FILM
Tangerine
Brash, manic, unashamedly cheap yet gloriously vibrant, this iPhone-shot LA street odyssey is perfectly in tune with its hero. Sin-Dee is a motormouthed trans sex worker out to find the (cisgender) woman her pimp cheated on her with, and all we can do is tag along for a frenetic tour of working girls, their johns, their tough lives and, ultimately, their spirited defiance. Steve Rose
All this week’s new film releases
Read an interview with the star and director of Tangerine
TALKS
Europe Is Kaput. Long Live Europe!
(Royal Festival Hall, London, Monday)
What a year for anti-capitalists: just 12 months ago, the appointment of an acerbic, tie-phobic radical academic economist and errant Marxist, whose previous highest elected office was head of the Black Students’ Alliance at the University of Essex, to run the Greek economy at the height of the Eurozone’s worst ever financial crisis would have sounded far-fetched. Now, it’s the subject of a nice night out on the South Bank. Retired finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, whose hardline stance, wit and refusal to even dress nicely has won him legions of fans – and the loathing, in his words, of Greece’s creditors – has been meeting with philosopher, joker, ex-Slovenian presidential candidate and “Elvis of critical theory” Slavoj Zižek since 2013. This week, like Watch The Throne for people who’ve read Gramsci, these two giants of insurgent thought will be sharing a public stage for the first time, when they’ll be discussing the tsunami of heck that’s gripped Europe this year, from near-currency collapse to the refugee crisis. Expect more laughs than attacks on systemic exploitation usually raise. Charlie Jones
The rest of this week’s best talks
MUSIC
Krept & Konan
(Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham)
While their fellow Croydon MC Stormzy looks explicitly to grime’s roots – rhyming in the park, filming videos outside his house – Krept & Konan have delighted in US hip-hop collaborations and private jets. Krept & Konan’s MCing is as raw as their upbringing (the fatal shooting of Krept’s stepfather forms the topic of one song), but their aspirations are clearly international, not hyperlocal. The pair’s debut album The Long Way Home, released in July, features glossy production and guests such as Rick Ross and Wiz Khalifa. Live, the pair present a rawer side, and are happy to be out grinding hard on tour. John Robinson
The rest of this week’s live music
CLUBS
XOYO Loves
(XOYO, London, Monday to 22 November)
Finding a space to dance in XOYO can be like recreating your passage through the birth canal with experiential marketing creatives greeting you instead of midwives, but its lineups remain reliably excellent, especially at this week of nights designed to “showcase the artists who truly get us excited”. Monday’s event cares not for your post-weekend fragility, with Baauer and S-Type blasting fun trap, while Tuesday gets even more animated with JME, Oneman and Virgil Abloh wheeling up grime curios. Wednesday is a showcase for the aggressively shallow and mostly brilliant pop of PC Music, while Thursday does a 180 into brittle-boned dub techno from Dopplereffekt and Moritz Von Oswald. There’s cosmic disco on Friday, and while Lindstrøm and Juju & Jordash will take you on a psychedelic odyssey through a beard, Crazy P will keep things light. Cosmopolitanism reigns as 2ManyDJs, Busy P and Lena Willikens play next Saturday, while DJ Koze holds the fort alone on the Sunday for a contemplative but crisp deep house marathon. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
The rest of this week’s best club nights
COMEDY
Daniel Sloss
(Brighton, Musselburgh)
Young male Scottish comedians have a lot in common with young male Argentinian footballers. Whatever their personal merits, people are always asking whether they can inherit the mantle of the legend that has gone before: for the Argentinians, Maradona, for the Scots, Billy Connolly. Daniel Sloss is the latest to bear the burden of the “next Connolly” tag, but he’ll be looking to carve out a career on his own terms (so, to stretch the analogy to breaking point, he wants to be Lionel Messi). Despite his youth, Sloss has a brutal sense of humour that makes him more like the offspring of Frankie Boyle than the Big Yin. But whereas Boyle comes across like a nihilist howling at the moon, Sloss is more a joyfully uninhibited schoolboy who’s suddenly been allowed to be as obscene as he wants. His stand-up is a warts-and-all explication of the young adult experience. James Kettle
