What to see and do this weekend: From an ace new film to the 15th album from ... trends now
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.
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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
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
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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
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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
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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
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MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Pet Shop Boys
Nonetheless Out now
A record called Nonetheless! It could only be the 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 had even 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.
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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
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
