What to see and do this weekend: From an ace new film to the 15th album from the 'archbishops of arch', the Mail's critics pick the very best of movies, music and theatre
A host of fantastic films, awesome new albums and spectacular stage performances – they are all featured in our critics' picks of the best of film, music and theatre.
Our experts have explored all the options for culture vultures to get their teeth into, and decided on the music, plays and movies that are well worth dedicating your weekend to.
Read on to find out what to see and do...
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
Challengers Cert: 15, 2hrs 11mins
Just for a moment, as Challengers gets under way, you find yourself wondering whether Zendaya, all of 27, is a tad too young to convince totally as the glossily coiffed wife and coach of a top tennis champion, let alone the distracted mother of a little girl.
But then you remember that the great Steffi Graf retired at only 30 and that Zendaya is playing a former junior champion whose hugely promising career was ended by injury before she even had the chance to turn professional, and you realise that the makers of Challengers – and Zendaya herself co-produces – have got it spot-on.
The makers of Challengers – and star Zendaya herself co-produces – have got pretty much everything spot on in a film which is sporty, sexy and absolutely gorgeous to look at
And they carry on getting pretty much everything else spot-on too. The result is a film that arrives like an overdue burst of warm spring sunshine – it’s sporty, ridiculously sexy at times and, like other films directed by the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino of Call Me By Your Name fame, absolutely gorgeous to look at.
At the outset, Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya) is watching the final of a Challenger tournament, a step down from the better-known competitions. One of the finalists is her husband, Art, played by West Side Story star Mike Faist, who has hit a bad patch and dropped down a level to regain confidence. The other is Patrick Zweig (an excellent Josh O’Connor) an unshaven John McEnroe-like figure who sleeps in his car and has a strange serve.
There is no sign the pair even know each other until Justin Kuritzkes’s screenplay skips back 13 years and we discover they used to be doubles partners and best friends. And that they were both besotted with the same girl.
Ah, that’ll be Zendaya again, now alarmingly convincing as an 18-year-old with the world, not to mention both boys, at her feet. But which one does she choose?
Yes, Challengers may be a tennis film and bear some similarities to 2004’s Wimbledon with Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst, but it’s also a well-acted and beautifully cast love triangle film that will keep you guessing right up to its somewhat overplayed end. I loved it, particularly its use of music, despite getting slightly befuddled by all the jumping about in time.
Matthew Bond
FOUR MORE FABULOUS FILMS TO SEE IN CINEMAS
There's Still Tomorrow
Cert: 15, 1hr 58mins
Challengers is not, however, even the best film of the week by an Italian director. That accolade goes to the Italian-language There’s Still Tomorrow (original title C’è Ancora Domani). It’s the directorial debut of actress Paola Cortellesi, who co-wrote the screenplay and plays the female lead — and it’s wonderful, indeed it was the biggest smash at the Italian box office last year, nuking Oppenheimer and besting Barbie.
Paola Cortellesi stars in and also directs the tremendous There's Still Tomorrow
It is set in 1946 in Rome, a city still reeling from the war and patrolled by American military policemen. Cortellesi plays Delia, a hard-working mother of three trapped in an abusive marriage to the brutish Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea), tyrannised by him and by the needs of everyone else in the household, including her bedridden father-in-law.
If that sounds grim, it is, although there are a few rays of sunlight penetrating the gloom: the attentions of an old lover, the kindliness of an American MP, the empathy of Delia’s friends, the impending engagement of her daughter.
But there’s also something else going on, on which Cortellesi at first lets us in only tangentially, setting up a surprising conclusion that, truly, will make you want to cheer.
It’s a picture of tremendous, sometimes whimsical charm and not a little mischief, filmed in black-and-white in the style of great works of Italian neorealism such as Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 masterpiece, Rome, Open City, to which it would make a perfect companion piece. Honestly, it’s that good.
Brian Viner
Back To Black
Cert: 15, 2hrs 2mins
Both Amy Winehouse's father, Mitch, and ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, will be much happier with Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black than they were with Asif Kapadia's 2015 documentary, Amy.
