Going out: Cinema
Elvis
Out now
The King has returned, in biopic form, courtesy of Baz Luhrmann, the showman who brought you Moulin Rouge! and Strictly Ballroom. Getting all shook up as the man with the sideburns is Austin Butler, rising to the challenge of his first really big lead role, with support from Tom Hanks as manager Colonel Tom Parker.
Moon, 66 Questions
Out now
An exciting new voice in the contemporary Greek new wave, director Jacqueline Lentzou builds on the promise of her short films to deliver a sensitive and offbeat debut feature set in Athens, about familial estrangement, which never quite goes where you think it’s going to go.
The Black Phone
Out now
What do you get if you cross Stephen King’s It with the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth? In The Black Phone, a creepy child killer called The Grabber (Ethan Hawke, unrecognisable) traps his latest victim in a room with only a mysterious telephone for company. Directed by Scott Derrickson.
Sheffield DocFest
Various venues, to 28 June
One of the world’s biggest documentary film and TV festivals returns to Sheffield IRL with a veritable banquet of premieres, retrospectives, talks and panel discussions, plus a VR sidebar for anyone who has had their fill of reality these days, thank you very much. Catherine Bray
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Going out: Gigs
Oliver Sim
Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 29 June
Ahead of his debut solo album, Hideous Bastard, the xx’s velvet-voiced crooner plays a one-off London show. Of the trio of songs he’s released so far – all produced by Jamie xx – it’s the Jimmy Somerville-assisted Hideous, in which Sim discusses his HIV status, that leaves the deepest impression.
Guns N’ Roses
28 June to 5 July; tour starts Dublin
Now settled back into their mostly classic lineup of Axl Rose, Slash, Dizzy Reed and Duff McKagan after a few years of having a guitarist sporting a KFC bucket for a hat, the US hard rock titans return to UK stadiums. Expect a fair amount of the 80s classics, and hopefully not a lot from 2008’s bloated Chinese Democracy. Michael Cragg
Love Supreme jazz festival
Glynde Place, Glynde, East Sussex, 1 to 3 July
Europe’s biggest greenfield jazz festival returns, with Ezra Collective’s vivacious jazz/Afrobeat/hip-hop mix, and young pianist Fergus McCreadie’s atmospheric folk-jazz on Friday’s opening bill. An Erykah Badu UK exclusive, and sax great Charles Lloyd’s country-blues band the Marvels feature later in a star-packed weekend. John Fordham
Migrations
Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 29 June to 2 July; touring from 2 October
One composer and six librettists are involved in the finale to WNO’s season. Will Todd’s new opera interweaves six narrative strands, all focused on migration, in both the natural and the human worlds. As well as writing one of the strands, director David Pountney has the task of making it all cohere, with more than 100 performers. Andrew Clements
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Going out: Art
True to Nature
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to 29 August
The passion to paint in the open air that gripped 19th-century artists led to one of the revolutions of art. Pioneers such as Constable and Kopisch led the way. By the 1870s, this inspired the spontaneity of impressionism, as Monet and Degas painted the city as well as the country.
The Black Fantastic
Hayward Gallery, London, 29 June to 18 September
Visions of strange and liberating worlds in the future and the past proliferate in this survey of Afrofuturism, the aesthetic of science fiction and fantasy whose inspirations include the writer Samuel R Delany and the music of Parliament-Funkadelic. With Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Hew Locke, Kara Walker and many more.
Tattoo
National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth, to April 2023
The art of tattooing was copied by 19th-century sailors from Pacific peoples and was a fixture of port towns before its recent rise from the subculture to the mainstream. This blockbuster survey of that epic tale also includes contemporary art commissions by Aimée Cornwell, Tihoti Faara Barff and Matt Houston.
David Hockney
Salts Mill, nr Bradford, to 18 September
Hockney’s pictures of spring in the Normandy countryside were a much-needed artistic highlight of the Covid era, bringing his brilliant eye for colour to images that affirm the renewal of life. This exhibition shows them as a series, inspired by the Bayeux tapestry, on tour from the Orangerie, Paris. Jonathan Jones
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Going out: Stage
The Tempest
Theatre Royal: Ustinov Studio, Bath, 1 July to 6 August
Deborah Warner has pulled together a brilliant creative team for her first show as artistic director, with a stellar cast led by Nicholas Woodeson as Prospero and Dickie Beau as Ariel.
