FILM
Carol
As he did with 2002’s Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes sweeps us away in illicit 1950s passion, conveying grand emotions with gorgeous visuals, intelligent observation and exquisite acting. At heart, it’s a simple love affair between a lonely wife and a young shop assistant. The prospect of a “happily ever after” is dim from the outset, but we’re with them every intoxicating step of the way. SR
All of this week’s new film releases
COMEDY
Jessie Cave: I Loved Her
(Soho Theatre, London, Tuesday to 5 December)
A common complaint about young stand-ups is that they don’t have enough life experience, the result being that a load of them offer up the same observations about flat-sharing, nights out and TV shows they’ve seen. Jessie Cave has dramatically broadened her horizons in the last year since becoming pregnant as the result of a one-night stand with a fellow comedian. I Loved Her is the story of the resulting changes in her life, not only accommodating a baby into her previously self-absorbed world, but also trying to build a relationship with the father of her child. This isn’t a mopey show, or one filled with tedious preaching; Cave’s got too much of a daffy sense of fun to go down that route. Instead, the whole thing is packed with Josie Long-ish handmade props, puppetry and faux-naïf drawings, making for a charmingly lo-fi and authentically personal show. JK
The rest of this week’s best new comedy
MUSIC
Peaches
(Glasgow, Salford, Brighton)
If you shock people for six months you’re interesting; do it for 20 years and you’re seminal. While Canadian contemporaries have changed their musical strategies (like Chilly Gonzales) or made surprising breakthroughs (like Feist), Peaches has stayed making electronic rock very much within the arena of adult sexual behaviour. Interestingly, though, however bold they may have first appeared, Peaches’s songs have never been confined to an art ghetto. Instead, they’ve found a place outside it, as her song Fuck The Pain Away did in the film Lost In Translation. Her new album Rub (an eye-watering array of sexually themed material featuring Kim Gordon and Feist) makes that sound all very PG now, but it’s interesting that Peaches is moving in a satirical and witty way through a subject matter that in hip-hop is often simply pornographic. JR
The rest of this week’s new music
FILM EVENTS
Stolen Images: People & Power In The Films of Raoul Peck
(BFI Southbank, London, Thursday to 11 December)
A film-maker, political activist and one-time Haitian minister of culture who’s lived in Haiti, Congo, the US and France, Raoul Peck is amply qualified to chronicle not just Haitian but pan-African history, particularly its despotic regimes and the mixed results of western aid. He’s done so with a mix of fiction and documentary: the 2005 film Sometimes In April, starring a pre-Luther Idris Elba, was a fact-based fictionalised account of the Rwandan genocide, for example. And having made a documentary in 1990 on Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s assassinated independence leader (Lumumba, La Mort d’un Prophète), he then drew on new historical evidence to dramatise his story 10 years later in Lumumba, starring French actor Eriq Ebouaney. Throughout this retrospective, Peck is appearing at various BFI venues. SR
The rest of this week’s best film events
TV
The Murder Detectives
(Monday, 9pm, Channel 4)
This three-part documentary series, continuing on Tuesday and Wednesday, explores the murder of a young man in the St Pauls area of Bristol, then the investigation and trial that follow. Tonight, we hear the last words of 19-year-old Nicholas Robinson, dying from stab wounds as he calls 999. The police fear this is a gang-related crime but there are twists and turns as they uncover the truth. For the grieving mother, this is the second son she has lost in violent circumstances. Melancholy, harrowing, gripping. DS
TALKS
Sylvia Pankhurst, Feminism And Social Justice
(Mansfield College, Oxford, Friday)
Hot on the heels of Suffragette, biographer Rachel Holmes will be speaking in Oxford about campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst and what her movement means today. Born in 1882 to suffragette leader Emmeline, the pioneering first-wave feminist fought for universal rights, believing in the then-radical idea that people should be treated as equals, regardless of gender. Holmes’s tome on Pankhurst will be out in 2018 for the centenary of at least some women being able to vote, but for now, this date is a must-do. It’s is presented as part of the Mansfield Lectures, which has hosted weekly talks from names like Michael Palin, Camila Batmanghelidjh and Sandi Toksvig. Holmes is an engaging, funny speaker, who previously profiled 19th-century champagne-lover, actor and progenitor of socialist feminism Eleanor Marx. Essential for anyone interested in human rights and action. CJ
The rest of this week’s best talks
CLUBS
Vitalic
(Hangar, Dublin, Saturday)
With the release of his Poney EP on DJ Hell’s International DeeJay Gigolo label in 2001, Pascal Arbez conquered clubs worldwide, and the name Vitalic soon became synonymous with peak-hours floor-devouring electro. The weight of the two leading tracks – the brooding Poney Part 1 and La Rock 01, with its frenetic splintering textures – was matched by its stacked B-sides: the title track’s throbbing sequel, and the sole-blistering You Prefer Cocaine, a mass of shrieking whorls and infectious vocals. While these tracks were rinsed by the likes of 2ManyDJs, Aphex Twin and Sven Väth, Arbez mysteriously disappeared, later re-emerging with a steady run of productions that veered towards the more punishing end of maximalist dance music. His last album, Rave Age, released in 2012, bulged with antagonistic trance stabs and overwrought arena drops that seemed somewhat remote from the refined chaos of tracks gone by, but still retained his signature driving crescendo. Expect more of the latter here, as he flies in from Dijon for a live show. SC
The rest of this week’s best club nights
EXHIBITIONS
Shadi Habib Allah
(Rodeo, London, Saturday to 23 January)
There is no predicting what form Shadi Habib Allah’s work will take from one show to another: the artist has exhibited video, photographs, sculptures and drawings. What unites his output is the artist’s interest in political narratives and power plays. This investigation has seen him riding with the Bedouin smugglers of the Sinai peninsula for a video shown at the New Museum, New York earlier this year, to the reproduction in steel of Jean-Paul Marat’s bathtub (the French revolutionary’s favourite place to write his radical texts, and eventually the site of his assassination). Habib Allah’s most complex video to date is 30kg Shine, which, accompanied by a new group of sculptures, meditates on the tangled subject of ownership through an old Jerusalem ghost story, a personal account of the city’s electricity blackouts in the time of conflict, and a study of the Israeli government’s plan to build a giant catacomb. OB
The rest of this week’s new exhibitions
THEATRE
Inkheart
(Home, Manchester, Friday to 9 January)
The idea that the characters of stories can come alive from the pages of a book is not a new one, but it is given a sinister twist in Cornelia Funke’s novel, which has been transposed to the stage by director Walter Meierjohann and playwright Stephen Sharkey. Meggie’s father Mo hasn’t read to her since her mother mysteriously disappeared many years ago, and with good reason: when Mo reads aloud, the characters burst out of the pages into real life – and there is a price to pay. A celebration of the pleasures of reading and the dangers of getting really lost in a book, Meierjohann’s production has already been a big hit in Germany and it should offer UK audiences a seasonal treat with a difference. LG
The rest of this week’s best theatre
ON DEMAND
A Very Murray Christmas
Netflix
Not content with taking over the rest of the year’s TV, Netflix has its eyes trained on the holidays. Its ambitions go higher than festive fistfights in Albert Square: instead, we get a variety show starring Bill Murray, directed by his Lost In Translation collaborator Sofia Coppola, with contributions from George Clooney, Amy Poehler and Chris Rock helping foster the holiday spirit. No previews are available, so it’s hard to know whether this is a playful reimagining of the Christmas special or a takedown; either way Murray’s presence makes it worth watching.
It goes live from Friday. GM
