Five of the best ... films
First Man (12A)
(Damien Chazelle, 2018, US) 141 mins
Ryan Gosling reunites with La La Land director Chazelle for a biopic of Neil Armstrong, America’s famously enigmatic space-race hero, who took that iconic giant step in 1969. Gosling’s unreadability works well in the film, which is an essentially straightahead and conventional recreation, despite its lack of a flag-planting scene.
Bad Times at the El Royale (15)
(Drew Goddard, 2018, US) 141 mins
Joss Whedon acolyte Goddard made his name with the satirical horror The Cabin in the Woods. His second film as director does a similar number on film noir. Seven oddballs hole up in a fleapit hotel, among them Jon Hamm as a vacuum cleaner salesman and Dakota Johnson as a mysterious criminal dame. It’s styled to the max, and very weird.
Mandy (18)
(Panos Cosmatos, 2018, Bel/US) 121 mins
Gloriously trashy revenge thriller with Nicolas Cage on superlative Cage Rage form. He plays a lumberjack whose girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) is kidnapped and tortured by a biker gang led by Linus Roache. Cage goes several miles over the top in his crusade to wreak havoc. It’s not what you’d call a deep character study, but one that carries a high-voltage charge.
A Star Is Born (15)
(Bradley Cooper, 2018, US) 135 mins
Lady Gaga’s supremely confident reinvention of herself as a leading actor is this film’s crowning glory. She plays the hopeful young ingenue eclipsing her raddled mentor Bradley Cooper in a classic she’s-up-he’s down fable. Cooper, though, ballasts the whole thing with muscular direction and a heavyweight performance of his own in the beardy-singer role.
22 July (15)
(Paul Greengrass, 2018, Nor/Ice/US) 133 mins
This Netflix-streaming docudrama about the Utøya massacres is getting a short cinema run – presumably for the prestige as much as the awards qualifications – so catch it while you can. Greengrass returns to the real-life trauma cinema of United 93 and Bloody Sunday – here exploring the foul crimes of far-right terrorist Anders Breivik – but the film also follows the aftermath and the legal process.
AP
Five of the best ... rock & pop
Rina Sawayama
The best new pop star of 2018 continues her upward trajectory with her biggest headline show to date. Fresh off a US tour that also saw her work with Lady Gaga/Justin Bieber collaborator BloodPop, Sawayama’s current single Cherry (self-proclaimed as a “glistening pansexual bop”) feels like a gentle streamlining of her 90s-inflected electropop.
Heaven, WC2, Friday 19 October
Beach House
After cleaning out the closet via 2017’s B-Sides and Rarities album, dream-pop duo Beach House changed things up for May’s album 7. Well, sort of. Producer Sonic Boom – who worked on MGMT’s bonkers Congratulations – hasn’t helped them reinvent the wheel, just to ramp up the atmospherics. Expect to sway, dreamily.
Troxy, E1, Wednesday 17 & Thursday 18; Albert Hall, Manchester, Friday 19; touring to 20 October
Bugzy Malone
From amateur boxer hustling in Manchester to one of grime’s most successful exponents (August’s B. Inspired debut followed his three previous EPs into the UK Top 10), Bugzy Malone’s journey to mainstream success is indeed inspiring. Not that he’s resting on his laurels: recent single Run featured chart-botherer Rag’n’Bone Man and was playlisted by Radio 1.
O2 Academy Liverpool, Thursday 18; The Printworks, SE16, Friday 19 October; touring to 15 November
Enrique Iglesias
The Do You Know? (The Ping Pong Song) hitmaker makes his first appearance at a UK arena in four years for this greatest hits tour. Expect a dash of Spanish flair, some gloriously manipulative, doe-eyed balladry and, unfortunately, a large dollop of EDM-infected nonsense featuring Pitbull. Still, Hero is a proper weepie that only grows in depth after a few wines.
The O2, SE10, Friday 19; touring to 27 October
MC
Gwyneth Herbert
Back in the 00s, Gwyneth Herbert’s coolly evocative voice had major labels queueing to mould her into a retro jazz diva, but this quirky storyteller had other ideas. This tour (with a quintet including guitar original Rob Luft) unveils Letters I Haven’t Written, a set of new songs conceived as letters of love, gratitude and protest.
Oxford, Saturday 13; London, Sunday 14; Milton Keynes, Tuesday 16; Cardiff, Wednesday 17; Hastings, Thursday 18 October
JF
Three of the best ... classical concerts
Cendrillon
The highlight of Glyndebourne’s autumn tour is a new production of Jules Massenet’s take on the story of Cinderella. As light and witty as you’d expect of a fairytale opera, this is the first time it has been seen at the East Sussex venue. Fiona Shaw returns to direct, following her staging of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia in 2013, with Alix Le Saux as Cinders and Eléonore Pancrazi in the trousers role of Prince Charming. Eduarda Melo and Kezia Bienek are the ugly sisters, Noémie and Dorothée.
Glyndebourne Opera House, Lewes, Saturday 13 October to 3 November; touring to 1 December
Malcolm Arnold festival weekend
In British music after 1945, Malcolm Arnold was a colourful and immensely popular figure, but since his death in 2006 his works have more or less disappeared from view. Except, that is, in Northampton, the town of his birth, where this year’s weekend festival is the 13th. The centrepiece is a concert performance of Arnold’s one-act opera The Dancing Master, and there are also orchestral events as well as performances of all his solo instrumental Fantasies.
