Five of the best ... films
Leave No Trace (PG)
(Debra Granik, 2018, US) 109 mins
A tender study of outsiders on America’s rural fringes. A traumatised military veteran (Ben Foster), self-exiled from society along with his devoted teenage daughter (Thomasin McKenzie), is evicted from their national park homestead. Their struggles to get along – with each other and the rest of the world – are rendered with a matter-of-fact sensitivity.
The Endless (15)
(Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, 2017, US) 111 mins
Low in budget but rich in ideas, this sci-fi is one to file alongside Another Earth or Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour, with its mysteries, odd characters and subtly digitally warped reality. The directors play brothers drawn back to a cult they fled years earlier. Like them, we want to stick around and find the answers.
Arcadia (12A)
(Paul Wright, 2017, UK) 78 mins
The distinctive notes of the British countryside are captured in this stirring essay film, compiled from archive clips and obscure movies, and backed by a varied score from Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory. Into our history of rural tradition and harmony it injects anarchy, revelry and horrors ancient and modern, from witchcraft to mad cow disease.
Hereditary (15)
(Ari Aster, 2018, US) 127 mins
A family curse plays out in awful ways in this domestic horror, which bears comparison with Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining with its building claustrophobic dread, but delivers fresh new shocks of its own. Toni Collette (pictured) leads a fine cast as a matriarch in meltdown, beset by the strains of her dead mother, her troublesome children and some increasingly bonkers, supernatural phenomena.
Sicario 2: Soldado (15)
(Stefano Sollima, 2018, Ita/US) 122 mins
Uncanny timing for a sequel expanding on the United States’ dirty war on the southern border, and its human and moral costs. Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro are the manliest of men to send into a messy situation involving Mexican drug cartels working with Islamist terrorists, with innocent migrants and government meddling muddying the waters.
SR
Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs
Little Mix
While work continues on their fifth album in six years, the hardest-grafting band in pop head out on a tour of the UK’s premier cricket grounds, air-show venues and second-tier rugby clubs. Expect a blitzkrieg of top-drawer bangers, PG-rated school-disco fun and a dollop of self-empowerment.
The 1st Central County Ground, Hove, Friday 6; touring to 29 July
Wiz Khalifa
Since scoring a huge global hit with the Charlie Puth-assisted weepie See You Again – the video to which is currently at 3.6bn views (!) – rapper Wiz Khalifa has been focusing on his fitness, apparently going to the gym five days a week and learning mixed martial arts. Lovely. He’s pulling the focus back to the music, however, with this one-off London gig ahead of a new album.
Roundhouse, NW1, Sunday 1 July
Wireless festival
This year’s Wireless lineup hit the headlines in January for all the wrong reasons: the lineup originally featured just a handful of female artists across its three days of showcasing the best in R&B, hip-hop and grime. While the event has since added an all-female stage in the wake of backlash about its bill, it’s still a sorry state of affairs. But expect Mabel (above), Raye, Ms Banks et al to more than hold their own among the likes of Post Malone, Stormzy and professional buffoon DJ Khaled.
Finsbury Park, N4, Friday 6 to 8 July
Queen + Adam Lambert
What started out as a one-off awards show collaboration has morphed into a seven-year stint fronting one of rock’s most enduring behemoths for subtlety-free American Idol alumnus Adam Lambert. With the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody on the horizon, and likely another hits compilation of some kind, there will be plenty of opportunities to admire Brian May’s nest-like hairdo.
Wembley Arena, Sunday 1; The O2, SE10, Monday 2 & Wednesday 4; Glasgow Green, Friday 6 July
MC
Pharoah Sanders
The raw and impassioned saxophone sound of former John Coltrane partner Pharoah Sanders can still be a spine-chillingly uncompromising experience, but Sanders’s parallel affection for seductive grooves will make him a popular draw at Love Supreme’s diverse jazz, funk and soul weekend, featuring Elvis Costello (Sat), Mavis Staples and Earth, Wind & Fire (both Sun) and many more.
Love Supreme jazz festival, Lewes, Saturday 30 June
JF
Four of the best ... classical concerts
Pelléas et Mélisande
Stefan Herheim is widely recognised as one of today’s leading opera directors, but so far we’ve seen relatively little of his work in Britain. That’s about to change. His version of La Cenerentola is coming to the Edinburgh international festival in August, and his outstanding production of The Queen of Spades arrives at Covent Garden next January. The new Glyndebourne staging of Debussy’s masterpiece is his, too, with John Chest and Christina Gansch in the title roles, Christopher Purves as Golaud and Robin Ticciati conducting.
Glyndebourne Opera House, Lewes, Saturday 30 June & Wednesday 4 July; to 9 August
Till Dawning
Pianist Ryan Wigglesworth’s settings of poems by George Herbert are the novelty in this neatly devised recital with soprano Sophie Bevan. The new songs, written for Bevan, are balanced by Poèmes Pour Mi, the ecstatic cycle Messiaen composed in 1937 for his first wife, while songs about childhood precede each of them: Mussorgsky’s The Nursery; and Stravinsky’s Three Little Songs, subtitled Recollections of My Childhood.
