
New Acquisitions: Gozzoli to Kara Walker
The art of Kara Walker is a meditation on the way American history is shot through with violence and racism. Benozzo Gozzoli, too, is an artist of history, a vibrant storyteller from Renaissance Italy. These two artists, more than 500 years apart, bookend this survey of works on paper collected in the last five years by the British Museum, a show that also boasts Raphael, Hockney and Picasso.
British Museum, WC1, to 27 January
Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill
Horace Walpole got the idea for The Castle of Otranto, widely accepted as the first gothic novel, at the medieval-style house he built for himself at Strawberry Hill. This exhibition reunites the collection he amassed there, from a clock Henry VIII gave to Anne Boleyn to a huge Chinese porcelain tub in which his cat drowned: Walpole got his friend Thomas Gray to write a poem about the tragedy.
Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, to 24 February
Richard Pousette-Dart
The squiggly, flowing cosmic visions of this comparatively little-known American modern painter have a lot in common with Jackson Pollock, his contemporary, though while Pollock’s swirls of colour are raw and rollicking, Pousette-Dart is quieter and more inward. He may have been sidelined in the era of abstract expressionism but today he looks like the ancestor of the similarly spiritual Brice Marden.
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, to 6 January
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
The Madness of George III
After touring the live League of Gentlemen show with his old muckers, Mark Gatiss now stars in Alan Bennett’s rich, epic drama about the Regency monarch and his rapidly failing mental health. Adam Penford directs the tale of the often comic attempts of his court medics and confidants to conceal his increasingly bizarre behaviour.
Nottingham Playhouse, Friday 2 to 24 November
Don Quixote
Cervantes’s Spanish golden age wedge of a novel gets a lovely, crowd-pleasing musical adaptation from the RSC (the Spaniard and the bard both died on the same day in 1616). This 2016 production finally arrives tilting at West End windmills, with David Threlfall as the deluded but chivalrous titular knight and Rufus Hound as his hapless squire, Sancho Panza.
Garrick Theatre, WC2, Saturday 27 October to 2 February
The Height of the Storm
French playwright Florian Zeller made his mark here with The Father, a startling study of Alzheimer’s. Set in the large house of an elderly writer and his wife, this one ploughs similar ground: one of them has seemingly died (but which one?), as reality bleeds away into the fog of dementia. There are terrific performances from Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins, though a certain trickiness dilutes the emotional heft of this portrait of old age and family.
Wyndham’s Theatre, WC2, to 1 December
The Nightingales
Gavin & Stacey star and writer Ruth Jones doesn’t take to the stage too often, but here she features as the familiar dramatic device of a feather-ruffling interloper in a close-knit group. The play by William Gaminara – best known as a regular in Silent Witness – is set among an assorted group of a cappella singers in a small village. Jones plays newcomer Maggie, who puts the cat among the songbirds, while Christopher Luscombe directs.
Theatre Royal Bath, Wednesday 31 October to 10 November; touring to 8 December
Measure for Measure
Featuring sexual hypocrisy and predatory behaviour by a man in a position of power towards a woman, this is perfect for a #MeToo reinterpretation. Josie Rourke’s lively production plays a much cut version, set in 1604, then shifts to 2018 with the lead roles swapped between Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden. Some of the contemporary section doesn’t quite ring true, but this is a thought-provoking take on gender politics nonetheless.
Donmar Warehouse, WC2, to 1 December
MC
Three of the best ... dance shows
Clod Ensemble: Placebo
The power of the placebo effect is put under the metaphorical microscope in Clod Ensemble’s latest work. Seven dancers and the audience take part in a series of “experiments” looking at how our feelings and perceptions can be altered by factors such as expectation, suggestion, ritual, trust and presentation.
The Place, WC1, Tuesday 30 October to 10 November
Agudo Dance Company: Silk Road
Jose Agudo trained in flamenco dance in Spain, then went on to work in contemporary and kathak dance with Akram Khan. All three come together here in a journey from west to east, performed by Agudo and Indian classical dancer Mavin Khoo.
London, Saturday 27; Salford, Monday 29 October; Birmingham, Thursday 1 & Friday 2 November
Rambert2
A brand new company, Rambert2 features 13 of the world’s best young contemporary dancers, starting their careers with a triple bill that includes pieces by Rafael Bonachela, Sharon Eyal and Rambert’s guest artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer. Theatr Clwyd, Mold, Saturday 28; The Lighthouse, Poole, Tuesday 30 & Wednesday 31 October
LW