Marisa Abela is brilliant as Amy and Jack O’Connell charms as Amy's husband Blake
Mitch (Eddie Marsan) because he’s restored to the role of loving father and Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) because he’s portrayed, not as the man who introduced Amy to hard drugs, but as a charming cockney chancer.
Taylor-Johnson’s creative vision is essentially affectionate and celebratory rather than insightful and revelatory.
Marisa Abela is rather brilliant as Amy (her singing - she doesn’t lip-synch - is amazing) and it’s refreshing to see the now permanently tragic figure of Winehouse actually having fun.
Matthew Bond
The Book Of Clarence
Cert: 15, 2hrs 9mins
At first glance, The Book Of Clarence looks like a black American version of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian. It’s funny at times, flirts with blasphemy at others, and when Clarence of Jerusalem gets into serious money problems he becomes a false messiah, just as Brian of Nazareth did all those years ago.
The Book Of Clarence features a compelling central performance from LaKeith Stanfield
But these similarities turn out to be superficial. Written and directed by the British film-maker Jeymes Samuel and co-produced by Jay-Z, The Book Of Clarence has a wistful, almost mournful atmosphere and a compelling yet quietly subtle central performance from LaKeith Stanfield.
The result is a film that explores belief, non-belief and race, and will make you think every bit as much as it will make you laugh. The laid-back, likeable Clarence, who turns out to be the dope-peddling, chariot-racing brother of Doubting Thomas, is a firm non-believer. But he owes a ton of money to Jedediah the Terrible, so into the lucrative messiah business he must go.
With the picturesque, hilltop Italian city of Matera (it was also used in The Passion Of The Christ) filling in convincingly for 1st-century Jerusalem, the film looks great, and I loved some of Samuel’s more surreal touches – particularly the floating hookah-pipe smokers and the disco routine.
He goes a bit Mel Gibson in the last lap – the stations of the cross sequence seems to go on for a blood-splattered eternity – but even then he has some clever and funny points still to make with the help of James McAvoy as Pontius Pilate and Benedict Cumberbatch as a rather important beggar.
Matthew Bond
Civil War
Cert: 15, 1hr 49mins
Alex Garland's Civil War takes the shape of a road movie: a truckful of journalists driving from New York City to Washington, D.C to try and secure the last interview with the president (Nick Offerman) before his government comes crashing down.
Kirsten Dunst is on career-best form as photojournalist Lee in Civil War
They are the veteran hack Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), war correspondent Joel (Wagner Moura), wannabe photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and her idol, Lee (Kirsten Dunst). Four fine performances, though only one weary, wonderful Dunst, who’s on career-best form here.
The landscape they pass through is the stuff of a hundred post-apocalypse flicks except there are no zombies or climate cataclysms here. It’s just politics.
Peter Hoskin
MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Pet Shop Boys
Nonetheless Out now
A record called Nonetheless! It could only be Pet Shop Boys. Their 15th studio album is also the 15th to have a one-word title. This week it will surely become the 15th to reach the top ten.
It’s 40 years since Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe released their first single, the flop version of West End Girls (which stalled at No133, before they rejigged it and landed their first No1). They have given us 40 years of sparkling consistency, making electro-pop that is always the same, yet always different.
Pet Shop Boys, aka Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, have given us 40 years of sparkling consistency, making electro-pop that is always the same, yet always different
Their stock is rising now. Old hits have acquired new lustre in two talked-about films, Saltburn and All Of Us Strangers. The Dreamworld tour is still filling arenas, on and off, after two years. Their career has just been encapsulated in a BBC1 documentary. The NME calls them ‘synthpop deities’, while Mojo, much to Lowe’s distaste, opts for ‘the archbishops of arch’.
On Monday, Pet Shop Boys were interviewed on stage at Kings Place in London, where a packed house gave them a standing ovation before they uttered a word.
Lowe was typically taciturn, Tennant typically lucid. ‘There’s no ideology any more in music,’ said Tennant, who is nearly 70. ‘People listen with an open mind and they’re not ageist about it. That is very refreshing.’
Lowe needs only three words to sum up the Pet Shop Boys’ sound: ‘electronics with strings’. This is truer than ever on Nonetheless, produced by James Ford. Tennant and Lowe admired him not just for his well-known work with Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode, but for his use of strings with The Last Shadow Puppets.
