TV
Line Of Duty
(Thursday, 9pm, BBC2)
The third series of Jed Mercurio’s excellent cop drama plunges straight into boiling hot water and stays there throughout this gripping opening episode. Daniel Mays, memorable for playing the devil in Ashes To Ashes, stars as Sgt Danny Waldron, leading an armed-response unit against a would-be gangland killer who ends up being shot dead. Suspicion falls on him when DC Fleming (Vicky McClure) goes undercover to establish what happened. Sure to be more complex than a straightforward case of police corruption. David Stubbs
FILM
10 Cloverfield Lane
A fun little genre flick that doesn’t try to do too much, but does more than you might have expected. Underground in location but entirely mainstream in sensibility, it’s a clever, claustrophobic chamber piece. Mary Elizabeth Winstead finds herself a nuclear bunker-guest of John Goodman’s avuncular weirdo, who’s well prepared for the alien apocalypse he assures her is going on upstairs. But is it? How to tell? It would be a crime to reveal more, but as the title, and the fact it was produced by JJ Abrams, suggest, there certainly is. Steve Rose
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ON DEMAND
Flat TV
(iPlayer, from Thursday)
Starting life as a webseries, Tom Rosenthal and Naz Osmanoglu’s comedy gets a full BBC3 series. A flatshare sitcom with a high-concept twist, it sees the mundanities of domestic life told via the medium of telly: attempts at cooking are turned into MasterChef challenges, and an incident with lost keys becomes I’m Not A Celebrity… Get Me Back In My Flat! Daft fun. Phil Harrison
THEATRE
Reasons To Be Happy
(Hampstead Theatre, London, to 16 April)
It’s unusual for a playwright to go back and revisit characters, but Neil LaBute has done just that, and revealed himself to be rather less misanthropic these days in the process. This is, after all, the man who wrote and directed the roundly unpleasant 1996 film In The Company Of Men. Reasons To Be Pretty featured Steph and Greg, a couple plagued with problems. Now, in Reasons To Be Happy, they have separated; she’s married to someone else and he’s dating her best friend Carly, whose ex-husband wants her back. This is more romantic comedy than the trademark LaBute tale-with-a-nasty-twist, and features Tom Burke, recently Dolokhov in War And Peace, and Warren Brown of Luther fame. Mark Cook
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MUSIC
Alessia Cara
(London, Manchester, Birmingham)
A proper pop star in the US, here Alessia Cara is showcasing her act on some rather more modest stages. Not that you would imagine this remotely fazing an artist whose whole shtick is “well-adjusted teenager”. Her debut album, Know-It-All, presents Cara as intelligent and under-styled, someone who looks goofy in her videos and sounds, when she sings about it, as if she can well remember wondering what lay out there in the world beyond her suburban home. Such relatable normalcy is clearly catnip to her young fans (sample YouTube comment: “She controls her own Vevo and her hair is SOOOO CUUUTE”), but the wry humour in her big song Here, where she addresses feeling alienated at a party, isn’t something they’ll necessarily grow out of. John Robinson
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CLUBS
Peckham Paradise
(Canavan’s, London, Saturday)
Part of the irony-exploding collective PC Music, Kane West – AKA Gus Lobban – made one of its best releases to date with his 2014 mixtape Western Beats, a cute splurge of electro, whistles and a woman saying “shower curtain” over and over. Using percussion seemingly made by a Nokia technician in 1995, he’s since made satisfying ghetto house tracks for Tiga’s Turbo label, and plays here alongside fellow Kero Kero Bonito member WHARFWHIT and Nighswan. Pre-game with a cocktail of cherry Lambrini and Panda Pops for the most appropriate mindset. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
COMEDY
John Robins
(Hemel Hempstead, Glasgow, Aldershot, Birmingham)
For the last few years, John Robins has ploughed his own furrow, creating a string of shows that offer a soft, contemplative take on modern masculinity. That’s not to say he’s a delicate flower; as regular listeners to his Radio X shows with Elis James can attest, he enjoys sinking pints and making mischief as much as anyone. But in his solo stand-up work, Robins reveals himself to be more of a romantic, someone endlessly searching for fulfilment while remaining riven with self-doubt. He has previously anatomised the break-up of relationships and spoken movingly about the girls that got away. Speakeasy finds him warmly ensconced in an idyllic relationship with the woman of his dreams but plagued by many of the same old insecurities, especially when he discovers that his girlfriend has access to his internet history. James Kettle
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FILM EVENT
Essay film festival
(Various venues, to 24 March)
Essay film: a daunting term for a loosely defined genre of self-reflective cinema, the proponents of which would really be unclassifiable otherwise, such as Chris Marker, Agnès Varda or Patricio Guzmán. Guest of honour this year is Kidlat Tahimik, pioneer of Filipino film and possibly the least classifiable of them all. His work is neither strictly fact nor fiction, playfully ignoring all film-making rules. His 1977 film Perfumed Nightmare contrasted developing and developed worlds and was championed by the likes of Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola and Susan Sontag, with the latter writing that it “reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment – even innocence – are still available to film”. Elsewhere, there are films by Mark Rappaport, Manoel de Oliveira, Eric Rohmer and Miranda Pennell. SR
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TALKS
London Thinks – The Theology And Ethics Of Star Wars
(Conway Hall, London, Thursday)
Is the Force, and ergo all religion in general, an instrument for evil or for good? Is Obi-Wan Kenobi really a benevolent, excellently bearded guru of peace or is he a telekinetic harbinger of doom, recruiting impressionable youngsters into terrorism? Are higher powers such as the Force real at all, or is it – as Han Solo famously quipped – all a “lot of simple tricks and nonsense”? These and similar existential quandaries will be mulled over by a panel of humanists, historians, free thinkers and journalists, using George Lucas’s morally monochrome fairytale as a springboard for wider theological discourse. And why not? Since JJ Abrams caused a disturbance in the Force with the runaway success of the seventh episode of the franchise last year, events tenuously pegged to all things Far, Far Away have similarly blossomed, but this one appears more cerebral than most. Plus, the presence of Star Wars on the poster might mean this provides a rare opportunity to trick a child into attending a panel discussion about ethics. How often are you able to do that? Luke Holland
EXHIBITIONS
Omer Fast
(Baltic, Gateshead, to 26 June)
In Omer Fast’s 2011 video work 5,000 Feet Is The Best, a former operator of Predator drones explains that the distance is ideal for watching the target’s cigarette flare like a beacon. “It’s quite beautiful,” he recounts. The piece is typical of the Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based artist’s multi-screen installations here, with their ambivalent themes and deliberate confusion of highly politicised documentary and almost poetic fiction. The exhibition presents painstakingly recomposed fragments of various traumas and crises that tend to connect with our collective subconsciousness. CNN Concatenated is an 18-minute collage of thousands of single spoken words sampled from the US rolling news network rearranged to form an ambiguous but threatening narrative. Something is going on and we don’t know what it is. Fast’s inventive skills make us feel and share the uncertainty. Robert Clark
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