FILM
Sunset Song
Having captured vintage domestic life so brilliantly in Distant Voices, Still Lives, director Terence Davies is faced with a bigger challenge here, adapting Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scottish country novel. It’s a tale of hostile landscapes – internal and external – and a farm-girl hero who is put through a wringer of hardships: patriarchal abuse, family deaths, the first world war and more. Davies’s deliberate, muted storytelling is somewhat at odds with this sweeping narrative, even if it’s all ravishing to behold. SR
All this week’s new film releases
THEATRE
The Lorax
(Old Vic, London, to 16 January)
It sounds more like Doctor Who than Dr Seuss. But the titular creature of The Lorax is, in fact, a moustachioed and rather irritable animal who is on a mission to save the Earth from the Once-ler, a greedy and rapacious tree-chopper. This environmentally themed tale tackling corporate greed is thought to have been Dr Seuss’s favourite of his stories, and was made into a Hollywood film in 2012. Here, blending story, songs (written by former Noah And The Whale frontman Charlie Fink) and typically off-the-wall humour, it has been adapted for the stage by the award-winning David Greig, who has shown previous form with children’s shows, having written the book for the West End production of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. MC
The rest of this week’s best theatre
MUSIC
JME
(Canal Mills, Leeds, Saturday)
You get a pretty good idea of JME from a verse on Man Don’t Care, a track from his 2015 album Integrity>. In it, he threatens to punch his challengers with a variety of keys: the key to his big car, the key to his house and, amusingly enough, even the security key to his HSBC online banking account. It’s an interlude that goes some way to explaining the signature style of this enduring British MC: a mixture of gritty talk, basic but effective rhyming and a surprising, occasionally slightly troubling, humour. All round, it’s a combination that has served the performer well. While some artists are participating in a “grime revival” after a flirtation with chart success, JME (unlike his brother Skepta) has never really left the roots of the music. A founder of the north London crew Boy Better Know, JME’s work has been done without much hype, PR, or even a label, but his recent top 20 album illustrates how it’s possible to succeed outside convention. JR
The rest of this week’s best live music
EXHIBITIONS
Radical Disco: Architecture And Nightlife In Italy, 1965-1975
(ICA, London, Tuesday to 10 January)
This archival exhibition makes the case that there was more to disco than the cliches of overly tight menswear, fake palm trees and shiny balls. At least in Italy, where a number of clubs were designed by avant garde architectural practices, including Gruppo Strum, Superstudio and Gruppo UFO. Yet while the centre of this movement was the Piper club in Rome, where Pink Floyd played in 1968 against a backdrop of works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Piero Manzoni these discotheques weren’t just places for dancing. Space Electronic for example, which opened in Florence in 1969 as the hippy vision of Gruppo 9999, hosted performances by anarchist theatre groups and housed a vegetable garden. OB
The rest of this week’s best exhibitions
FILM EVENT
James Benning: People & Places
(Home, Manchester, Sunday to 17 December)
Few film-makers have mastered the art of staying still like Benning. His work is as close to landscape painting as cinema gets, in that he carefully chooses a location, positions his camera, and records life passing by in long, unbroken takes. Few people can get away with it, but Benning’s films are often spoken of in terms of meditation, rather than mere movies. In the past he’s used 16mm but in a Dylan-going-electric conversion, he recently adopted digital film, and these are some of the results. Highlights include 2009’s Ruhr, documenting the German region in seven takes (one of which is an hour long), Twenty Cigarettes (which simply watches people smoke), and Small Roads, which gives us 47 rural roadside spots. SR
This rest of this week’s best film events
TALKS
Guardian Live: Newsroom – The Paris Attacks
(Kings Place, London, Tuesday)
It would be nice to be able to say that the dust had settled from the November Paris terrorist attacks, but that seems far from the case; they still feel painfully raw. And no wonder: coming relatively hot on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, they seem like a dangerous escalation in an ongoing conflict. But, even so, some hard-headed analysis is surely now in order. What are the root causes of such atrocities? What impact will the attacks have on community relations? And, most urgently, how should the world respond? Inevitably, there will be military implications, but can Isis be defeated by a traditional armed response? All these issues will be up for discussion in this debate, which draws together the Guardian’s deputy editor Paul Johnson, foreign affairs commentator Natalie Nougayrède, Middle East editor Ian Black and senior fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation Shiraz Maher. At a time when it feels tempting to retreat into binary certainties, expect nuance and insight on a difficult subject, one that we’re all going to have to engage with in a more thoughtful way. PH
The rest of this week’s best talks
ON DEMAND
Transparent
(Amazon Prime Video, from Friday)
Probably the crowning achievement of streaming TV to date. The most dramatically audacious thing about Transparent is that the Pfeffermans are really not very likable. This allows the drama to manifest itself as pitch-black comedy, too; after all, they’re not making it easy for you to root for them. Season two begins with a naturalistic opening shot during which the extended clan are photographed at Sarah and Tammy’s wedding. They’re bickering away in their familiarly infuriating style; hard to watch but impossible to ignore. One of the more excruciating small-screen weddings in recent history inevitably ensues, nothing being simple with this lot. PH
COMEDY
The Geekatorium
(The Phoenix, London, Sunday)
Maybe it’s down to the popularity of The Big Bang Theory, or perhaps it’s just the way the internet allows subcultures to thrive by allowing likeminded people to communicate, but declaring oneself a geek has never seemed more acceptable. There are plenty of nerds within the stand-up community, probably because obsessing about how to make people laugh is a fairly niche activity in itself. Paul Gannon’s Geekatorium night allows comics the chance to veer away from their usual sets and talk about other odd or unusual subjects that have attracted their freakishly passionate interest, the stuff that would have got them beaten up at school, but now finds a receptive audience. This week features performances from homespun cartoonist and comic Bec Hill plus Alexis Dubus, taking time out from his usual work as foppish French character Marcel Lucont. JK
The rest of this week’s best comedy
CLUBS
Don’t Be Afraid & Cold Tonic
(The Love Inn, Bristol, Thursday)
Helping us bypass the dreary and/or repugnant rituals of the workplace socials that we’re encouraged to endure at this time of year, the people behind two fine underground labels have arranged what they’re calling an Alternative Office Xmas Party. Cold Tonic co-founder Krystal Klear will be playing his renowned disco-centric set, tbut he big draw is Neville Watson, a connoisseur of house and the acid-rumbling, drum machine-chugging spirit of the epoch-making Chicago sound. Also a regular collaborator with Bulgaria’s finest, KiNK, he’s rarely spotted in Bristol. Maurice Alexander (also of Cold Tonic) and Semtek (Don’t Be Afraid) are manning the decks, too, if not decking the halls. The latter is a particularly appealing prospect; his jilting, idiosyncratic techno production broadcasts below the radar of many, but is engaging and original. Time to hum-bug out! GTDC
The rest of this week’s best clubs
DANCE
Carlos Acosta: A Classical Selection
(London Coliseum, Tuesday to 13 December)
Carlos Acosta, one of the most beloved male dancers on the ballet stage, has just retired from the Royal Ballet. As part of his farewell, he has produced this mixed programme of work. The evening is made up of extracts from different ballets, which range from George Balanchine’s Agon to August Bournonville’s La Sylphide and Diana And Actaeon by Agrippina Vaganova. Acosta himself heads a cast that includes Marianela Núñez, Zenaida Yanowsky, Yuhui Choe, Thiago Soares and Nehemiah Kish. JM
