Five of the best ... films
Cold War (15)
(Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018, Pol/Fra/UK) 88 mins
The hit of Cannes this year was Pawlikowski’s follow-up to his 2013 Oscar-winner Ida, a luminous black-and-white study of a self-sabotaging love story. Beginning in postwar Poland and leap-frogging checkpoints throughout Soviet-era Europe, it charts the passing of time with joyously innocent folk, smoky jazz and, finally, rebellious rock’n’roll.
Yardie (15)
(Idris Elba, 2018, UK) 102 mins
The feature debut from the actor-turned-director is the story of a charismatic Jamaican gangster dispatched to London to deal cocaine for his dandy underworld boss. The gun culture of 70s Kingston and the boom-bass club scene of 80s east London are immaculately recreated, but the revenge plot they’re pegged to turns out to be painfully thin.
Distant Voices, Still Lives (15)
(Terence Davies, 1988, UK/Ger) 82 mins
This re-reissue of Terence Davies’s 1988 debut is not only a reminder of the high point of postwar British art cinema, but also testament to what we’ve lost in the intervening period: there’s simply no way a film like this could be made now. Davies casts an unapologetically myth-making eye over his adolescence in wartime Liverpool, forging drama out of father-son conflicts, sisterly solidarity and maternal fortitude.
Searching (12A)
(Aneesh Chaganty, 2018, US) 102 mins
John Cho stars in this genuinely surprising, Gone Girl-style disappearance thriller. Cho is the widowed father whose seemingly perfect daughter goes Awol, throwing up some unexpected family secrets. Laptop and smartphone screens chart the drama almost in real time, leading to a climax that’s either a let-down or a relief, depending on your capacity for harsh.
Upgrade (15)
(Leigh Whannell, 2018, Aus) 100 mins
One half of the duo behind the original Saw, Whannell breaks out into sci-fi. He has crafted a futuristic gorefest in which a mechanic is left seriously disabled and his wife killed after a violent mugging. Given some serious AI implants, the former quadriplegic embarks on a revenge spree that ticks multiple midnight movie boxes in his bloody search for his wife’s killers.
DW
Five of the best ... rock & pop
Festival No 6
A unique blend of music, art and family-friendly fun set in an Italianate Welsh village resort, Festival No 6 offers a refreshing twist on your typical festival. Enjoy it while it lasts, mind you; organisers have announced that the event is being put on indefinite hiatus. It’s going out with a mild bang, with slots from the Horrors, Jessie Ware and Hawaiian shirt enthusiasts Friendly Fires.
Portmeirion, Thursday 6 to 9 September
Afropunk fest
Billed as a Brixton takeover, this year’s celebration of all things Afropunk includes six days of events, ranging from talks on radical self-care, to a battle of the bands and a club night featuring DJ Spoony, Jazzie B and the BBZ collective. Live performances on 8 September come from Maleek Berry (pictured, above), rapper-poet and activist Akala, and indie rascal Bakar.
Various venues, SW4, Monday 3 to 8 September
Soccer Mommy
Soccer Mommy, AKA Nashville’s Sophie Allison, makes the sort of bare-boned indie that could have slipped out on any low-key, college rock-obsessed label since the 1980s. This year’s debut album, Clean, however, also betrays her love of early Taylor Swift, with a lyrical economy that brings its tales of tangled infatuation to life.
Birmingham, Tuesday 4; Manchester, Wednesday 5; Dublin, Friday 7; touring to 13 September
Barry Manilow
Mandy! Could It Be Magic! Can’t Smile Without You! Copacabana! You can turn your nose up all you want, but Barry Manilow and his Princess-Diana-circa-1991 haircut has brought pure joy to millions for 50 years. FIFTY YEARS! Expect all the hits, some glorious name-dropping speeches and unbridled, white wine-tinged euphoria among the Fanilows.
Leeds, Saturday 1; Manchester, Sunday 2; Birmingham, Tuesday 4; London, Thursday 6 to 8 September
MC
Gwilym Simcock & Johannes Berauer’s Hourglass
The Austrian composer Johannes Berauer is a rising master of jazz, world, and classical fusions. This dazzling ensemble including Gwilym Simcock (piano) and Mike Walker (guitar) shows just why, with American vibraphone star Joe Locke joining in at the London show, where he’ll also play a duo set with Simcock.
Watermill Jazz, Dorking, Tuesday 4; Kings Place, N1, Wednesday 5 September
JF
Three of the best ... classical concerts
Berlin Philharmonic
Since Simon Rattle became their principal conductor at the end of the last century, the Berlin Philharmonic have become regular visitors to London. But this latest appearance at the Proms provides an opportunity to hear them playing under Rattle’s successor, Kirill Petrenko, who takes over officially next year. In the first concert, Petrenko conducts Dukas’s La Péri, Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto (with Yuja Wang, pictured, as the soloist) and Franz Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony; in the second, two of Strauss’s tone poems are paired with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
Royal Albert Hall, SW7, Saturday 1 & Sunday 2 September
The Enchanted Island
First seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera seven years ago, and modelled on 18th-century operatic pasticcios, Jeremy Sams’s riff on The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings together operatic numbers from baroque composers including Handel, Rameau, Vivaldi and Purcell. This new staging, the first in the UK, directed by Stuart Barker forms one half of British Youth Opera’s latest season, with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress being the other.