LIFT 2022
Various venues, London, to 10 July
This year’s international festival of theatre includes a climate opera performed on a beach, an interactive ghost hunt and a garden party celebrating Black activism. Miriam Gillinson
Compañia Jesús Carmona
Sadler’s Wells theatre, London, 28 & 29 June
There is much more to modern flamenco than frilly skirts and castanets, as you will see in Sadler’s Wells’s annual flamenco festival (back after a Covid-enforced hiatus). This week, Jesús Carmona examines 21st-century masculinity in The Jump. Also check out the magnificent María Pagés, opening on 1 July. Lyndsey Winship
Oxford comedy festival
Various venues, Oxford, 1 to 30 July
This month-long Edinburgh preview includes many of the same acts as the fringe, making it a great alternative to the Scottish extravaganza. Esther Manito, Tony Law and Jayde Adams all feature. Rachel Aroesti
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Staying in: Streaming
Only Murders in the Building
28 June, Disney+
Steve Martin and Martin Short put in irresistible performances in this brilliant, timely series about three New York neighbours who start a true-crime podcast (fellow comedy greats take note: this is how to age gracefully and hilariously). Season two sees the pair rejoin forces with Selena Gomez’s Mabel – but this time it’s the crime-fighting trio who are under suspicion.
Atlanta
29 June, Disney+
The third series of Donald Glover’s boundary-pushing comedy-drama does not actually take place in its titular city – instead it follows music manager Earn (Glover) and his rapper cousin Paper Boi on the latter’s European tour, a narrative interspersed with surreal standalone dream episodes set back in the US.
Aids: The Unheard Tapes
27 June, 9.30pm, BBC Two & iPlayer
It’s been 40 years since charismatic barman and DJ Terry Higgins became the one of the first Britons to die of an Aids-related illness. This series relives the terrifying early days of the epidemic via interviews with his friends as well as heartbreaking archival conversations with the recently infected.
Westworld
Mon, 9pm, Sky Atlantic & Now
The ambitious, confounding and occasionally controversial sci-fi series – which began by following androids working in a wild west theme park and later migrated to a world controlled by a powerful AI – returns for a fourth series. Plot, setting and character details are still scarce; horrifyingly dystopian drama, however, is guaranteed. RA
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Staying in: Games
Air Twister
Out now, iOS
Seminal game developer Yu Suzuki was responsible for some of the greatest Sega arcade machines of the 1980s, including OutRun, Afterburner and Hang-On. Now he’s designed a smartphone shooter that looks and plays like a modern incarnation of his 1985 classic Space Harrier. You control Princess Arch flying through a fantastical kingdom battling surreal enemies, and shooting is via an intuitive swipe mechanic. A turbo-charged trip down memory lane for arcade veterans.
Tinyfolks
Out now, PC
Released recently on Steam, this retro role-playing adventure has the visual style and deceptively simple-looking gameplay of an old Commodore 64 title. The aim is to upgrade your little village and train your warriors so they can fight monsters and earn loot. It’s a mix of classic Japanese adventure and town-building sim, and its nostalgic aesthetic is earning rave reviews. Keith Stuart
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Staying in: Albums
Muna – Muna
Out now
LA’s premier alt-pop trio return with their third album, and first for Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory imprint. Their new boss adds shimmering vocals to the soft-rock Silk Chiffon, while elsewhere the band dabble in country (Anything But Me), synthpop (Home By Now) and full-on dance.
Madonna – Finally Enough Love
Out now
To celebrate scoring 50 No 1s on the US Billboard Dance Club Songs chart, Instagram aficionado Madonna releases this career-spanning remix compilation, all remastered by producer Mike Dean. While this is an abridged 16-track digital version, all 50 club bangers will be released physically on 19 August.
Alexisonfire – Otherness
Out now
It has been a slow road back to new music for this Canadian post-hardcore quintet. After disbanding in 2012, they reunited three years later for various tours and festival appearances, before a trickle of one-off singles arrived in 2019. None of those appear on this fifth album, which pairs melodic rock with throat-lacerating howls.
Regina Spektor – Home, Before and After
Out now
Recorded in a converted church, this eighth album from the Russia-born, US-based singer-songwriter expands her piano-based sound to include vast orchestral sweeps and, on the epic Spacetime Fairytale, a tap-dancer. Thematically, Spektor still tackles the big topics, with recent single Becoming All Alone featuring a conversation with God. MC
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Staying in: Brain food
Lenny Henry’s Caribbean Britain
29 June, 9pm, BBC Two
Lenny Henry’s two-part series celebrating the contributions of Caribbean culture to the UK is a joy. This concluding episode investigates the identity of second- and third-generation migrants and their legacies in music, entertainment and theatre.
Welcome to Provincetown
Podcast
Reality podcasts are a relatively new experiment and this latest offering provides a surprisingly informative insight into the Massachusetts town long known as an LGBTQ+ haven. Host Mitra Kaboli follows the complicated lives of seven locals in summer 2021.
Sandwiches of History
YouTube
Lunch will never be the same after watching Instagrammer “Barry” recreate the strangest sandwiches from history, plundering old cookbooks for his recipes. Watch as he fastidiously consumes concoctions such as smoked oyster and cheddar. Ammar Kalia
