Five of the best ... films
Custody (15)
(Xavier Legrand, 2017, Fra) 94 mins
What begins as a social-realist drama steadily morphs into a domestic horror movie here, and the only special effect required is actor Denis Ménochet. He plays a father granted access to his son in what has clearly been a messy divorce. Striving to make a fresh start and move on, mother Léa Drucker is apprehensive – and with good reason.
A Quiet Place (15)
(John Krasinski, 2018, US) 90 mins
Leave the popcorn and crisp packets at home for this noise-sensitive crowd-pleaser, whose premise of post-apocalyptic monsters triggered by the slightest sound is ingeniously simple and primed for tension. Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s rural family have made lifestyle changes but will it be enough to survive? Especially with a baby on the way?
120 Beats Per Minute (15)
(Robin Campillo, 2017, Fra) 143 mins
Political and personal passion go hand in hand in this powerful drama documenting Act Up, a radical Aids awareness group in 1990s Paris when indifference and prejudice hampered medical progress. Campillo’s film is faithful to the debates and disagreements within this group but also celebrates their camaraderie – in politics, partying, sex and, inevitably, death.
A Gentle Creature (18)
(Sergei Lozintsa, 2017, Fra/Ger/Rus/Lith/Neth/Ukr/Lat) 143 mins
A young woman’s (Vasilina Makovtseva) mission to find out what’s happened to her convict husband becomes a surreal, nightmare tour of a Russian prison town, taking in Kafkaesque bureaucracy, endemic drunkenness and grim sexual exploitation. The pacing is a little slow, but it’s a strange, unforgettable descent into depths of grimness.
Western (12A)
(Valeska Grisebach, 2017, Ger/Bul/Aus) 121 mins
This tale of German construction workers in wild Bulgaria doesn’t exactly pan out into a celebration of European unity. Instead, it’s a slow burn of cultural differences, historic resentments and masculine horn-locking, as various encounters between the locals and the Germans raise the tension – with our strong, solitary protagonist (Meinhard Neumann) caught in the middle.
SR
Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs
Hinds
Since the 2016 release of their charmingly ramshackle debut, Leave Me Alone, Spanish quartet Hinds have recorded the main title track to Disney’s Cars 3 and finished a new album, I Don’t Run. Scuzzy new single The Club is peak early 00s garage or, as they put it, “more Hinds than Hinds themselves”.
Glasgow Sunday 15, Manchester Tuesday 17, Bristol Wednesday 18, London Thursday 19, Brighton Friday 20 April
IAMDDB
Following a third place finish on this year’s BBC Sound of 2018 poll, Diana Debrito, AKA IAMDDB, takes her hazy, trap-inflected jazz on the road for her first headline UK tour. Each gig will be unique, with fans asked to adhere to specific dress codes and themes (Manchester attendees, you’ll need to revisit your 90s wardrobe, apparently).
Bristol, Monday 16, Birmingham, Tuesday 17, Manchester, Wednesday 18; London, Thursday 19 April
Alexis Taylor
If you found Taylor’s 2016 Piano album a bit, well, piano-y, then fear not because his new opus, Beautiful Thing, sees him edge back towards the elegant dance music he occasionally makes with Hot Chip. Co-produced alongside DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy, if the title track is anything to go by you can expect some slow-burn bangers infused with warm nostalgia and poppers.
Patterns, Brighton, Thursday 19; Omeara, SE1, Friday 20 April
Method Man & Redman
Rappers Method Man and Redman – AKA Meth and Red – started collaborating in 1994, since when they have starred in a film together, 2001’s How High, and a short-lived Fox sitcom, Method & Red (tagline: “Puttin’ the urban in suburban”). This one-off London show pulls focus back to the music, specifically 1999’s classic, Blackout!.
O2 Academy Brixton, SW9, Saturday 14 April
MC
Jakob Bro Trio
Jakob Bro is no rip-roaring guitar hero, but the immensely musical Danish guitarist is no ambience-exploring introvert either – his trio with empathic American partners Thomas Morgan (bass) and Joey Baron (drums) exhilaratingly confirms that. Inspired by the late Paul Motian’s ingeniously lyrical music, Bro’s subtle artistry gets richer the closer you listen.
Pizza Express Jazz Club, Soho, W1, Monday 16 & Tuesday 17 April
JF
Four of the best ... classical concerts
Panambí
Juanjo Mena steps down as chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic this summer. He has conducted less of the Spanish and Latin American repertory than one hoped during his years in Manchester, but at least his latest concert includes a real Argentinian rarity: Panambí, the ballet score that made the 21-year-old Alberto Ginastera’s name in 1937.
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, Saturday 14 April
The Song of the Children of the Stars
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia bring Unsuk Chin’s choral piece to Europe for the first time. Setting poems by the likes of Fernando Pessoa, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Octavio Paz for adult and children’s choirs, it explores humanity’s relationship with the cosmos.
Royal Festival Hall, SE1, Sunday 15 April
Colin Currie & Nicolas Hodges
The percussionist and pianist celebrate the reopening of the QEH with a programme of Birtwistle, Feldman and Stockhausen. The main work is Kontakte, Stockhausen’s electroacoustic classic. Currie also plays Feldman’s King of Denmark, and there’s a new work from Birtwistle, too: Intrada for piano and percussion.
Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, Thursday 19 April
Rattle’s Mahler
Simon Rattle is concentrating on Mahler’s final pair of symphonies in his latest concerts with the LSO. In Dublin, the Ninth is performed on its own, but in London it’s prefaced (Thu & 26 Apr) by the premiere of Helen Grime’s Woven Space, while his 10th (22 Apr) is paired with Tippett’s last work, The Rose Lake.
National Concert Hall, Dublin, Wednesday 18 April; Barbican, EC2, Thursday 19, 22 & 26 April
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
Beatriz Milhazes
This Brazilian painter mixes abstract colour and flashes of reality in designs that are hard-edged, exuberant and relentlessly dynamic. There are echoes of such European 20th-century modernists as Delaunay, Kandinsky and Matisse, yet her paintings have a decorative, accessible brightness that locates them unmistakably in the present day.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1 Wed to 1 July
Joseph Beuys
This great German artist survived a Stuka crash in the second world war because, he said, Siberian shamans swaddled his burned body in felt and fat. Out of that symbolic rebirth he forged a vocabulary of myth and ritual that gives his sculpture intense power. This exhibition brings together his Stag Monuments.
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, W1, Wednesday 18 April to 16 June
Linder Sterling
Getting collage artist Linder to be a resident artist at Chatsworth House was a wonderful idea. She has delved into the history and treasures of this great stately home with madcap enthusiasm – ghosts, family mementos, neglected paintings and the renowned Devonshire collection of drawings all catching her eye. This exhibition at the house is accompanied by one at Nottingham Contemporary. Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, to 21 October
Sony World Photography Awards
German artist Candida Höfer gets a special display to celebrate her work alongside more than 600 entrants in this year’s global Sony competition. Höfer takes eerily perfect pictures of architectural interiors that lavishly reproduce the grandeur of baroque and neoclassical buildings all over Europe. Her magnificent images have a cool irony that stresses our distance in time and culture from these places. Alongside her is a feast of talent from the entire planet.
Somerset House, WC2, Friday 20 April to 6 May
Tracey Emin
Margate’s finest modern artist has a direct way of communicating that makes her a natural as a public sculptor, yet she is only now taking the genre seriously. Her emotional neon text, titled I Want My Time With You, is a warm way to welcome travellers to London and the UK. Emin campaigned to stay in the EU so this is a love letter to our fellow Europeans in bright light. On display until the end of 2018.
St Pancras International Station, N1
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
Caroline, Or Change
It’s your last chance – until November’s West End transfer – to see Michael Longhurst’s revival of this musical set in 1963 in a US on the cusp of change. There are many reasons to see this intelligent, offbeat and often searing show, but worth it alone for Sharon D Clarke’s performance as the black maid trapped below stairs, singing to the washing machine.
Hampstead Theatre, NW3, to 21 April
The Inheritance
There are shades of both Howards End and Angels in America in Matthew Lopez’s absorbing seven-hour epic (staged in two parts), which explores New York’s present-day gay community. It also looks back to the Aids crisis in an evening directed with both elan and delicacy by Stephen Daldry, with a cast including Kyle Soller and Andrew Burnap.
Young Vic, SE1, to 19 May
The Encounter
A journey into the jungle and the imagination, Simon McBurney’s one-man show – co-directed by Kirsty Housley – tells the story of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre, who in 1969 was dropped into the Amazon rainforest and promptly got lost. Getting away from western ways of thinking is at the heart of a dense, challenging but illuminating show, delivered into the audience’s brains via headphones.
Barbican Theatre, EC2, Saturday to 5 May
Brighton Rock
Bryony Lavery has always been fascinated by good and evil and has written some very fine plays around the subject, including current West End hit Frozen. Here, she adapts Graham Greene’s 1938 thriller for Pilot Theatre. Esther Richardson’s production plays to the atmospheric seediness of seaside Brighton in a story of coercion, deception and murder, in which waitress Rose is the only witness to a murder committed by gang leader Pinkie.
Birmingham Rep, Saturday 14; Theatre Royal, Winchester, Thursday 19 to 21 April; touring to 26 May
The Class Project
Part of CPT’s working-class theatre festival Common People, Rebecca Atkinson-Lord’s solo show draws upon her own experience to explore social mobility, regional identity and who gets to speak in their own voice. Winning a scholarship to a private school and working in theatre has left Atkinson-Lord adrift from the rest of her family, moving in different worlds, in a thoughtful show about remembering your roots.
Camden People’s Theatre, NW1, Friday 20 & 21 April; touring to 1 June
LG
Three of the best ... dance shows
Royal Ballet: Mixed Bill
The last mixed programme of the season has revivals of three very different one-act ballets. Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear showcases the skill and nuance of its all-male cast, its refined abstractions of style contrasting with the turbulent romanticism of Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, and MacMillan’s ragtime romp Elite Syncopations.
Royal Opera House, WC2, Saturday 14 April to 11 May
Candoco Dance Company: Face In / Let’s Talk About Dis
The excellent ensemble of disabled and non-disabled dancers play with issues of prejudice, political correctness and the ferocious possibilities of the dancing body in a powerful double bill by Yasmeen Godder and Hetain Patel.
Attenborough Centre For the Creative Arts, Brighton, Wednesday 18 April
Kenneth MacMillan: Steps Back in Time
Viviana Durante presents a fascinating programme of early MacMillan ballets. Extracts from House of Birds, Danses Concertantes and others are performed by dancers from Ballet Black with Royal Ballet principals such as Lauren Cuthbertson.
Barbican Centre: The Pit, EC2, Wednesday 18 to 21 April
JM
