Five of the best … films
It Chapter Two (15)
(Andy Muschietti, 2019, Can/US) 169 mins
It’s a bad month for coulrophobics: while Joaquin Phoenix’s greasepainted Joker waits in the wings, here comes Pennywise, back to terrorise the town of Derry. As more kids disappear, the now grown-up Losers’ Club – featuring Bill Hader as Richie and Jessica Chastain as Beverly – must reconvene to face the horrors of the past. Needless to say, this sequel has big shoes to fill.
Rojo (15)
(Benjamín Naishtat, 2018, Arg/Bra/Fra/Neth/Ger/ Bel/Swi) 109 mins
No one does political neo-noir quite like the Argentinians, and this thriller chillingly recreates the country at the height of the military dictatorship’s “dirty war”. Darío Grandinetti stars as Claudio, a lawyer who learns the hard way about the butterfly effect when a testy restaurant altercation comes back to bite him.
The Souvenir (15)
(Joanna Hogg, 2019, UK/US) 120 mins
Martin Scorsese’s name may be on the poster (as executive producer), but there is nothing of that film-maker’s epic style in Joanna Hogg’s fourth and arguably best film to date. The achingly personal but sparingly told story of a toxic co-dependent relationship, it stars Honor Swinton Byrne as a directionless young film student who falls in love with a gnomic civil servant (Tom Burke).
Bait (15)
(Mark Jenkin, 2019, UK) 89 mins
Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin makes a name for himself with this refreshingly authentic study of tensions between locals and tourists in a now gentrified southern fishing village. The social-realist subject is familiar but the style is not: shot with clockwork cameras on grainy 16mm stock, with sound and dialogue added in post-production, it’s a surreal, almost dreamlike experience.
Pain and Glory (15)
(Pedro Almodóvar, 2019, Spa) 113 mins
Antonio Banderas gives one of his best performances as a legendary Spanish director who is forced to reflect on former glories and forgotten loves as he deals with bad health, depression and an unexpected taste for heroin. Almodóvar fans will have a field day spotting the in-jokes, but the emotion is sincere enough to captivate non-trainspotters.
DW
Five of the best ... rock & pop
Stephen Malkmus
With slacker rock favourites Pavement reuniting for two festival appearances next year to celebrate their 30th anniversary, their frontman is busy touring his recent solo album, Groove Denied. Inspired by Berlin, and Malkmus’s occasional forays into the city’s club culture, it eschews his fascination with lo-fi post-punk in favour of lo-fi synthwave instead.
CCA, Glasgow, Friday 13; touring to 18 September
Alice Chater
Alongside the curiously coiffured Ava Max, newcomer Alice Chater is a fan of the high-concept, pure pop sugar rush of The Fame-era Lady Gaga as showcased by her heavily choreographed videos. She has also already chalked up an impressive roster of collaborators, working alongside the likes of Mark Ralph (Marina) and Rami (Britney).
London, Monday 9; Birmingham, Tuesday 10; Manchester, Wednesday 11 September
CASisDEAD
According to Tottenham rapper CASisDEAD, his various masks, which range from battered hockey player to Freddy Krueger, reflect his feelings on being in the limelight. “It eliminates the need for me to show off or try and be anything I’m not,” he told i-D. “I’m not interested in the whole bragging, arsehole behaviour.” He’s got a lot to brag about, though, not least 2017’s classic single Pat Earrings.
XOYO, EC2, Friday 13 September
Common
Rapper, actor, philanthropist, writer, activist and Microsoft TV advert mainstay Lonnie Lynn, AKA Common, returns to music with this brief UK jaunt in support of his 12th album, Let Love. The title’s taken from his recent autobiography, Let Love Have the Last Word, with both focusing on forgiveness in trying times.
O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, W12, Tuesday 10; O2 Ritz Manchester, Thursday 12 September
MC
Kit Downes Quartet
Snape Maltings’ adventurous Festival of New spans experimental artists from Dutch improvisers Tin Men and the Telephone to hip-hop poets and multimedia artists. There’s also ingeniously imaginative pianist Kit Downes, here adding to a growing collage of live material for an upcoming ECM album with saxophonist Tom Challenger, cellist Lucy Railton and drummer Seb Rochford.
Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Saturday 7 September
JF
Three of the best ... classical concerts
In the Name of the Earth
No contemporary composer has made environmental issues more central to his music than John Luther Adams, and a Proms season with the environment as one of its themes was bound to programme one of his major works. In the Name of the Earth is certainly a major piece, involving 600 singers from eight London choirs stationed around the auditorium, as they intone a litany of natural wonders: the names of rivers, lakes, mountains and deserts. It’s an immersive experience and, in its final moments, the audience are invited to join in singing the work’s main theme.
Royal Albert Hall, SW7 Sunday 8 September
Lammermuir festival
As ever, this year’s programme at the Lammermuir festival, the 10th, is dominated by chamber music, with the period-instrument Quatuor Mosaïques giving three recitals and the Dunedin Consort giving four. But there are also Schubert’s three song cycles from baritone Roderick Williams, the three last Beethoven piano sonatas from Steven Osborne, a double bill of Mascagni and Wolf-Ferrari from Scottish Opera and the premiere of Prometheus Symphony by Stuart MacRae in a concert by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
Various venues, Lothian, Friday 13 to 22 September
Britten Gala
Song cycles by Britten open the Wigmore’s new season. The first concert includes four, all with James Baillieu as the pianist joined by a different soloist. Soprano Louise Alder sings On This Island, mezzo Christine Rice A Charm of Lullabies, while tenor Allan Clayton has the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo and baritone James Newby the Sonnets and Proverbs of William Blake.
