Film
Matthew McConaughey signs up to save the world, not from aliens or terrorists, but – because this is a Christopher Nolan film – from ourselves. Earth has run out of food. A widowed engineer (McConaughey) volunteers to lead a space mission to find new planets to inhabit. Nolan regulars Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine are along for the ride, while Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon pop up to look contemplative. Promises to be an angsty epic of galactic proportions. Henry Barnes 7 November UK and US, 6 November Australia.
Benedict Cumberbatch gets what might just be the Oscar push he needs in this biopic of Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing, adapted from the biography by Andrew Hodges. His fellow Bletchley Park whizzes include Matthew Goode, Charles Dance and Keira Knightley, apparently also outstanding as the woman to whom Turing becomes engaged before revealing his homosexuality. The presence of Norwegian director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters) should help steer this away from predictable period telly territory. Catherine Shoard 14 November UK, 21 November US.
That this moody drama is the last film of James Gandolfini should not overshadow coverage of what looks like a terrific crime thriller, written by Dennis Lehane and directed by Michaël R Roskam, whose Bullhead was a very sturdy Belgian Oscar nominee a few years back. The star of that film, Matthias Schoenaerts, returns for this, alongside Noomi Rapace and Tom Hardy, who co-stars with Gandolfini as owners of a Brooklyn bar used as a drop-off for illicit funds by local gangsters. CS 14 November UK, 12 September US, 13 November Australia.
Get on Up
Hollywood has been trying to make a biopic of soul legend James Brown for years, and this one finally got there. Brits Jez and John-Henry Butterworth wrote the script, Mick Jagger is one of the producers, The Help’s Tate Taylor got the nod to direct, and Chadwick Boseman, fresh from playing Jackie Robinson in 42, nabbed the lead role. It’s already been and gone in the US, with largely positive reviews giving particular respect to Boseman – our critic, Tom Shone, called it “one of the year’s truly outstanding performances”. With a soundtrack of live Brown performances, they could hardly go wrong. Andrew Pulver 21 November UK, 30 October Australia.
Winter Sleep
The jury at this year’s Cannes film festival fell over themselves to award top honours to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s rumbling 196-minute Chekhovian drama (“I could happily have stayed there for another couple of hours,” insisted judge Jane Campion). Haluk Bilginer (formerly of EastEnders) plays the moneyed old actor who dreams of playing god in a Turkish mountain community. Ceylan nudges him towards the rocks of self-awareness. Xan Brooks 21 November UK, 19 December US.
TV
The Missing
As shown by the huge and continuing media coverage of the Madeleine McCann case, the sudden disappearance of the young is a story with universal resonance, which is perhaps why so many successful crime dramas (Broadchurch, Top of the Lake, Happy Valley) involve a lost child. So initial interest is guaranteed for this six-parter in which James Nesbitt plays a father obsessively returning to the place in France where his child vanished and finding that the local police chief also believes that the case can be solved. Talented young writers Jack Williams and Harry Williams (Full English and Roman’s Empire) intriguingly switch to TV drama’s most popular form. Mark Lawson BBC1, 15 November.
Atlantis
The first series of Atlantis was an odd little curio; basically Life on Mars, but with Atlantis instead of the 1970s and jokes about Mark Addy farting instead of any discernible tension. Perhaps in this new series we’ll find out why Jason was sent to Atlantis, or why he suddenly has superpowers, or whether or not he has a personality of any kind. If not, at least we’ll always have those fart jokes. Addy’s probably the best in the business at delivering them. Stuart Heritage BBC1.
Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance
Generally, successful presenters or shows move towards the lower-numbered BBC channels (from 4 to 2 or 3 to 1), but Len Goodman’s temporary transfer from BBC1 (where he is chief judge on Strictly Come Dancing) to BBC4 is effectively a promotion as it invites him to show a more serious side than the soundbite analysis on the pro-am hoofing franchise. Goodman joins historian and BBC4 regular Lucy Worsley to co-host a story of dance that seems cleverly calculated to make effective use of the movie and sound archives. ML BBC4.
