Autumn arts: our critics pick the best shows, film, music, books and TV
Art: Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery
Artemisia National Gallery, London, 3 Oct–24 Jan
It looked for a while as if the most anticipated show of the year – perhaps the past decade – might be cancelled by Covid-19, and Artemisia’s long road to recognition blocked yet again. But tickets are now on sale. Italian Baroque genius, precocious successor to Caravaggio, fearless traveller, defiant witness against her rapist in court – Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) is the all-round heroine of art. She painted women as strong as herself: Cleopatra grasping the asp, Lucretia choosing suicide over dishonour, Judith cutting off the head of the despotic Holofernes with a vigour scarcely seen in art.
All of Artemisia’s images are narratives condensed into spectacular single-scene dramas, and painted with the strongest originality. Indeed, she was the first woman to portray herself in the physical act of painting, sleeves rolled and sweat on her brow. This survey will include several self-portraits and many stunning images of women from history, religion and myth, most never shown in this country before. Along with actual court testimony and the artist’s passionate letters, it will be a phenomenal show from first to last.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s The Birth of St John the Baptist, c1635. Photograph: Artemisia Gentileschi/Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Five more highlights
Bruce Nauman Tate Modern, London, 7 Oct–21 Feb
40 artworks from 50 years of provocative, upsetting and darkly original American art, from the notorious Clown Torture video to the pioneering immersive installations.
Kristof Kintera: The End of Fun Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 17 Sep–22 Nov
Acute and highly topical kinetic sculptures and films by the acerbic Czech artist, striking hard at contemporary politics with sizzling wit.
Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul Royal Academy, London, 15 Nov–28 Feb
No artist has been more influenced by Munch than Tracey Emin, his rival in painterly miserabilism. Expect more Emin than Munch, plus additional self-pity.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Tate Britain, London, 18 Nov-9 May
Major survey of this British-Ghanaian artist, celebrated for her marvellous black paintings, with their mysterious content: not quite portraits, never quite narratives.
Ray Harryhausen, Titan of Cinema Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two, Edinburgh, 24 Oct-5 Sep
Powerful celebration of a cinema special effects genius, featuring figures from Jason and the Argonauts to Clash of the Titans: stop-motion objects as sculptural art. Laura Cumming
Film: lovestruck boys in DayGlo colours
Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin in François Ozon’s Summer of ’85. Photograph: SCOPE PICTURES / Curzon
Summer of ’85 Directed by François Ozon; in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema, 2 Oct
Adolescent amour fou, accessorised with flicked hair and billowing shirts, and playing out to the Cure and Bananarama: the latest from the prolific French director François Ozon captures first love in all its naivety and DayGlo intensity. Adapted from Dance on My Grave, the 1982 young adult novel by British author Aidan Chambers, this heady, ill-starred romance was on (cancelled) Cannes’s official selection list, and is among the selected films at the San Sebastian film festival later this month.
Transposing the action from Chambers’s Southend to a seaside town in Normandy, Ozon sheds his urbane skin and relinquishes the storytelling to lovestruck 16-year-old Alexis (Félix Lefebvre). Alexis is all at sea without many friends when he meets 18-year-old David (Benjamin Voisin) when the older boy rescues him from a capsized dinghy.
It’s Alexis’s voice that guides us through this doomed love affair; his perspective that gives the story its super-saturated sense of teen melodrama. The result is a film that feels as fresh as the 80s citrus colour palette, and as heartfelt as sixth-form poetry.
Five more to look out for
The Devil All the Time Antonio Campos; on Netflix from 16 Sep
A deliciously sleazy Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland sweat it out in this slice of sordid southern gothic perversity.
Wonder Woman 1984 Patty Jenkins; in cinemas 2 Oct
A lurid 80s backdrop, a boomerang tiara and Kristen Wiig as a villain: the Wonder Woman sequel earns must-see status.
Ammonite Francis Lee; London film festival 17 Oct, general release Jan 2021
Lee’s follow-up to God’s Own Country stars Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan and is the LFF’s closing night gala, which audiences across the UK can watch in cinemas.
On the Rocks Sofia Coppola; in cinemas 2 Oct and streaming on AppleTV+ from 23 Oct
Coppola reunites with Bill Murray, who plays the playboy father of Rashida Jones’s put-upon young wife and mother.