The rest of this week’s best comedy
THEATRE
The Homecoming
(Trafalgar Studios, London, Saturday to 13 February)
This is a high-profile production for the Trafalgar Studios, with director Jamie Lloyd returning with his company for a 50th anniversary production of what is considered Harold Pinter’s finest play. Crackling with Pinter’s customary tension, power-plays and dark humour, The Homecoming finds a son returning with a new wife after a spell in America to his working-class north London home, a testosterone-fuelled place ruled over by a foul-mouthed patriarch. A terrific cast comprises Keith Allen, Gemma Chan, Ron Cook, Gary Kemp, John Macmillan and John Simm, the latter of whom starred in Lloyd’s last Pinter offering, The Hothouse. Tickets priced only
£15 will be released on the first day of each month. Bargain. Mark Cook
The rest of this week’s best theatre
FILM EVENTS
Fokus: Films From Germany
(Various venues, Scotland, Friday to 15 December)
Acclaimed new crime thriller Victoria, shot over a Berlin night in a single, two-and-a-half-hour take, is your gateway drug here for a touring season (coming to seven Scottish towns) that reminds us what a force German cinema still is. It’s a chance, probably the only chance, to catch recent releases such as Who Am I?, on the hot topic of anonymous hackers; Inbetween Worlds, following a soldier in Afghanistan; and Finsterworld, a multi-stranded fable on German identity taking in pedicures, animal outfits and the Holocaust. For historical context, try 1980s Berlin punk documentary B-Movie or boundary-pushing postwar classics by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. SR
The rest of this week’s best film events
TV
Toast Of London
(Wednesday, 10.30pm, Channel 4)
Steven Toast leaves his usual voiceover recording with Clem Fandango and Danny Bear only to discover he’s been replaced by a soundalike. But his troubles really begin when he tells a particular story about Kubrick on ITV’s Lorraine while half-cut. Will his indiscretion derail his forthcoming role in “the Scottish play” at Regent’s Park open air theatre? A splendid cast fleshes out the wonky Toast universe while Berry does his thing. Julia Raeside
EXHIBITIONS
Jim Shaw
(Simon Lee Gallery, London, Thursday to 9 January)
To what extent the private individual can be separated from the culture that spawned them is one of the abiding questions thrown up by Jim Shaw’s work. In Shaw’s case, that culture is American, and while no definite answer is ever reached in work that includes painting, ink drawing, sculpture and more, it certainly looks as if the artist, and indeed the person (for he says his work is deeply personal), is inextricably tied up with US pop culture. Shaw had a huge retrospective this autumn at the New Museum in New York but Londoners will be able to sample just a particular body of work. In this new series, the artist has painted iconography referencing DC comics, 1970s rock, Hollywood films and detective novels – images sifted from the artist’s own adolescence – on to sections of used theatre backdrops. Oliver Basciano
The rest of this week’s best exhibitions
MUSIC
Chvrches
(Brighton, Bristol, Manchester)
From indie ducklings came a successful dance pop swan. That, in the loosest terms, is the story of Chvrches, a group formed by Iain Cook as a side project to his lachrymose post-rockers Aereogramme, and Martin Doherty, a guitarist in the Twilight Sad, conceivably the indiest band of their day. That’s not to say, however, that with the arrival of singer Lauren Mayberry they all suddenly cheered up and got their dance on. Chvrches make an agreeably upbeat synth-pop, not a million miles from the way hipper Disclosure and Rudimental, but Mayberry isn’t simply belting out platitudes. Catchy as their songs are, they have been a vehicle for barbed – and occasionally sweary – observations on modern relationships, which on their latest album Open Every Eye occasionally takes them into the territory of Depeche Mode. JR
DANCE
Christian Rizzo: D’Après Une Histoire Vraie
(Sadler’s Wells, London, Monday & Tuesday)
French choreographer Christian Rizzo is also a designer and visual artist, and in most of his work his choreography is closely integrated with the imagery of his set and costume design. For his latest production, however, Rizzo focuses principally on the muscular and expressive power of his eight male dancers. Inspired by a performance Rizzo saw in Istanbul, he recreates the powerful sense of community and tradition embodied in Turkish folk dance. Judith Mackrell
The rest of this week’s best dance