The upshot is that most of these ten tracks have three things going on at once. There’s a pop hook, a dance beat and a luxurious air, with the orchestra smuggling in extra melodies.
It often feels as if this duo from the 1980s are introducing the 2020s to the 1960s.
And that’s before you take in Tennant’s lyrics, which mix crisp detachment with intense feeling. The ex-journalist in him tells stories about Rudolf Nureyev’s heyday, Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, cheesy Europop (‘sexy, sexy, sexy!’) and what life must be like for Donald Trump’s bodyguard. These are not things you can get from Ed Sheeran.
When he swaps journalism for poetry, Tennant is even better. He devotes two sunny tunes to loneliness, two bittersweet ones to being in love, and two sombre ones to piercing reminiscence.
On A New Bohemia, a gravely beautiful ballad, he finds a killer line at just the right moment: ‘Your only friend is the memory of a dream.’
Tim de Lisle
FOUR MORE AWESOME ALBUMS OUT NOW
ST. VINCENT: All Born Screaming
Singer-songwriter Annie Clark, the Dallas musician better known as St. Vincent, paid a brilliant homage to 1970s New York on her last album, Daddy’s Home, in 2021. It was a record of soft vocal harmonies, nods to Steely Dan, and even (although this stretched the point) a re-working of Sheena Easton’s 1981 singalong 9 To 5.
She’s toughened up her act on All Born Screaming. It’s a record of two halves – the first dark and aggressive, the second seeking calm – and it’s often scattergun. It also wears its influences, particularly David Bowie and Prince, too obviously on its sleeve. The highlights, though, are spellbinding.
The first LP on which the triple Grammy winner, 41, acts as sole producer, it opens with the ominous Hell Is Near, Annie singing of empty cups and half-burned candles as her 12-string guitar adds a folky feel.
The riffs are heavier on Reckless, and Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl crops up on Flea, on which Clark plays a small, flight-less insect. ‘l look at you, and all I see is meat,’ she warns.
Part two steps back from the guitar barrage, even if the lyrics are no less gloomy at first. The Power’s Out is a sister piece to Bowie’s Five Years – from 1972’s Ziggy Stardust – right down to Clark’s stuttering drum pattern. Echoing Bowie’s prophecy of doom, she witnesses shootings and a suicide: ‘The power’s out, and no one can save us.’
The mood eventually lifts. There’s wonky reggae on So Many Planets, and she adds superlative guitar on Sweetest Fruit. On the epic title track, there’s also a self-effacing admission that she’s both ‘a pantomime of a modern girl’ and ‘a karaoke version’ of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Darker than Daddy’s Home, it still reiterates her skill as a mistress of reinvention.
Adrian Thrills
JAMES: Yummy
Manchester veterans James's 18th studio effort adds fresh layers to a sound first honed in the 1980s, when their local peers were New Order, The Smiths and The Fall.
Like Simple Minds, James have been refreshed by adding a female vocalist. Chloe Alper is a foil to Tim Booth in much the same way Sarah Brown complements Jim Kerr in Simple Minds.
Booth remains a compelling lyricist. Mobile God is penned from the perspective of a smartphone, while album closer Folks is a wry contemplation of mortality. It would be a perfect farewell... were it not for the fact that there’s still plenty of life left in James.
Adrian Thrills
TAYLOR SWIFT: The Tortured Poets Department
There's certainly a sense that Taylor Swift is pulling out all the stops on The Tortured Poets Department. Even for someone with a track record of lengthy, value-for-money albums, it's a mammoth undertaking and an immersive, cinematic affair that often feels more like an old Hollywood film script than a straightforward pop record.
Written on the US leg of The Eras Tour, this isn't a major departure musically. Two of her regular collaborators, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, are the main co-writers, and many of her lyrically-rich songs are built around shimmering electronics and inarguably great tunes. There are two duets – one with soft-voiced US star Post Malone, one with UK singer Florence Welch – and passing hints of folk music.
