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A host of fantastic films, awesome new albums and spectacular stage performances – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of film, music and theatre.
Our experts have explored all the options for culture vultures to get their teeth into, and decided on the music, plays and movies that are well worth dedicating your weekend to.
Read on to find out what to see and do…
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
The Fall Guy Cert: 12A, 2hrs 6mins
Ryan Gosling was interviewed on stage before a preview screening of The Fall Guy in London last week, concluding his rhapsodies about the ‘real heroes’ of action movies with a plea. ‘Give stunts an Oscar,’ he entreated. He’s right. It’s high time.
The Fall Guy is a much less interesting film than Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, but at one level it does the same thing, elevating the stunt double, a performer who by definition is usually anonymous, to the status of leading man. The equivalent here of Brad Pitt’s character Cliff Booth in Tarantino’s 2019 barnstormer is Gosling’s Colt Seavers, the best ‘fall guy’ in the business, who risks life and limb for the greater glory of a narcissistic star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
The Fall Guy’s big achievement is in putting Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt together for the first time. They have proper screen chemistry
David Leitch’s film is notionally inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same title, and indeed there is a 1980s action-movie feel to it, popcorn entertainment that falters whenever it takes itself and its corny narrative too seriously.
When we meet Colt, he has been swept off his feet not by a CGI wave or an exploding shell but by a pretty English camera operator, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). Alas, their passionate relationship is torpedoed when Colt breaks his back after a stunt goes disastrously wrong. He withdraws from her, and from movie work generally, but 18 months later he is persuaded back, to work on a Tom Ryder sci-fi blockbuster being filmed in Australia. The film’s first-time director is… Jody Moreno.
She’s startled by his sudden reappearance, and seemingly none too delighted, but she and her movie need his expertise. Moreover, she is unaware that Ryder, her slimy star, has fallen in with some disreputable rascals and gone missing. The film’s shrill English producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham, best known for the TV show Ted Lasso), believes that Colt is the person best equipped to return Ryder to the production. Colt’s other, evidently tougher challenge is to win back Jody.
That’s the plot in a nutshell, and a nutshell is all it needs: it’s silly and implausible. But Gosling and Blunt jointly have enough charisma to give it most of the necessary heft. From where I was sitting it still ran out of steam about two-thirds of the way through and became an exercise in a kind of high-energy tedium, but in fairness there were plenty around me in the cinema who manifestly loved it throughout.
Moreover, as a celebration of stunts and those who fearlessly perform them, The Fall Guy can’t be faulted. Some of the fights, crashes and chases are genuinely spectacular, if never quite up there with the Mission: Impossible movies.
As it happens, the screenplay is by Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation writer Drew Pearce, and it has been rightly criticised for a bad-taste joke about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, one of numerous references to real-life stars and their movies (Harrison Ford, The Fugitive, Jason Bourne, Miami Vice, Thelma & Louise, even Notting Hill, Love Actually and Pretty Woman) that are meant to be part of the fun, pumping up the sense of an industry chuckling at itself.
If, amid all the self-referential swagger, The Fall Guy does succeed in getting the Academy Awards to recognise stunt choreography, then it will earn itself a significant footnote in cinematic history. We’ll see. In the meantime, its big achievement is in putting Gosling and Blunt together for the first time. They have proper screen chemistry.
Brian Viner
FOUR MORE FABULOUS FILMS TO SEE IN CINEMAS
The Idea Of You
Cert: 15, 1hr 55mins
Also available on Amazon Prime
In real life, the age gap between 41-year-old Anne Hathaway and 29-year-old Mary & George star Nicholas Galitzine is just 12 years, but in The Idea Of You it’s been expanded to 16, presumably to underline the point its makers want to make about how unfairly society treats couples where the woman is the older partner.
All hell breaks loose when Solene (Anne Hathaway) dates Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine)
After all, when Solene’s ex-husband dumped her for a younger work colleague nobody batted an eyelid but when Solene (Hathaway) tentatively starts a relationship with Hayes (Galitzine) all hell breaks loose.
But then not only is he younger, he’s also the lead singer of August Moon, one of the biggest boy bands in the world.
This is all nicely and plausibly played out, funny at times, a little contrived at others. But it neatly avoids the cougar cliches and, at my screening, seemed to be going down particularly well with women.
Matthew Bond
There’s Still Tomorrow
Cert: 15, 1hr 58mins
The Italian-language There’s Still Tomorrow (original title C’è Ancora Domani) is the directorial debut of actress Paola Cortellesi, who co-wrote the screenplay and plays the female lead — and it’s wonderful, indeed it was the biggest smash at the Italian box office last year, nuking Oppenheimer and besting Barbie.
