TV
The Last Man On Earth
(Monday, Dave, 9pm)
The planet has been ravaged by a pandemic, and Phil Miller is the sole remaining occupant. Or so he believes. Beginning with his beautifully executed descent into delusion and despair, this opening double bill of Will Forte’s sitcom sees Phil’s downward spiral interrupted by the discovery of fellow human Carol (Kristen Schaal). What follows is a pained union between the apathetic Phil and his shrew-like new acquaintance, and a high-concept premise that blossoms into a brilliantly funny, weird and weirdly relatable domestic comedy. Rachel Aroesti
Read an interview with Last Man On Earth creator and star Will Forte
FILM
The Diary Of A Teenage Girl
The title suggests a tweeny summer feelgood, which couldn’t be further from the reality: a story so vibrantly, refreshingly frank, teens the same age as its protagonist can’t even see it. Bel Powley is terrific as a 17-year-old discovering her sexual powers in 70s San Francisco. Steve Rose
The rest of this week’s new films
Read an interview with The Diary Of A Teenage Girl director Marielle Heller
COMEDY
Edinburgh festival fringe
There are countless comedy acts to discover at this year’s fringe: some brand new, others so strange they’ll most likely be flying under the radar for the foreseeable future. Comedian James Acaster picks his favourite fringe acts here – reliably weird, they include a storyteller who uses a completely made-up language, to the edgy and challenging material of a 12 year-old girl.
FILM EVENT
A (Cumber) Batch Of Benedict
(Barbican Centre, London, Saturday to 30 August)
Couldn’t get tickets for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet at the Barbican? Then join the queue (does that make you a queue Cumber?). Anticipating the sell-out, the venue at least provides an overflow facility for thwarted Cumberbatcharians (or whatever his devotees are calling themselves these days). Die-hard fans have probably already worn out their DVDs of Star Trek Into Darkness and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but this season also puts on a selection of the actor’s small-screen works; acclaimed 2007 TV movie Stuart: A Life Backwards, for instance, a reverse biography of an alcoholic. You can also catch Cumberbatch’s pre-Redmayne Hawking, there’s a marathon session of the Parade’s End miniseries, and, of course, plenty of Sherlock. SR
The rest of this week’s film events
MUSIC
Robert Glasper Trio
(Manchester, Brecon, Edinburgh, London)
Robert Glasper once memorably called jazz his “jealous ex-girlfriend”, and when he won a Grammy in the R&B category for his Black Radio album two years ago, it seemed like the eclectic, witty and casually virtuosic Texan genre-buster’s departure from the jazz loop that spawned him was complete. But Glasper has never wanted to dump jazz, only detach it and its traditional audiences from old habits. On this tour, Glasper shows just how inventively he has managed that. With his 2015 album Covered, he revisited his early piano trio interpreting songs by Radiohead, Musiq Soulchild and John Legend, injecting a little politics, and even imparting a Bill Evans-like classical grace to the 1940s standard-song Stella By Starlight. John Fordham
The rest of this week’s live music
THEATRE
887
(Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Thursday to 23 August)
The Canadian theatrical wizard Robert Lepage and his company Ex Machina have a long relationship with the Edinburgh international festival. This year he returns to write, direct and perform this very personal show about memory in which he delves back into his own childhood in Quebec in the 1970s. Lepage describes the show as “a dive into the waters of my past” but the personal becomes entwined with the political in a piece that looks not just at memory, but also identity and nationhood. As ever, Lepage will be seamlessly melding live action with technological effects in a show which has already premiered in Canada and has been praised for its honesty, intimacy and firework theatricality. Lyn Gardner
The rest of this week’s theatre
EXHIBITIONS
Robert Mapplethorpe
(Aberystwyth Arts Centre, to 7 November)
This snapshot of Robert Mapplethorpe’s hugely influential career mixes self-portraits with celebrity portraits, flower imagery and still lifes, all captured in the sultry black and white of earlier modernist masters. It’s big on his interest in celebrity glamour but somewhat more reserved when it comes to the S&M-inflected homoeroticism, which made him one of the 20th century’s distinctive talents. The famous faces include his muse Patti Smith, with whom, as a young hopeful, he explored 1960s and early 70s New York, discovering its art world and gay scene, before creating some of rock’n’roll’s most iconic images with her. There’s a young, pumped Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Grace Jones looking like an Aztec goddess in Keith Haring body paint. Skye Sherwin
The rest of this week’s exhibitions
CLUBS
Tropical Waste
(The Waiting Room, London, Friday)
Just when jetset hipsters are airily dismissing Berlin in favour of Leipzig, Lisbon or, I dunno, Loughborough, the Janus crew remind us that the city is still churning out bleeding-edge culture. They’re the most exciting collective in electronic music right now: a group of producers and DJs, including MESH and Lotic, who make bleak, abstracted ruminations built out of whipped air and blitzed gravel, alongside bursts of R&B and rap. Expect more of the same from Janus emissary Kablam, playing here alongside Staycore label boss Dinamarca, a Swedish producer making his UK debut trading in stripped-back low-riding kuduro. Then there’s Throwing Shade, making woozy neo-soul but also equipped with a formidable crate of obscurities; and Kamixlo, the blue-rinsed sprite who jacks up rap production with cans of guava Rockstar until it’s a stuttering juke mess, before glucose-crashing into mournful slow jams. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
DANCE
Dance at the Fringe
One of the themed strands of the fringe this year is a focus on Korean dance, and its programme is headlined by one of the country’s leading contemporary dance companies. EDx2 presents a double bill of works, jointly titled One Fine Day (Assembly Hall, to 31 Aug), which inflects the liquid athleticism
that is characteristic of Korean choreography with playful humour
and intimacy. Elsewhere, from London comes the experimental company PanicLab, with its latest work RIOT (pictured, Zoo Southside, to 31 Aug), a satirical sci-fi comedy inspired by recent protests against austerity, and by a superhero fantasy of ordinary people gaining control of their destinies. Judith Mackrell
The rest of this week’s new dance
HOME ENTERTAINMENT
This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory
With his spectacularly ambitious “documentary feature released in instalments”, Brooklyn-based film-maker Kirby Ferguson explores the human desire to draw conclusions where there are none to be found. Intricately constructed from archive material, animation and even off-the-shelf stock footage, the series cannily exploits the tools of its adversaries (9/11 truthers, Illuminati paranoiacs and anyone else who might use the word “sheeple” with a straight face) to make a case for reason and sanity in an arena dominated by wild conjecture. Charlie Lyne