Wigmore Hall, W1, Friday 13 September
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
William Blake
To call this great poet and artist a visionary is probably tautological because he invented the modern idea of art as inner vision. That has made him not only a giant of the Romantic age but an influence on every creator who has ever reverenced a tiger or taken a drug, as this show of more than 300 works aims to demonstrate. Break on through to the other side …
Tate Britain, SW1 Wednesday 11 September to 2 February
Mona Hatoum
William Blake used print-making and prophecy to fight the power; Hatoum uses everything from steel to human hair to suggest the tensions of today’s world. Globes are a recurring image in this show, covered with iron filings or bombsite rubble to express the trauma of the 21st century. A vision of violence and ruin.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, Thursday 12 September to 3 November
Peter Doig
In his 60th year, you could say Doig is entering his mature phase: an era of poised, contemporary mastery. His dreamlike, imaginary Caribbean scenes mix photographically accurate details of places and people with stellar colours Blake might have loved. Deep greens and blues and painful yellows create a poetic landscape of seaside pleasure and pain. Doig is sailing his canoe into ever more mysterious waters.
Michael Werner Gallery, W1, to 16 November
A Rothschild Treasury
This is a cabinet of curiosities, a gathering of strange and wondrous items collected by the Rothschild family since the 19th century. In Queen Victoria’s anniversary year, it reveals her friendship with this dynasty through a seal and bracelet given by her to Alice Charlotte von Rothschild. Other treasures range from a Roman cameo portrait to a nautilus goblet that belonged to gothic novelist William Beckford.
Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Sat to 27 October
Dora Maurer
The abstract paintings of this Hungarian conceptualist are free and joyous in a way that resembles Bridget Riley or Ellsworth Kelly. This show coincides with a retrospective at Tate Modern but I am glad to see more of these big, bold assaults on space. Maurer sends colours hurtling out of any conceivable frame to smear themselves across walls and around corners. Uplifting.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, Thursday 12 September to 3 November
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
Big: The Musical
Big (’scuse the pun) cheesy musicals are hugely tempting at the moment: we need a little escapism from our theatre. This week’s light-hearted offering is a West End premiere adapting the classic 80s Tom Hanks film about a 12-year-old boy who becomes trapped in an adult’s body. Jay McGuiness stars alongside Matthew Kelly, Wendi Peters and Kimberley Walsh.
Dominion Theatre, W1 to 7 November
Faith, Hope and Charity
Alexander Zeldin makes his very own particular brand of theatre, focusing on those living on the peripheries of our communities and based on real-life research. Faith, Hope and Charity is set in a rundown community hall and, if it’s anything like Beyond Caring and Love, it will be difficult, powerful theatre.
National Theatre: Dorfman, SE1, Monday 9 September to 12 October
HighTide festival
Some of the very best plays from the Edinburgh fringe are coming to the HighTide new writing festival. A bunch of critically lauded shows will feature, including Queer House with Mika Johnson’s Pink Lemonade, Margaret Perry’s Collapsible and Charlotte Josephine’s Pops. There is also the premiere of Sophie Ellerby’s LIT (pictured), about a teenage girl looking for love in all the wrong places. It is a product of HighTide’s First Commissions programme and is directed by Stef O’Driscoll.
Various venues, Aldeburgh, Tuesday 10 to 15 September
A Doll’s House
Another Doll’s House, another intriguing twist on Ibsen’s classic play about a woman struggling to break free of her domestic trappings. In Tanika Gupta’s new version, Nora becomes Niru (played by Anjana Vasan), a young Bengali woman married to an English colonial bureaucrat. The show marks Rachel O’Riordan’s directorial debut as artistic director of the Lyric.
Lyric Hammersmith, W6, to 5 October
The Man in the White Suit
The Ealing comedy film has been adapted by Sean Foley, who also directs. Stephen Mangan plays Sidney Stratton, a man whose life spirals out of control after he invents a fabric that never gets dirty, with Kara Tointon as his faithful sidekick. If it sounds silly that’s because it really, really is. This is the second collaboration between Mangan and Foley, following a cracking version of Jeeves and Wooster.
Theatre Royal Bath, to 21; Wyndham’s Theatre, WC2, 25 September to 11 January
MG
Three of the best ... dance shows
Teaċ Damsa: Swan Lake/Loch na hEala
A stunning work from Michael Keegan-Dolan that touches on a seemingly impossible combination of themes – mythology, depression, urban regeneration, the Celtic Tiger, the crimes of the Catholic church, Nordic folk music and Marius Petipa’s ballet Swan Lake – and turns them into an excoriating yet uplifting piece of dance-theatre.
Cork Opera House, Tuesday 10 to Thursday 12 September
Astana Ballet
Kazakhstan’s leading ballet company, no less, makes its UK debut. Formed in 2012, the company performs an eclectic programme of contemporary and neo-classical ballets and folk dance, including a piece inspired by Édith Piaf and one based on Oscar Wilde’s Salome.
Royal Opera House: Linbury Theatre, WC2, Thursday 12 to 14 September
Stuart Waters: RockBottom
A former dancer with Protein and Motionhouse, Stuart Waters’s choreographic debut is a painfully raw autobiographical solo about mental health and the dangers of chemsex. In an intimate, no-holds-barred piece of dance-theatre, he explores addiction and recovery.
The Place, WC1, Thursday 12 September
LW
Main composite image: Alastair Muir; Allstar/New Line Cinema; Robbie Augspurger; Lucy Dawkins/Tate Britain