Paola Cortellesi stars in and also directs the tremendous There’s Still Tomorrow
It is set in 1946 in Rome, a city still reeling from the war and patrolled by American military policemen.
Cortellesi plays Delia, a hard-working mother of three trapped in an abusive marriage to the brutish Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea), tyrannised by him and by the needs of everyone else in the household, including her bedridden father-in-law.
If that sounds grim, it is, although there are a few rays of sunlight penetrating the gloom: the attentions of an old lover, the kindliness of an American MP, the empathy of Delia’s friends, the impending engagement of her daughter.
But there’s also something else going on, on which Cortellesi at first lets us in only tangentially, setting up a surprising conclusion that, truly, will make you want to cheer.
It’s a picture of tremendous, sometimes whimsical charm and not a little mischief, filmed in black-and-white in the style of great works of Italian neorealism such as Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 masterpiece, Rome, Open City, to which it would make a perfect companion piece. Honestly, it’s that good.
Brian Viner
Challengers
Cert: 15, 2hrs 11mins
The makers of Challengers – and star Zendaya herself co-produces – get pretty much everything else spot-on in a film that is sporty, ridiculously sexy at times and, like other films directed by the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, absolutely gorgeous to look at.
Challengers’ makers, including Zendaya, have got just about everything spot on
At the outset, Tashi (Zendaya) is watching the final of a Challenger tournament (a step down from the better-known competitions) between her husband Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (an excellent Josh O’Connor).
There is no sign the players even know each other until the screenplay skips back 13 years and we discover they used to be doubles partners and best friends. And that they were both besotted with the same girl. Ah, that’ll be Zendaya again, now alarmingly convincing as an 18-year-old tennis player with the world, not to mention both boys, at her feet.
I loved it, particularly its use of music, despite getting slightly befuddled by all the jumping about in time.
Matthew Bond
The Book Of Clarence
Cert: 15, 2hrs 9mins
At first glance, The Book Of Clarence looks like a black American version of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian. It’s funny at times, flirts with blasphemy at others, and when Clarence of Jerusalem gets into serious money problems he becomes a false messiah, just as Brian of Nazareth did all those years ago.
The Book Of Clarence features a compelling central performance from LaKeith Stanfield
But these similarities turn out to be superficial. Written and directed by the British film-maker Jeymes Samuel and co-produced by Jay-Z, The Book Of Clarence has a wistful, almost mournful atmosphere and a compelling yet quietly subtle central performance from LaKeith Stanfield.
The result is a film that explores belief, non-belief and race, and will make you think every bit as much as it will make you laugh. The laid-back, likeable Clarence, who turns out to be the dope-peddling, chariot-racing brother of Doubting Thomas, is a firm non-believer. But he owes a ton of money to Jedediah the Terrible, so into the lucrative messiah business he must go.
With the picturesque, hilltop Italian city of Matera (also used in The Passion Of The Christ) filling in convincingly for 1st-century Jerusalem, the film looks great, and I loved some of Samuel’s more surreal touches – particularly the floating hookah-pipe smokers and the disco routine.
He goes a bit Mel Gibson in the last lap – the stations of the cross sequence seems to go on for a blood-splattered eternity – but even then he has some clever and funny points still to make with the help of James McAvoy as Pontius Pilate and Benedict Cumberbatch as a rather important beggar.
Matthew Bond
MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Dua Lipa
Radical Optimism Out now
Her credentials as a song and dance queen are second to none, but Dua Lipa also has an impeccable sense of timing. Four years ago, just as Britain went into lockdown for the first time, she released her feel-good second album, Future Nostalgia, and provided the perfect accompaniment for thousands of impromptu kitchen discos.
This week, as winter finally loosens its chilly grip, she’s come up with a sequel that bristles with warm, sunny enthusiasm. As its title suggests, Radical Optimism is a buoyant collection of breezy dance and luxuriantly produced pop that may well end up sound-tracking the summer.
This week, as winter finally loosens its chilly grip, Dua Lipa has come up with Radical Optimism, a sequel to her last album that bristles with warm, sunny enthusiasm
Lipa says she was inspired by the confidence shown by British music in the 1990s — the brashness of Britpop and the style of trip-hop acts such as Portishead and Massive Attack — and she displays a similar level of self-belief. As she puts it: ‘A friend introduced me to the term Radical Optimism, and it struck me — the idea of going through chaos gracefully and feeling like you can weather any storm.’