Royal & Derngate Theatre, Northampton, Saturday 13 & Sunday 14 October
Wexford opera festival
For once, Wexford’s standard mix of three neglected operas includes a contemporary piece. William Bolcom’s Dinner at Eight, first staged last year, gets its European premiere, directed by Tomer Zvulun and conducted by David Agler. Also in the programme this time is a double bill of Leoni’s L’Oracolo and Giordano’s Mala Vita, plus Il Bravo by Mercadante, a composer who has become a Wexford speciality.
Various venues, Friday 19 October to 4 November
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
The Sun: Living With Our Star
The star we orbit not only gives us life but has inspired the human imagination since … well, since the beginning. This exhibition includes everything from Nordic bronze age images of a sun god to today’s dazzling astrophotography, fusing art and science in a molten ball of light. You can even sample the museum’s collection of sunglasses.
Science Museum, SW7, to 6 May
Liquid Crystal Display
Flowing random patterns of light make for an art of the abstract in this survey of how artists are freeing liquid crystal displays from their functional use in the screens we stare at. Science becomes psychedelic in this art form pioneered by Gustav Metzger, whose swirling displays accompanied the Who and other 1960s bands.
Site Gallery, Sheffield, to 27 January
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
This artist of still and sombre dreams was one of the strangest, most imaginative painters in late 19th-century France (which is saying something). Pierre Puvis de Chavannes created frescoes in Paris’s public buildings at a time when modernity should surely have made them outmoded. His archaic scenes are frozen friezes of myth and religion. Yet, far from being out of his time, he had a profound influence on Matisse and Picasso.
Michael Werner, W1, to 10 November
Ladies of Quality and Distinction
London’s Foundling Hospital was created long before the welfare state by philanthropic individuals who wanted to do something for the city’s poor. Its benefactors included William Hogarth, whose art can still be seen there, but this exhibition remembers the women who strove to save children from desperate destinies: Eleanor Barnes, Prudence West, Elizabeth Leicester and other forgotten heroes.
The Foundling Museum, WC1, to 20 January
Sean Scully
The art of Sean Scully is rooted in the land. A heavy, loamy aroma of farmland clings to his abstract canvases. So, Britain’s best-known sculpture park makes an appropriate venue: Scully shows new paintings in the park’s gallery and sculptures amid its rolling fields. Slabs of colour are stacked like slates in his rugged, three-dimensional monuments and austerely impressive paintings.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, nr Wakefield, to 6 January
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
The Wild Duck
Robert Icke, who has directed Uncle Vanya, Mary Stuart and the Andrew Scott Hamlet at this Islington venue, helms his own new version of Henrik Ibsen’s domestic tragedy. All the theatre will reveal is that this will be a contemporary adaptation, as events of the past surface with fatal consequences. The cast includes Edward Hogg and Nicholas Farrell.
Almeida Theatre, N1, Monday 15 October to 1 December
Twelfth Night
Shakespeare’s comedy of love and gender confusion is often presented with an autumnal flavour, reflecting the melancholy streak that runs through it. Forget that: here, in Wils Wilson’s co-production between Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, it’s a groovy, psychedelic, hedonistic affair set in the Summer of Love of 1967.
Bristol Old Vic, Wednesday 17 October to 17 November
Pack of Lies
Based on a true story, Hugh Whitemore’s 1983 play concerns US spies the Krogers who, in the early 1960s, passed secrets to the Russians from a house in Ruislip, west London. It’s an ordinary, domestic betrayal, brought home by Hannah Chissick’s atmospheric production, with dowdy neighbours Bob and Barbara (Chris Larkin and Finty Williams, all cups of tea and pursed expressions), also drawn in by the security services.
The Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1, to 17 Nov
I and You
Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams makes her theatrical debut in this play by Lauren Gunderson, whose work was second only to Shakespeare in performances in her native US last year. Teenager Caroline has locked herself in her room with only Facebook and Instagram for company, until the arrival of classmate Anthony shakes her out of her despond. A piece about adolescence, friendship and living life to the full.
Hampstead Theatre, NW3, Friday 19 October to 24 November
The Messiah
Patrick Barlow, author of the stage version of The 39 Steps, also penned – as part of the National Theatre of Brent – a comic version of the greatest story ever told. He directs this revival, which stars Hugh Dennis, soprano Lesley Garrett and John Marquez, giving us the nativity and much more in a zany combination of theatre and theology, performed by a cast of only three.
Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Thursday 18 to 27 Oct; touring to 1 December
MC
Three of the best ... dance shows
Ballet Black: Double Bill
Ballet Black is a small company with a lot of personality and pluck– and an excellent record in commissioning new work. This double bill features Arthur Pita’s fun, eccentric Midsummer Night’s Dream and the brilliant Cathy Marston adapting South African writer Can Themba’s The Suit.
Theatre Royal Stratford East, E15, Saturday 13; Theatre Royal, Winchester, Tuesday 16 October; touring to 29 November
Le Patin Libre: Threshold
If you have not come across Canadian skaters Le Patin Libre, prepare to reassess what you thought you knew about dancing on ice. The five-strong company strips back all the glitz to focus on the magical “glide”, taking figure skating into the realm of contemporary dance.
Alexandra Palace, N22, Thursday 18 to 21 October
English National Ballet: Manon
The tale of a woman painfully choosing between true love and material wealth is a classic of British 20th-century ballet. Kenneth MacMillan’s telling comes with passion-fuelled pas de deux and a rich role for its leading lady.
Manchester Opera House, Wednesday 17 to 20 October; touring to 20 January
LW
Main composite: Universal Pictures/LMK Media; © courtesy Sean Scully; Tristram Kenton/The Guardian; Mihaela Bodlovic