Wigmore Hall, W1, Saturday 30 June
In the Locked Room & The Lighthouse
Since its premiere in 1980, The Lighthouse has become the most regularly staged of all Peter Maxwell Davies’s operas. This production, directed by Stephen Unwin, pairs the story of the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in the Outer Hebrides in 1900 with Huw Watkins’s equally taut 2012 one-acter, featuring a libretto by David Harsent that is loosely based upon a short story by Thomas Hardy.
Royal College of Music: Britten Theatre, SW7, Monday 2 & Tuesday 3 July
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
Michael Jackson: On the Wall
There is absolutely nothing desperate about the NPG, whose recent moves in a more serious artistic direction have seen visitor numbers fall, putting on an exhibition about the King of Pop. Nothing. In fact, Jackson really was portrayed by a lot of artists from Andy Warhol to Isaac Julien. This could be a fascinating panorama of modern fame.
National Portrait Gallery, WC2, to 21 October
Frieze Sculpture
This free display of outdoor sculpture, which lasts until autumn’s Frieze Art Fair, encompasses an eclectic variety of artists. The geometrical abstract vision of Conrad Shawcross combines with Barry Flanagan’s bronze hare perched on an anvil and a penguin by conceptual artist John Baldessari. Surely something for everyone.
Regent’s Park, NW1, Wednesday 4 July to 7 October
Dorothea Lange
The Great Depression that started when the US stock market crashed in 1929 caused suffering around the world, yet it is Lange’s photographs of rural poverty in the US that define it visually. Along with Walker Evans, she shot portraits that are unforgettable in their straightforward sympathy. Her 1936 picture Migrant Mother, in which two hungry children cry on their mother’s shoulders, has an urgent resonance in today’s climate.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 2 September
250th Summer Exhibition
Don’t miss Grayson Perry’s imaginative reinvention of this show, which has been going since the 18th century. To mark the Royal Academy’s 250th anniversary, he has led a radical rethink of its annual all-comers event. Outsiders and insiders jostle for space on luridly coloured walls. Where Paula Rego meets Banksy, it all adds up to a crazy and inspired new perspective on art and its purpose today.
Royal Academy of Arts, W1, to 19 August
Bomberg
East End-born Jewish painter David Bomberg was one of Britain’s most daring early-20th-century artists. Influenced by futurism and cubism, he created highly original paintings that turned everyday Whitechapel scenes into abstract vortexes of energy. There’s a strong comparison with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Later in life, he became an expressive painter of landscapes, still with a raw edge.
Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, NW8, to 16 September
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
Queens of the Coal Age
After starring in Beckett’s Happy Days, Maxine Peake stays on at the Manchester venue for her own play, telling the remarkable story of four women who occupied a Lancashire mine in 1993 to protest against pit closures, stuffing their bras with nicotine patches and wet wipes to survive 80 metres underground. Bryony Shanahan directs.
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, to 21 July
Imperium
A West End transfer for the RSC’s impressive distillation (two parts, seven hours) by Mike Poulton of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy. Tracing the rise and fall of the orator, politician and passionate Roman, it offers parallels with power struggles of today and a fine performance by Richard McCabe as a flawed man of vision. Think The West Wing in togas.
Gielgud Theatre, W1, to 8 September
Pressure
A play about the weather for us obsessed Brits, but here the consequences are rather more crucial, affecting the future of Europe and the free world. It’s the eve of D-day, June 1944, and the invasion depends on two warring meteorologists: British group captain James Stagg predicts severe storms, while his Yank opposite number says the weather will be lovely. The excellent David Haig stars as Stagg, and also wrote this absorbing fact-based play.
Ambassadors Theatre, WC2, to 1 September
Sasha Regan’s All Male Iolanthe
A welcome revival for a charming, clever adaptation of a lesser-known Gilbert & Sullivan work first seen in 2010. The thing about Regan’s all-male G&S productions is that they are not just camp frolics but pieces full of wit, pathos and satire. Iolanthe sees G&S lampooning peerages and the House Of Lords, here tellingly related by a group of fairies and some schoolboys who find costumes in a dressing-up box.
Cambridge Arts Theatre, Tuesday to 7; touring to 28 July
An Octoroon
A sell-out hit at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre, now the National hosts this thought-provoking, unsettling mash-up of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 anti-slavery melodrama and a modern unravelling of it by hot young US writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. With characters in whiteface, blackface, even redface makeup, it tackles the legacy of slavery, racial identity and the illusion of theatre itself.
National Theatre: Dorfman, SE1, to 18 July
MC
Three of the best ... dance shows
Hofesh Shechter Company: Grand Finale
A welcome return for Shechter’s daringly apocalyptic work, first staged at this venue last September, in which the choreographer squares up to the precariousness of our world with dance that is not only fractured with violence, dread and defiance but also hums with a beautiful, fragile note of humanity.
Sadler’s Wells, EC1, Thursday to 7 July
Birmingham Royal Ballet: La Fille Mal Gardée
Ballet heaven in Frederick Ashton’s pastoral comedy about a giddy, wayward girl and her romance with a handsome farmhand. Featuring bawdy wit, exquisite classical choreography and a barnyard of dancing fowls.
Bristol Hippodrome, Wednesday to 7 July; touring to 10 November
Goldberg Variations: Ternary Patterns for Insomnia
An entrancing homage to Bach, with 11 musicians from Scottish Ensemble choreographed together with five dancers by Orjan Andersson to create an infectiously theatrical interpretation of the iconic score.
Barbican Theatre, EC2, Thursday to 7 July
JM