This third album, it should be said, isn’t going to be forensically picked apart for detailed personal insights in the manner of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department or Ariana Grande’s recent Eternal Sunshine. Lipa, born in London to Kosovo Albanian parents, is dating British actor Callum Turner, who starred in the George Clooney-directed 2023 rowing film The Boys In The Boat, but she sings of relationships in more general terms, shying away from intimate revelations and retaining a certain mystique.
The musical changes are subtle rather than dramatic. Dua, 28, was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2024, and she has a Glastonbury headline appearance to look forward to in June. With the stakes now higher than they were four years ago, she sticks predominantly to Future Nostalgia’s club-friendly blueprint. It ain’t broke, so she isn’t going to fix it.
Upbeat opening track End Of An Era sets the tone. Powered by samba-style rhythms and a playful spoken-word section, it introduces Dua’s main collaborators — Australian musician Kevin Parker (of Tame Impala), British producer Danny L. Harle, Canadian songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr, and Norwegian singer Caroline Ailin (who co-wrote Lipa’s 2017 breakthrough single, New Rules).
If there’s an overall theme, it’s one of romantic indecision. On the bass-driven disco of Whatcha Doing, Dua admits to being wary of commitment. ‘There’s a part of me that wants to steal your heart… and a part that tells me don’t,’ she sings. ‘I can’t give you what you want,’ she adds on French Exit, a slower track dominated by acoustic guitars. On These Walls, she takes things further: ‘If these walls could talk, they’d tell us to break up.’
French Exit is as close as Radical Optimism gets to a full-blown ballad, but there are still surprises. One of them is Falling Forever, a 1980s-leaning soft rock number on which Lipa opens her lungs against a backdrop of big drum rolls. Another is the melodramatic Maria, all flamenco strums and skipping Latin beats.
On Happy For You, which closes the record, there are gentle, psychedelic touches from Kevin Parker and, from the elusive Lipa, a rare hint of vulnerability. ‘I must have loved you more than I ever knew, ’cause I’m happy for you,’ she laments. Her soul-baring masterpiece will have to wait for now, but this is still a classy comeback.
Adrian Thrills
FOUR MORE AWESOME ALBUMS OUT NOW
KELLY JONES: Inevitable Incredible
The raspy-voiced Welsh rocker boldly strips away the bombast of his day job fronting the Stereophonics to deliver a solo album made in six days on a remote Norwegian island.
Built around piano rather than guitar, it’s his answer to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. The title track opens with crashing waves and dramatic keyboards before taking wing on the back of a ten-piece string ensemble.
Jones’s melodic instincts remain strong, too, with Time’s Running Away a minor chord delight, and guest Jason Mowery’s pedal steel adding a country feel.
Adrian Thrills
PET SHOP BOYS: Nonetheless
It’s 40 years since Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe released their first single, the flop version of West End Girls (which stalled at No133, before they rejigged it and landed their first No1). They have given us 40 years of sparkling consistency, making electro-pop that is always the same, yet always different.
Lowe needs only three words to sum up the Pet Shop Boys’ sound: ‘electronics with strings’. This is truer than ever on their 15th album, Nonetheless, produced by James Ford. Tennant and Lowe admired him not just for his well-known work with Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode, but for his use of strings with The Last Shadow Puppets.
The upshot is that most of these ten tracks have three things going on at once. There’s a pop hook, a dance beat and a luxurious air, with the orchestra smuggling in extra melodies.
It often feels as if this duo from the 1980s are introducing the 2020s to the 1960s.
And that’s before you take in Tennant’s lyrics, which mix crisp detachment with intense feeling. The ex-journalist in him tells stories about Rudolf Nureyev’s heyday, Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, cheesy Europop (‘sexy, sexy, sexy!’) and what life must be like for Donald Trump’s bodyguard. These are not things you can get from Ed Sheeran.
When he swaps journalism for poetry, Tennant is even better. He devotes two sunny tunes to loneliness, two bittersweet ones to being in love, and two sombre ones to piercing reminiscence.
On A New Bohemia, a gravely beautiful ballad, he finds a killer line at just the right moment: ‘Your only friend is the memory of a dream.’
Tim de Lisle
SINÉAD HARNETT: Boundaries
First tipped on by me in 2015, homegrown R&B star Harnett has yet to break into the pop mainstream, but she’s now finding her feet after moving from London to LA.
This is her third album, and it’s her most assured yet, framing her silky vocals with glitchy beats, acoustic guitars and soulful strings.
