Going out: Cinema
Joyride
Out now
You’ve got a choice of two charming new road trip movies in UK cinemas this week. This one stars Olivia Colman and adorable newcomer Charlie Reid as a pair of mismatched misfits on a picturesque trip around County Kerry, Ireland, in a stolen taxi …
Hit the Road
Out now
… and this one follows a middle-aged couple and their two sons – one a young man, the other a young boy – as they journey across the Iranian countryside. From Panah Panahi, the son of the recently detained film-maker Jafar Panahi, it’s an auspicious, outward-looking debut feature.
Fire of Love
Out now
For two decades, Katia and Maurice Krafft documented volcanoes together, until in 1991 they lost their lives in a volcanic explosion. This documentary from film-maker Sara Dosa explores their work, relationship and legacy.
Paris, Texas
Out now
You know those must-see films you’ve never got around to seeing? If this Wim Wenders classic is on your filmic bucket list, there couldn’t be a better way to finally tick it off than with this big screen re-release – part of Curzon’s retrospective of the director’s work. Catherine Bray
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Going out: Gigs
DIIV
O2 Ritz, Manchester, Tue; KOKO Electronic, London, 2 & 3 August
To coincide with the 10th anniversary of their debut album, Oshin, New York shoegazers DIIV play two UK dates. While that fragile, dream-pop album will be in the spotlight, it’s likely to be mixed with highlights from 2019’s more muscular Deceiver.
Christina Aguilera
2 to 6 August; tour starts Scarborough
The big-voiced superstar arrives for a whistle-stop tour featuring a night at London’s O2 (5 Aug), and Brighton Pride on 6 August. Expect songs from May’s Spanish-language album, Aguilera, mixed in with career-defining hits from her 00s heyday. Michael Cragg
Ealing jazz festival
Walpole Park, London, 30 & 31 July
Afrobeat, grime and funk fusioneers Binker & Moses headline the genre-fluid jazz fest. Highlights include Nigeria-born saxist Camilla George, pianist Sarah Tandy and Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Chamber Orchestra. John Fordham
Summer at Snape
Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh, 31 July to 31 August
Following on barely a month after the end of this year’s Aldeburgh festival, the summer programme at Snape Maltings spreads its net a bit wider. There are plenty of high-class classical concerts – but also programmes of folk and country music, jazz and blues too. Andrew Clements
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Going out: Art
A Taste for Impressionism
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, to 13 November
A newly discovered Van Gogh self-portrait is among the highlights of this Scottish take on the French avant garde from Degas to Matisse. It tells how Scottish collectors invested early and wisely in the impressionists, and shows off the resulting richness of Monets, Gauguins and more in national collections.
Ishiuchi Miyako
Stills, Edinburgh, to 8 October
This veteran Japanese photographer has an eye for the objects we leave behind, the intimate possessions that tell tales of vanished people. She takes cool colour images of human relics, including her late mother’s shoes and lipstick, as well as Frida Kahlo’s clothes and cosmetics. A haunting artist of quiet poetry.
Young & Wild?
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 30 July to 20 November
With raw expressionism once again an artistic fashion, this show revisits 1980s Germany to see how the human figure was depicted with roughcut passion and mordant irony by artists of the neo-expressionist movement. With drawings and watercolours by Salomé, Elvira Bach and the godfather of the movement, Georg Baselitz.
Traces: Renaissance Drawings for Flemish Prints
Courtauld Gallery, London, to 25 September
Pieter Bruegel the Elder is an unsung treasure of this collection. The Courtauld has the best Bruegels in Britain, including his tiny yet epic vista of a mountain, The Landscape With the Flight into Egypt. It also owns some of his greatest drawings, including a rollicking depiction of a carnival. Jonathan Jones
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Going out: Stage
The Jungle Book
The Dukes theatre, Lancaster, to 28 August
The Dukes’ summer show has become a much-loved local tradition. This year, Williamson Park will be transformed into a jungle for a promenade production of Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale.
