Film
Finch
There’s a strain of terrible melancholy hanging over every frame of this soulful sci-fi film that makes it more than the sum of its familiar parts. It’s a post-apocalyptic yarn about a dying man called Finch, his beloved dog Goodyear, his newly completed robot assistant Jeff, and their scattershot struggle for survival across an arid American landscape that has been catastrophically irradiated by a freak solar flare. What elevates this entry far above the generic is the unyielding presence of its secret weapon — a thrilling performance from Tom Hanks in the title role.
On Apple TV+
Kevin Maher
Television
Worzel Gummidge
Warming your cockles before tonight’s bonfire night celebrations is the first of three fresh Worzel Gummidge adaptations, once again enchantingly modernised by Mackenzie Crook. The opening story finds Crooks’s Worzel rowing with his cousin Guy Forks (Paul Kaye) about who would do a better job at the top of the bonfire. Perhaps most pleasingly it also features Toby Jones, Crooks’s co-star from the peerless Detectorists, stretching his acting muscles by playing all six members of the village’s bonfire committee: the Baker, Butcher, Mayor, Postmaster, Publican and Alderman.
BBC1, 5.45pm today
Ben Dowell
Theatre
Top Hat
Cole Porter’s Anything Goes isn’t the only vintage show receiving a handsome revival at the moment. Based on the 1935 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, this effervescent, tap-crazy musical comedy wraps a deliciously silly plot around gorgeous songs by Irving Berlin. Jonathan O’Boyle’s genial production makes maximum use of the Mill’s intimate dimensions. Jack Butterworth and Billie-Kay play the couple who get their romantic wires crossed, while Delme Thomas gets plenty of laughs as an overwrought fashion designer. It’s that time of year when Berlin’s evergreen, White Christmas, gets played to death. Here’s a chance to savour some of his jazzier melodies.
The Mill at Sonning, Reading, Berkshire (millatsonning.com), to Jan 8
Clive Davis
Classical
Patricia Kopatchinskaja
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra responds to Cop26 taking place on its doorstep with two concerts by the extraordinary Moldovan-Austrian violinist — often known as PatKop — who is leading what’s described as a “musicians’ reaction to a threatened world”. The programme will be shaped around Galina Ustwolskaja’s desperate, jagged Dies irae and includes music by Biber, Crumb and Dowland.
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (rsno.org.uk), Wed
Neil Fisher
Dance
Yorke Dance Project
Past Present is the title of this fascinating programme from Yorke Dance Project that pairs a pioneering solo by the great Martha Graham — Lamentation (1930) — with Robert Cohan’s Afternoon Conversations with Dancers, which he created during lockdown shortly before he died this year. Cohan was one of the stars of Graham’s company before he came to Britain in the 1960s. The evening also features a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s Hamlet-inspired Sea of Troubles (1988) and a new work by the company’s director, Yolande Yorke-Edgell, with music by Nathaniel Dett.
Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk), to Nov 14
Debra Craine
Advertisement
Exhibition
Hogarth and Europe
No painter captured the society of 18th-century Britain — including its dark underbelly — more sharply or perceptively than the satirist William Hogarth. Intellectual but down to earth, traditional but teasing, reserved but irreverent, he is hailed as the “father of English painting”. And yet he was far from the patriotic xenophobe of cliché as Tate Britain curators, hanging a host of his most famous pictures as well as rare loans (his splendid portrait of his patron Mary Edwards among them) beside those of European contemporaries, suggest.
Tate Britain, London SW1 (tate.org.uk), to Mar 20
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