Writing about her romantic turmoil and personal growth, she deploys some sharp lyrical phrases. ‘We went from amazing to a maze,’ she sings on The Most, while there are shades of Amy Winehouse’s first album, Frank, on the jazzy Downtown.
Adrian Thrills
ST. VINCENT: All Born Screaming
Singer-songwriter Annie Clark, the Dallas musician better known as St. Vincent, paid a brilliant homage to 1970s New York on her last album, Daddy’s Home, in 2021. It was a record of soft vocal harmonies, nods to Steely Dan, and even (although this stretched the point) a re-working of Sheena Easton’s 1981 singalong 9 To 5.
She’s toughened up her act on All Born Screaming. It’s a record of two halves – the first dark and aggressive, the second seeking calm – and it’s often scattergun. It also wears its influences, particularly David Bowie and Prince, too obviously on its sleeve. The highlights, though, are spellbinding.
The first LP on which the triple Grammy winner, 41, acts as sole producer, it opens with the ominous Hell Is Near, Annie singing of empty cups and half-burned candles as her 12-string guitar adds a folky feel.
The riffs are heavier on Reckless, and Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl crops up on Flea, on which Clark plays a small, flight-less insect. ‘l look at you, and all I see is meat,’ she warns.
Part two steps back from the guitar barrage, even if the lyrics are no less gloomy at first. The Power’s Out is a sister piece to Bowie’s Five Years – from 1972’s Ziggy Stardust – right down to Clark’s stuttering drum pattern. Echoing Bowie’s prophecy of doom, she witnesses shootings and a suicide: ‘The power’s out, and no one can save us.’
The mood eventually lifts. There’s wonky reggae on So Many Planets, and she adds superlative guitar on Sweetest Fruit. On the epic title track, there’s also a self-effacing admission that she’s both ‘a pantomime of a modern girl’ and ‘a karaoke version’ of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Darker than Daddy’s Home, it still reiterates her skill as a mistress of reinvention.
Adrian Thrills
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
The Other Boleyn Girl
You may feel Tudor-ed out after Wolf Hall, but this adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s hit novel The Other Boleyn Girl is refreshingly classy. The three Boleyn siblings are George, Mary and Anne. Mary, married to a drip, has become the King’s mistress. (Henry VIII – in his pre-fatso days – has only a minor part.) She will in time be replaced by her sister, prompting Mary’s wonderful outburst: ‘My sister is an adulteress, a whore, a bigamist and Queen of England!’
This adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s hit novel The Other Boleyn Girl is refreshingly classy and stars Lucy Phelps, who is heartbreaking as Mary Boleyn, sister to the future wife of Henry VIII
It’s a stately yet intimate evening. The hell of being a woman in a psychotic Tudor court is glaringly exposed. Talk about the terrible Tudors. The sisters are ruled by their mother – Alex Kingston is the cruelly ambitious Lady Elizabeth – with Andrew Woodall as the shouty, brutish ‘Uncle Norfolk’. A fruity Roger Ringrose doubles up as the two slimers Wolsey and Cromwell.
The events are distilled by Mike Poulton, who did the Wolf Hall stage version for the RSC. Expect ferocious rows, pregnancies, disappointing girl babies and fear. Lots of fear. When Anne has a malformed foetus, even witchcraft is suspected. Freya Mavor bravely makes Anne brittle, fierce and unlikeable. Lucy Phelps is heartbreaking as Mary – happiest on a farm, frantic not to be separated from her son, despising the court. Kemi-Bo Jacobs is memorable as a kind Queen Catherine of Aragon, doubling as a haggish midwife.
The king (James Atherton) treats his wives like breeding sows. Babies are his business. Director Lucy Bailey brings out the emotional detail in the family drama, and the rich music by Orlando Gough is a joy.
Robert Gore-Langton
Chichester Festival Theatre. Until May 11, 2hrs 55mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
The Buddha Of Suburbia
Emma Rice has delivered a charming, funny and joyfully bawdy adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel about his semi-autobiographical alter-ego Karim (Dee Ahluwalia), who comes of age as a randy young actor in the late 1970s.
Emma Rice has delivered a joyfully bawdy adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel
This of course was before the advent of today’s intimacy co-ordinators, #MeToo, and the appropriateness authorities. And there are aspects of Karim’s story which may make prudes and puritans tut-tut.
Oddly, though, Kureishi seems as eager to deploy Indian stereotypes as he does to denounce them. Karim’s father (Ankur Bahl) is an adulterous immigrant, riven with guilt and, in line with eccentric Indian characterisation, a yogic acrobat who does headstands in Y-fronts in his living room.
