FILM EVENTS
Christmas film events
(Nationwide)
Like Slade on the radio or unwanted socks from a distant relative, there’s something both comfortingly familiar and dispiritingly predictable about the traditional Christmas movie canon. But if you can’t change the movie, you can at least alter the surroundings; and fortunately, in London at least, there are myriad options this year, from The Winter Night Garden, part of Victoria Park’s Winterville to Pop-Up Screens’ Cinema In The Snow, an event that transforms the 20th Century Theatre in Notting Hill into a warm, wintry wonderland. Outside London, Edinburgh’s Royal Highland Centre has an American-style drive-in cinema, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester has The Snowman with live orchestral accompaniment, while Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema is presenting It’s A Wonderful Life with live music. SR
Find out more about the best Christmas film events
MUSIC
Skepta
(O2 Academy Brixton, London, Friday)
His Boy Better Know colleague JME (otherwise known as his brother Jamie, who joins him on this date) might have the better jokes and, arguably, the more felicitous way with words. However, of the Adenuga brothers, it is Joseph (who for the last decade has operated as Skepta) who seems most likely to have a profound impact. A grime MC with a great sense of gravity, Skepta’s authority derives less from the fleetness of his bars, more from the way he conveys the seriousness of his mission. After a period chasing chart success, he returned to back-to-basics grime with anthems such as Shutdown and 2014’s That’s Not Me, the latter serving as a manifesto of sorts, with the rapper relating tales of throwing all his designer gear in the bin because it didn’t fit his authentic self. Now his identity is rooted in values: striving to keep integrity, and rising to the challenge of being an artist in an underground medium. JR
The rest of this week’s best live music
TV
Luther
(Tuesday, 9pm, BBC1)
Big coat swishing in the wind, Idris Elba’s tortured, tight-lipped DCI saunters back into town for a two-parter. This time a cannibal serial killer is on the loose in London, prompting Luther and DS Emma Lane (Game Of Thrones’ Rose Leslie) to embark on a frenzied hunt to catch them before they strike again. Credulity-stretching and as subtle as a house brick, it’s also entirely thrilling. GM
Read our report from a night on the town with Luther’s Idris Elba
TALKS
Guardian Live: Games Of The Year
(Kings Place, London, Thursday)
With a market worth more than £54bn, gaming is among the planet’s most lucrative forms of entertainment. It is also often one with vast overheads: because savvy gamers are unwilling to cough up £40 for a substandard experience, hostile reception to a single game can mean life or death for the company responsible, so developers pump eye-watering sums into their products. This is great news for consumers: 2015 saw an array of huge games that were also critical darlings. In this Guardian Live event, the Guardian’s games editor Keith Stuart joins guests to discuss some of the best, a clutch no doubt featuring clandestine sneak-and-hide-’em-up Metal Gear Solid V; fantasy monster-murder-’em-up The Witcher 3; and oppressive try-desperately-not-to-die-’em-up Bloodborne; not to mention the cream of the smaller indie titles that helped make this year such a strong one
for the electronic arts. LH
The rest of the week’s best talks
FILM
The Forbidden Room
Oxygen-rich flapjacks, squid theft, insurance defrauders in poisonous skeleton unitards, the dream of the moustache hairs of a slain butler – even by Guy Maddin’s standards, his latest is heroically eccentric. Threading through a maze of lovingly rendered retro-movie scenarios, it’s a dream-within-a–dream hall of mirrors. It’s easy to lose track of where you started, possibly even what year it is, but the execution is admirable. SR
All this week’s new film releases
THEATRE
The Insatiable, Inflatable Candylion
(SSE SWALEC Stadium, Cardiff, Wednesday to 2 January)
If you’re looking for something completely different, National Theatre Wales can be guaranteed to deliver it. In its short life it has constantly pushed at the boundaries of what theatre might be, so it’s no surprise that this is a family Christmas show that will be more than a bit different. In fact, it’s hard to work out exactly what it will be – suffice to say that it combines the talents of theatre director Wils Wilson, playwright Tim Price and Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, who draws on his solo album, Candylion. Billed as a hybrid of gig and theatre, it takes you into the kingdom of Candy, where there’s a roaring lion, a polar pear and a sledgehog, among other things. LG
The rest of this week’s best theatre
COMEDY
Margaret Cho
(Leicester Square Theatre, London, Tuesday to 20 December)
There are lots of different ways that comedians use filth. Sometimes it’s just about shock: thinking of the worst thing you can possibly say and challenging your audience to either laugh at it or walk out. Other times (as with a performer such as Katherine Ryan or Sarah Silverman) it’s a way of creating a comic juxtaposition, getting bigger laughs from the fact a seemingly innocent-looking person is coming out with a tirade of smut. Korean-American Margaret Cho has another approach. Her extraordinarily explicit material – which features frequent and brutally frank descriptions of her own vagina and anus as well as discussions of sex acts of all kinds – functions as a kind of rallying call for her audience. Cho is a passionate LGBT campaigner and the wildness of her act feels like a claiming of comedy space for those who might otherwise feel excluded by the beery heterosexuality of a Saturday night club gig. JK
The rest of this week’s best comedy
HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Making A Murderer
(Netflix)
Serial casts a long shadow over the true-crime documentary genre. Following the likes of HBO’s The Jinx and Channel 4’s The Murder Detectives, this Netflix series is the latest to burnish a criminal investigation with a longform, box set sheen. It tells the story of Steven Avery, an American man convicted and exonerated of assault who, on his release, finds himself accused of murder in an entirely different case. Forensic and fast-moving, it looks a series well suited to the all-in-one-sitting model of the modern-day streaming service. It’s available in full from next Friday. GM
CLUBS
Leftfield
(The Warehouse Project, Manchester, Saturday)
Despite their impact on UK dance over the past 20 years, Leftfield have only recently chalked up their third LP, Alternative Light Source. With a long-established reputation for festival-friendly live spectacle, they return to the stage with new material expertly spliced by anthemic cuts from album number one, Leftism. Proving that their sound remains vital in 2015, they’re joined by the likes of George Fitzgerald, Hodge and Paranoid London. Justin Robertson and Adrian Sherwood will also be in attendance to instil the spirit of acid house. And while you can expect an older if no less wise crowd at this student favourite venue, the Warehouse Project nonetheless continues to dodge nostalgia. JT
The rest of this week’s best club nights
EXHIBITIONS
AR Penck
(Michael Werner Gallery, London, to 20 February)
AR Penck and gallerist Michael Werner go back a long way. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was Werner who would pick up the paintings that Penck smuggled out of his East German home town of Dresden. The artist was outspoken and received no support from the state for his work, relying on sales in the west of his pared-down landscapes and portraits of hieroglyphic stick men. It was these that ensured Penck was linked with the neo-expressionist painters of the moment, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer among them. This show looks back to those early years in which the artist, unable to secure government-controlled art materials, was forced to paint on tablecloths, bedsheets, wood and other found materials. OB