It's a far cry from Swift's early days in Nashville: a flair for storytelling and the odd spot of vocal phrasing aside, there are few traces of her country roots here. While the rest of the pop world is hitching a ride on the country hay-wagon, Taylor is once again heading in a different direction.
The lyrical mood is one of tarnished romance, with clever internal rhymes and skilfully-scripted melodrama by the bucketload. The album opens with Fortnight, an electronic ballad in which Taylor, accompanied by Post Malone, suggests she's on the verge of a breakdown.
The odd misstep is inevitable. Down Bad feels like one sad, electronic ballad too many. But, just as you fear the album might be losing momentum, up pops another classic in the making such as Florida!!! – sung with Welch – or Guilty As Sin?
Even as her record-breaking tour rolls on towards its final show in December, a new Era is already under way.
Adrian Thrills
ENGLISH TEACHER: This Could Be Texas
The fast-rising Leeds quartet are often bracketed alongside a new wave of punky guitar bands, but the pigeonholing does them a disservice.
There are some abrasive rock numbers on this highly promising debut, but also detours into delicate indie-pop and brooding balladry.
Singer Lily Fontaine is quietly charismatic, her conversational lyrics addressing intolerance on the powerful Albert Road and her own chronic indecision on Mastermind Specialism, where she likens herself to a hesitant bride and a child who jumps off a playground slide halfway down the chute.
Adrian Thrills
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Machinal
Machinal opens with lots of jerky ‘expressionist’ movement in the 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell. The initial performance style is off-putting, but the story, based on an account of the murderer Ruth Snyder, grips like a vice.
Machinal, based on an account of the murderer Ruth Snyder, grips like a vice mainly thanks to Rosie Sheehy who is terrific as the lowly office worker pestered by her leching boss
That’s thanks to Rosie Sheehy – terrific as the lowly office worker pestered by her leching boss (Tim Frances). Times are hard so she marries him. The honeymoon is a disaster.
When she meets a guy in a speakeasy bar (Pierro Niel-Mee in a charmer part first played by the young Clark Gable) one thing leads to another. She gets the physical love she craves. Her husband gets his head stoved in. By the end she’s inside a cage, in a jail, in a vile circus of rough justice, an electric chair downstage.
Director Richard Jones’s production is full of startling stage effects. But it’s Sheehy’s superb, almost rabid performance that freezes the blood, like one long, silent scream. As you come out, you want to forget it, but you can’t.
Robert Gore-Langton
The Old Vic, London. Until June 1, 1hr 50mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York)
The sweet-natured new musical Two Strangers is an endangered species in this age of gender activism. With loveable Sam Tutty alongside Dujonna Gift in a two-person performance, it’s a show that dares to take a basically benign view of people, sex, and even race relations.
Sam Tutty and Dujonna Gift star in the sweet-natured new musical Two Strangers
Jim Barne and Kit Buchan’s entertainment is now in the West End. And it wants nothing more from us than to be charmed by its tale of an excitable young Dougal (Tutty) flying to the Big Apple for his estranged father’s wedding.
It’s inspired by romcoms from Breakfast At Tiffany’s to When Harry Met Sally and although the set-up is a little forced, with Dad somehow not knowing his son is coming, it’s written with wit and affection.
Gift’s savvy, snappy native New Yorker, Robin, who meets Dougal at the airport, considers him perplexing but basically harmless with zero boundaries… until he starts to erode the cynicism with which she protects herself as they carry a four-tier cake across town for the big day.
Clever lyrics ensure the old-fashioned sentiments are tied into the modern world of Tinder and online dating, while music fuses jazz, rap, pop and soul. Tutty yodels a brassy hymn to New York, and Gift enjoys a Whitney Houston-ish apotheosis set to cascading drums.
Is Two Strangers too worshipful of the city to make it in New York itself? I suggest they convene a focus group of hard-boiled residents to find out. But for us over here, it’s a big-hearted cakewalk.
Patrick Marmion
Underdog: The Other Other Bronte
There are plenty of meta moments in Underdog: The Other Other Bronte. It is 1837 and at the parsonage in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, aspiring writer Charlotte Bronte (Gemma Whelan), older sister of Emily (Adele James) and Anne (Rhiannon Clements), is reading her reply from the poet laureate Robert Southey, to whom she has sent her poems, asking his opinion of them.