Karim, like the author, can be a little charmless and pleased with himself. But Ahluwalia makes a cheeky bed hopper who works best as an observer of others. Yes, there are casualties of the careless sex, drugs and rock’n’roll attitudes of the time but this show is less concerned with correcting our behaviour than with celebrating a lost sense of freedom and playfulness.
Patrick Marmion
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until June 1, 2hrs 50mins
Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York)
The sweet-natured new musical Two Strangers is an endangered species in this age of gender activism. With loveable Sam Tutty alongside Dujonna Gift in a two-person performance, it’s a show that dares to take a basically benign view of people, sex, and even race relations.
Sam Tutty and Dujonna Gift star in the sweet-natured new musical Two Strangers
Jim Barne and Kit Buchan’s entertainment is now in the West End. And it wants nothing more from us than to be charmed by its tale of an excitable young Dougal (Tutty) flying to the Big Apple for his estranged father’s wedding.
It’s inspired by romcoms from Breakfast At Tiffany’s to When Harry Met Sally and although the set-up is a little forced, with Dad somehow not knowing his son is coming, it’s written with wit and affection.
Gift’s savvy, snappy native New Yorker, Robin, who meets Dougal at the airport, considers him perplexing but basically harmless with zero boundaries… until he starts to erode the cynicism with which she protects herself as they carry a four-tier cake across town for the big day.
Clever lyrics ensure the old-fashioned sentiments are tied into the modern world of Tinder and online dating, while music fuses jazz, rap, pop and soul. Tutty yodels a brassy hymn to New York, and Gift enjoys a Whitney Houston-ish apotheosis set to cascading drums.
Is Two Strangers too worshipful of the city to make it in New York itself? I suggest they convene a focus group of hard-boiled residents to find out. But for us over here, it’s a big-hearted cakewalk.
Patrick Marmion
Criterion Theatre, London. Until August 31, 2hrs 15mins
Machinal
Machinal opens with lots of jerky ‘expressionist’ movement in the 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell. The initial performance style is off-putting, but the story, based on an account of the murderer Ruth Snyder, grips like a vice.
Machinal grips like a vice mainly thanks to Rosie Sheehy who is terrific as Helen
That’s thanks to Rosie Sheehy – terrific as the lowly office worker pestered by her leching boss (Tim Frances). Times are hard so she marries him. The honeymoon is a disaster.
When she meets a guy in a speakeasy bar (Pierro Niel-Mee in a charmer part first played by the young Clark Gable) one thing leads to another. She gets the physical love she craves. Her husband gets his head stoved in.
By the end she’s inside a cage, in a jail, in a vile circus of rough justice, an electric chair downstage.
Director Richard Jones’s production is full of startling stage effects. But it’s Sheehy’s superb, almost rabid performance that freezes the blood, like one long, silent scream. As you come out, you want to forget it, but you can’t.
Robert Gore-Langton
The Old Vic, London. Until June 1, 1hr 50mins
Love’s Labour ‘s Lost
A new era at the RSC opens with a sunny and (eventually) charming rendition of Shakespeare’s slightly tricky romcom Love’s Labour’s Lost. The story’s been transposed to a wellness centre, where four young bucks vow to improve themselves by fasting, studying and seeing no women… That is, until a delegation of eye-catching ladies turn up.
Horribly handsome Berowne (Luke Thompson) meets his match in Rosaline
Rising-star director Emily Burns tries a little too hard at the start, overloading the stage with the fuss of an exclusive health resort. She barely copes with Shakespeare’s lamentable, supposedly comic, ventures into Latin wordplay.
There is also confusion caused by a roving band in Hawaiian shirts combining Spanish guitar music with Polynesian flute playing. Where exactly are we?
But once we’ve got through this contextual toil, the show comes alight, as the boys scribble secret sonnets to the girls and perform the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way — while wearing suits of armour.
Joanna Scotcher’s creamy set of twin stone staircases, palm trees and cloudless skies is a holiday brochure dream.
But as always the play works better in the character contests than in the big concept. In particular, horribly handsome Luke Thompson (Bridgerton’s Benedict), as supercilious playboy Berowne, meets his match in Ioanna Kimbook’s Rosaline — the savviest of the four women.
Her polite smile and scornful eyerolls crucify his most ardent endeavours. She knows that Berowne needs to grow up, because love is a game of consequence.
Patrick Marmion
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until May 18, 2hr 45mins