Hungry
Soho theatre, London, to 30 July
A master of large-scale musicals, intimate plays, farce and family fare, Chris Bush’s talent runs deep. Here’s a final chance to catch a layered romance about food, class, queerness and cultural appropriation. Miriam Gillinson
The Care House Project
Harlow Town Park, to 6 August
A free family festival based around the idea of care and community. It’s masterminded by the choreographer Rhiannon Faith, featuring her show 9 Acts of Care, performed by pro dancers and local people. Lyndsey Winship
Romesh Ranganathan
Basingstoke, 1 August; Portsmouth, 2 August; Crawley, 3 & 4 August
August sees much of the comedy world decamp to Edinburgh – the deadpan standup is staying much closer to home, concluding his Cynic’s Mixtape tour with a special series of performances. Rachel Aroesti
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Staying in: Streaming
Irma Vep
2 August, 9pm, Sky Atlantic & Now
This mind-bendingly meta series from French director Olivier Assayas, starring Alicia Vikander as the lead actor in a TV show of the same name, is far too multilayered to explain in a brief blurb. Let’s just say fans of anagrams, remakes, self-reflexivity and film-world satire are in for a treat.
The Sandman
5 August, Netflix
After languishing for decades in Hollywood development hell, Neil Gaiman’s hugely influential comic-book series finally makes it to the screen featuring an array of brilliant British acting talent: Gwendoline Christie, David Thewlis, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Asim Chaudhry join Tom Sturridge as the titular Morpheus.
Three Busy Debras
4 August, All 4
Returning for a second series, this bizarre satire of suburban housewifery stars Sandy Honig, Alyssa Stonoha and Mitra Jouhari as three borderline sociopathic and generally very strange women called Debra, who spend their lives plotting and bickering in the eerily spotless town of Lemoncurd.
Code 404
4 August, 9pm, Sky Comedy & Now
Daniel Mays plays a top copper brought back to life – if not quite his previous levels of competence – by AI in this high-concept police farce, now back for a third series. The great Stephen Graham is his despairing partner, charged with keeping this work-in-progress robocop on the straight and narrow. RA
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Staying in: Games
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Out now, Nintendo Switch
Come to battle robots on beautiful alien planets in this science-fiction role-playing game, but stay for the British-accented voice-acting cast.
The Sims 4: High School Years
Out now, PC, PlayStation, Xbox
If, for some strange reason, you want to relive your high school years in the beloved life-simulation game, that is now possible. Except it’s American, so it’s more likely you will be acting out scenes from 80s/90s coming-of‑age movies. Keza MacDonald
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Staying in: Albums
Beyoncé – Renaissance
Out now
It’s been six years since marriage-crisis opus Lemonade, and even longer since a new LP arrived without being cloaked in mystery. Led by 90s house explosion Break My Soul, Renaissance has been billed by the 28-time Grammy winner as “a place to scream, release, feel freedom”.
King Princess – Hold on Baby
Out now
On her second album, New York’s Mikaela Straus unpacks the end of a relationship, while celebrating those who helped her through the fallout. Her two best pals are valorised on the electro-tinged For My Friends, while the Aaron Dessner-assisted Change the Locks picks at fracturing intimacy.
Jamie T – The Theory of Whatever
Out now
Since establishing himself as a grimy, spit-flecked street poet on 2007’s classic debut, Panic Prevention, Londoner Jamie Treays has since toyed with a less interesting mode of sad-boy indie. This fifth album – and first in six years – aims to merge the two.
Maggie Rogers – Surrender
Out now
The 28-year-old describes this follow-up to her 2019 debut, Heard It in a Past Life, as sounding like “feral joy”. That’s definitely the case on urgent recent single Want Want, which gallops out of the traps and barely lets up for three minutes. Horses, meanwhile, blossoms slowly from its more sedate folk-rock beginnings. MC
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Staying in: Brain food
Future of StoryTelling
Podcast
For those of us working in the traditionalist juggernaut of print media, this podcast from Charlie Melcher is a welcome breath of fresh air. Each week, he interviews someone disrupting the usual methods of conveying a story.
The Atlantic Archive
Online
The American journal of ideas has recently launched a digitised archive making available each issue of the magazine since its launch in 1857. Explore writing from the likes of Emerson, Hemingway and Martin Luther King.
This Is Amapiano
BBC iPlayer
A musical phenomenon in South Africa, the house-influenced genre of amapiano has gone global in recent years, featuring on releases by Drake and Burna Boy. This film explores the genre’s township origins and its danceable sound. Ammar Kalia