Rock and pop
Bob Dylan – Shadows in the Night/The Basement Tapes Complete
Rumours have abounded that Dylan is preparing to release a new album called Shadows in the Night ever since he uploaded a cover of Frank Sinatra’s 1945 hit Full Moon and Empty Arms to his website, along with an image that looked as if it might be album artwork influenced by the classic jazz label Blue Note. More concrete plans come in the shape of Volume 11 of The Bootleg Series: a six-CD set that fully documents Dylan and The Band’s legendary “Basement Tapes” sessions from 1967. Alexis Petridis Basement Tapes Complete, 3 November.
Foo Fighters – Sonic Highways
Dave Grohl has been talking up the Foo Fighters’ eighth album as a record “made in a way no one’s ever done before”. This turns out to mean that each of the eight songs has been recorded in a different US city, with different “local legends” appearing on the tracks – Joe Walsh of the Eagles and Joan Jett among them – and an accompanying eight-part TV series details the band’s journey around the country. How much effect this has had on the sound of the album remains to be seen, although the presence of New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band on one track suggests a certain pushing of boundaries. AP 10 November.
Jack White
White’s last live performances in the UK were pretty strange stuff: there was a secret gig in London in collaboration with theatre group Punchdrunk where the audience were required to wear surgical masks and gowns and White concluded the show by being carried to an ambulance on a stretcher, and a chaotic Glastonbury appearance during which he claimed to have been visited by the spirits of Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley. Whether or not those are a foretaste of his forthcoming dates, he is invariably a compelling live performer and his current band make a hell of racket. AP First Direct Arena, Leeds (firstdirect arena.com), 17 November, then touring.
Banks
LA-based Jillian Banks is apparently 2014’s most blogged-about artist and herdebut album Goddess has been greeted with critical acclaim: she’s certainly not the only artist around seeking to explore a downtempo, experimental type of R&B, but her take on it is particularly bewitching. AP The Institute, Birmingham (mamacolive.com/the institute), 17 November, then touring.
Who 50th Anniversary
Insert obligatory joke about dying before you get old here if you must, or indeed, raise a cynical eyebrow and point out that (a) their 50th Anniversay was actually last year and (b) The Who have, of course, announced a final tour before, a mere 32 years ago. But if it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the band – Pete Townshend has mooted the possibility of another studio album – the fact Roger Daltrey is 70 and Townshend 69 indicates that this may well be the last time the Who embark on a major tour. AP Glasgow SSE Hydro, 30 November, then touring.
Theatre
For my money, Ten Billion, in which Katie Mitchell collaborated with scientist Stephen Emmott to explore the population explosion, was the most important theatrical moment in years. Now playwright Duncan Macmillan has worked with another top climate-change scientist, Chris Rapley, and Mitchell to create a work that looks at the impact of environmental catastrophe on our children and grandchildren. It could be the one indispensable piece of theatre this autumn. Michael Billington Royal Court, London SW1, from 5 November.
Katherine Boo’s book about life in the teeming slums behind Mumbai airport was hugely acclaimed when it first appeared in 2012. Now David Hare has turned it into an epic play that will attempt to capture Boo’s documentary realism and compassionate humanity. Meera Syal heads a big cast and the piece will be staged by the National’s director-designate, Rufus Norris, who has already shown a welcome fascination with non-British cultures. MB Olivier, London SE1, from 10 November.
Hope
The government cuts and how they affect local authority spending come under scrutiny in the latest play from Jack Thorne that reunites him with director John Tiffany, with whom he worked on Let the Right One In. This will be very different, a satirical and savage state-of-the-nation play set in a working-class town where the council is meeting to decide how to find the £22m savings they need to make the budget balance. Lyn Gardner Royal Court, London SW1, 26 November to 10 January 2015.
Christmas Day Truce
In 1914, soldiers along the western front, fighting on opposing sides, left their trenches and walked into no man’s land where they exchanged gifts and played football. This story, which every schoolchild grows up with, is transposed to the stage in a new show written by Phil Porter that draws on the recollections of a former electrical engineer at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre who was a soldier in the Warwickshire regiment. The RSC’s deputy artistic director, Erica Whyman, directs. LG Royal Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, 29 November to 31 January.