Adele James, Gemma Whelan and Rhiannon Clements as the Bronte sister
Southey is not encouraging. ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ he writes. ‘He’s a bellend!’ declares Emily.
Sarah Gordon’s hilarious but ultimately moving comedy about the Brontes is a racy retelling of the sisters’ struggle to become recognised authors. Charlotte is determined to be as famous and lauded as the likes of Southey, but her ambition results in her overshadowing Anne, the full extent of whose talent was not acknowledged until long after her premature death.
The banter between the rival siblings is very sharp, there are some brilliant bits of business and much fun is poked at the prissy male critics horrified that such radical, fierce novels as Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall were written by women.
But Gordon also invites us to think seriously about how our view of these literary giants has been shaped, and about their battle to succeed in a profession dominated by men.
Incidentally, Charlotte really did write to Southey – an audacious move for the 20-year-old daughter of a country clergyman.
At the start of Underdog, Whelan wanders through the audience asking people their favourite Bronte novel. Everyone has an answer. How many people could even name a Southey poem?
Neil Armstrong
Love's Labour 's Lost
A new era at the RSC opens with a sunny and (eventually) charming rendition of Shakespeare’s slightly tricky romcom Love’s Labour’s Lost. The story’s been transposed to a wellness centre, where four young bucks vow to improve themselves by fasting, studying and seeing no women... That is, until a delegation of eye-catching ladies turn up.
Horribly handsome Berowne (Luke Thompson) meets his match in Rosaline
Rising-star director Emily Burns tries a little too hard at the start, overloading the stage with the fuss of an exclusive health resort. She barely copes with Shakespeare’s lamentable, supposedly comic, ventures into Latin wordplay.
There is also confusion caused by a roving band in Hawaiian shirts combining Spanish guitar music with Polynesian flute playing. Where exactly are we?
But once we’ve got through this contextual toil, the show comes alight, as the boys scribble secret sonnets to the girls and perform the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way — while wearing suits of armour.
Joanna Scotcher’s creamy set of twin stone staircases, palm trees and cloudless skies is a holiday brochure dream.
But as always the play works better in the character contests than in the big concept. In particular, horribly handsome Luke Thompson (Bridgerton’s Benedict), as supercilious playboy Berowne, meets his match in Ioanna Kimbook’s Rosaline — the savviest of the four women.
Her polite smile and scornful eyerolls crucify his most ardent endeavours. She knows that Berowne needs to grow up, because love is a game of consequence.
Patrick Marmion
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until May 18, 2hr 45mins
LAST CHANCE: The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook - famous as the flame-haired Shiv Roy in the TV series Succession - is the star of this one-woman version of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray. I feared the worst, not least because Snook is a woman and Dorian Gray isn't. But how much better she turns out to be than some fashionable male twerp starlet with cheekbones.
Sarah Snook is far from snookered by Wilde's camp, gothic horror novel
Snook is far from snookered by Wilde's twisted, camp, gothic horror novel. In fact she's funny, quick and amusing, playing 26 characters - and it's her beaming personality that makes the play work.
It's the story of Dorian, who has his portrait painted. He gets his dearest wish, that his looks will never fade, only his portrait. As Dorian abandons himself to vice and murder, his face remains pretty but the painting ages and corrupts, like a putrefying selfie.
Snook peoples the fun with lip-smacking caricatures and conjures up an actress, an ancient butler, a clubland bore, a duchess and so on, her wardrobe flitting from the fusty to the outrageous.
It's almost a movie. You get multiple screens and live feeds with Snook's face so close up you can see the glue on her sideburns.
The camera crew follows her everywhere, even backstage. All the new-fangled videography is offset by the stately plush of the most beautiful theatre in London. Kip Williams, director and adapter of the book, takes credit for this hip, metrosexual event.
It's a riveting piece of storytelling but my one complaint is the final 30 minutes, when the pace gets exhausting. It needs trimming. Either that or give us an interval, which the play lacks. But as an evening it's an astonishing feat, and Snook magics Wilde's lurid yarn into high-definition life.
Robert Gore-Langton