Peacock Theatre, WC2, Saturday 1, Wednesday 5, Friday 7 & 8 September
Wilde Lieder Marx.Music
It is the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx this year, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is not letting the anniversary go uncelebrated. Its programme of pieces inspired by the writer’s life and work – some commissioned, others selected via an international call for scores – was first performed in Trier, Germany, Marx’s birthplace. Conducted by Michael Wendeberg, it features soprano Elizabeth Atherton and baritone Marcus Farnsworth.
CBSO Centre, Birmingham, Tuesday 4 September
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
I Object
Subversion, satire and general troublemaking are the themes of this alternative view of the British Museum’s collections. Chosen by Private Eye’s Ian Hislop, it uncovers thousands of years’ worth of protest from all over the world, from graffiti on a brick from ancient Babylon to Pussy Riot-influenced headgear and a woven raffia cloth from Congo.
British Museum, WC1, Thursday 6 September to 20 January 2019
Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft
Matthew Hopkins, self-appointed Witchfinder General during the civil war, and Dr John Dee, conjurer to Elizabeth I, are among the dark characters haunting this survey of magical objects and images. A dried human heart preserved in a medieval case and a magical doll from modern Devon are among the curiosities.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to 6 January 2019
The Art of Campari
If you have sat in a cafe in Italy drinking a certain bright-red liqueur this summer, this exhibition of Campari’s advertising art may tempt you. In fact, it is a sweep through Italy’s modern cultural history, for Campari started selling itself in the late 19th century with flamboyant art nouveau. In the 1920s, it created a new jazz-age image and in the 1960s became part of la dolce vita. The aperitif as a work of art.
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, N1, to 16 September
Ed Ruscha
The most super-cool of great American artists glides into the National Gallery with an exhibition so deadpan you may see the joke only a year later. Ruscha takes the title of Thomas Cole’s Romantic painting cycle The Course of Empire for a series of Los Angeles views that eerily marry the banal and the apocalyptic. Flat rooftops, wire fences, a lonely tree: this is a chilled-out vision of the modern American city as pop art hell.
The National Gallery, WC2, to 7 October
Ade Adesina and David Mach
Two artists with a keen sense of the surreal show together. Ade Adesina draws Bosch-like landscapes whose crowded oddities add up to an epic depiction of humanity’s impact on our planet. Mach has been turning found objects and unlikely stuff into art since the 1980s, from building a submarine out of tyres to tangling cars in a woollen scarf. They share an uneasy fascination with material excess.
Bo.Lee Gallery, SE15, Friday 7 to 29 September
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
Little Shop of Horrors
A colourful, not to say campy and darker version of the 1982 musical about a Skid Row florist and his Faustian pact with a man-eating plant. Maria Aberg’s in-your-face production sees the plant morph into US drag queen Vicky Vox, while Marc Antolin and Jemima Rooper as Seymour and Audrey combine sweetness with knowingness.
The Open Air Theatre, NW1, to 22 September
Holy Sh!t
What was the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn is reopening after major refurbishment under a new name. Its first production, by Alexis Zegerman, depicts the struggle of one couple to get their children into a local C of E school. Four adults find friendships, family and faith strained by their obsession with it. Indhu Rubasingham directs a cast that includes Claire Goose.
Kiln Theatre, NW6, Wednesday 5 September to 6 October
Six
Henry VIII certainly knew how to spice up his life with all those wives, and this musical, which has cheered audiences at the Edinburgh fringe, gives those six Tudor women the chance to put the record straight in girl group style. Whether you will improve your history knowledge through Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s lively show (originally performed by Cambridge students) is unlikely, but it may help you remember which were beheaded and who escaped the axe.
Arts Theatre, WC2, to 14 October
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel was a global bestseller. Adapted here by Bryony Lavery, whose Frozen was revived earlier this year, and directed by Melly Still, the story opens with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, Susie (played by Charlotte Beaumont), who watches from heaven as her friends and family try to move on.
Royal Theatre, Northampton, Saturday 2 to 22 September; touring to 17 November
Foxfinder
A plethora of TV stars – Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon, Call the Midwife’s Bryony Hannah and Heida Reed from Poldark, plus former EastEnder Paul Nicholls – star in Dawn King’s play, which follows the trend for dystopian drama but was actually premiered at the Finborough Theatre in 2011 to some acclaim. Rheon plays a governmental foxfinder who descends on a farm where the crop has failed in a political parable suggestive of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Ambassadors Theatre, WC2, Thursday 6 September to 5 January 2019
MC
Three of the best ... dance shows
Flawless: Chase the Dream – The Reboot
Nine years on from Britain’s Got Talent, the nation’s most celebrated street-dance troupe tour the UK with this high-voltage space fantasy, in which the body-popping crew of the Intergalactic Dream Ship attempt to navigate, and dance, their way back home.
Yeovil, Saturday 1; Cardiff, Sunday 2; Crawley, Monday 3; Loughborough, Wednesday 5; Inverness, Thursday 6; Perth, Friday 7 September; touring to 10 November
ZooNation & The Kate Prince Company: Sylvia
Kate Prince and Priya Parmar’s latest work is inspired by Sylvia Pankhurst (played by Genesis Lynea) and the women of the suffragette movement, using hip-hop dance language to evoke the struggles, the anger and the dramas of the battle for the vote.
The Old Vic, SE1, Monday 3 to 22 September
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Shantala Shivalingappa: Play
A wonderful collaboration between two of the dance world’s most interesting artists. Inspired by games of chess and love, the two performers play with the gestures and rhythms of each other’s dance styles.
Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, Tuesday 4 September
JM