Art and design
Transmitting Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol haunts our age like a ghost image flickering in cyberspace. The prophet of 15-minute fame, selfies (he took them in a photobooth), shared photographs (his silkscreen process is a hymn to reproduction) and even – as the recent rediscovery of his Amiga computer experiments reveals – of digital art, wrote the programme for the 21st century. Warhol’s first solo exhibition in the north of England homes in on the most revolutionary aspects of his enterprise: how he turned art into a form of mass communication, open to media and marketplace. Yet, with Warhol, you look at a frozen image of Marilyn Munro or a screen test of Bob Dylan, and a sudden, unexpected blast of emotion and truth knocks you sideways. He is a great artist and a prescient one. Jonathan Jones Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool (bit.ly/ 1qtd6UH), 7 November to 8 February.
After a £15m refit and extension, the Whitworth reopens with multiple exhibitions and displays, including key works and new commissions by Cornelia Parker, the beautiful watercolours of Thomas Schütte, and a 45-metre-long gunpowder drawing by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (who devised the unforgettable fireworks for the Beijing Olympics), originally conceived for the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The new Whitworth signals Manchester’s growing importance as a major centre for the visual arts. Adrian Searle Opens 29 November.
Dance
Akram Khan & Israel Galván: Torobaka
Khan has joined forces with some extraordinary dance artists in his career, from Sylvie Guillem to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. This autumn’s project should deliver sparks as Khan creates and performs a duet with flamenco iconoclast Galván, exploring their fascination with rhythm, gesture, pattern and myth. Judith Mackrell Sadler’s Wells, London EC1, 3-8 November.
Royal Ballet mixed bill
Music from the war-shadowed decades of the 1930s and 40s inspires the three choreographers showcased in the Royal Ballet’s latest mixed programme. Kim Brandstrup’s Ceremony of Innocence uses Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) to create a haunting elegy for lost youth, with outstanding roles for its leads Edward Watson and Marcelino Sambé. A second Britten score, Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) leads Christopher Wheeldon into the darker terrain of war and sacrifice in his densely imagined ballet Aeternum (revived this season after its 2013 premiere). Finally, Liam Scarlett turns to Britten’s contemporaries WH Auden and Leonard Bernstein for the inspiration of his new ballet, The Age of Anxiety. JM Royal Opera House, London EC2, 7-17 November.
Rambert autumn tour
Mark Baldwin’s choreographic imagination has embraced science in recent works, and The Strange Charm of Mother Nature is part of that trend. Inspired by the discovery of the “God Particle” and set to music by Stravinsky and Cheryl Frances-Hoad, it’s a work whose intricate patterning and vivid energies mimic the design of the known universe. Also premiering this autumn is a long overdue commission for Shobana Jeyasingh, a chance to see her meticulously rhythmic style on Rambert’s excellent dancers. Terra Incognita draws on modern urban legends and ancient cartography to consider the perils of journeying into the unknown and is set to music by JS Bach and Mark-Anthony Turnage. JM Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (sadlers wells.com), 18-22 November, then touring.
Jazz
Abdullah Ibrahim
Some of the most widely loved and enduring jazz themes composed outside the US in the past half-century have been forged at the piano keyboard of Cape Town-born Ibrahim, the great soloist/composer inspired by South African church themes, classical music and the jazz of Ellington and Monk. Ibrahim was a co-founder (with Hugh Masekela and others) of the first bebop-devoted black jazz group to record during the apartheid era, and his work still celebrates the sounds of townships dances, swing and hymn harmonies with which he began. Nowadays, though, he connects them in more meditative and patiently poetic ways. John Fordham Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, 15 November, then touring.
Snarky Puppy
Snarky Puppy have more than 18,000 Twitter followers and are widely hailed as the best thing to happen to the popular perception of jazz in years. The globetrotting American jazz-funk collective has achieved almost all of this success while applying its own industry-avoiding efforts. Returning to the UK for one of the EFG London Jazz Festival’s highlight shows, Snarky now bring their infectious mix of soul-horn hooks, riotous percussion, Latin grooves and improv to the Roundhouse, a recognition of how fast they have grown their British fanbase in recent years. JF Roundhouse, London NW1, 18 November.