No Time To Die Cary Joji Fukunaga; in cinemas 12 Nov
In which James Bond has retired and taken up golf. Just kidding. He’s on the trail of a missing scientist and an uber-weapon. Wendy Ide
Pop: a lush new album from pop mystic Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens performing in 2017. Photograph: Jason Kempin/Getty Images
Sufjan Stevens: The Ascension Asthmatic Kitty, 25 Sep
Gigs continue to be hard to stage this autumn, with safety at a hard angle to profitability. One recompense is the deluge of albums delayed by coronavirus. Even in this current bonanza, a Sufjan Stevens outing is an occasion. Sufjan albums tend to come in two forms – whispered and intense, or rococo and intense. The Ascension – Stevens’s eighth overall – lands with a digital crescendo in the latter camp. He has called it “a lush, editorial pop album”.
Recalling, in its scope, the electronic maximalism of Age of Adz (2010), and coming five years since the highly personal Carrie & Lowell, The Ascension finds Stevens wrestling with our slowly unfolding apocalypse. Clocking in at 80 minutes, it represents “a call for personal transformation and a refusal to play along with the systems around us”.
Tracks released so far combine this mystical artist’s wide-ranging spirituality with unapologetically pop treatments. On the elliptical, 12-minute-long album closer,America, Stevens conflates the personal and the political, combining a loss of faith with swelling digitals.
Five more to hear
Richard and Linda Thompson: Hard Luck Stories 1972–1982 UMC/Universal, 11 Sep
It costs £70, but the Sufi drones of their 1977 Theatre Royal gig, plus vast swathes of unheard peak-period detail, make this the folk rock duo’s motherlode.
Idles: Ultra Mono LP Partisan, 25 Sep
More pitiless and laser-guided than ever before, Idles’ third outing elevates the Bristol punk band from cult status into cultural necessity.
Public Enemy: What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down? Def Jam, 25 Sep
This timely Public Enemy reunion finds Chuck D and Flavor Flav back on their old label, fighting the power with renewed vigour.
Future Utopia: 12 Questions Platoon/70Hz, 23 Oct
Ambition abounds on producer Fraser T Smith’s all-star concept album, with guests ranging from poet laureate Simon Armitage to Stormzy.
Kylie: Disco BMG, 6 Nov
The jury’s out on whether our current era is best met with music of grit or neon escapism. Kylie’s plumped for a much-needed retro glitterball party. Kitty Empire
Television: Steve McQueen’s TV drama debut
Steve McQueen’s Small Axe. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/McQueen Limited
Small Axe BBC One, Nov
“If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” Oscar-winning film-maker Steve McQueen’s first TV drama Small Axe, named after the Jamaican proverb and Bob Marley song, was a tantalising enough prospect before this racially charged year. Now it’s more urgent and timely than ever. It has duly been confirmed to open both the London and New York film festivals over the next couple of months.
The five-part anthology series chronicles the experience of London’s Caribbean community across three decades, beginning with Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968. Each episode foregrounds a different real-life character, including Letitia Wright as British Black Panthers leader Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Malachi Kirby as civil liberties campaigner Darcus Howe and Star Wars’ John Boyega as Metropolitan Police anti-racism pioneer Leroy Logan.
Boyega’s, especially, is an exciting role in an autumn full of great casting. See also Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher as The Crown returns for season four (Netflix, 15 Nov) and Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott joining His Dark Materials for its second series (BBC One, Nov).
Five more to watch
The Third Day Sky Atlantic, 15 Sep
Writer Dennis Kelly’s ambitious psycho-drama about a mysterious island off the British coast stars Jude Law and Naomie Harris. Intriguingly, one episode of six will be a live-streamed immersive 12-hour piece with Punchdrunk.
Des ITV, Sep
David Tennant gives a seriously creepy performance as serial killer Dennis Nilsen in this true crime three-parter, strongly supported by Daniel Mays and Jason Watkins.
The Comey Rule Sky Atlantic, 30 Sep
Must-see miniseries starring Jeff Daniels as former FBI director James Comey and, brace yourselves, Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump.
Us BBC One, Oct
David Nicholls’s adaptation of his own novel sees Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves as the soon-to-separate couple taking their sulky son on one last family holiday.
Industry BBC2, Nov
Lena Dunham calls her new series “Wolf of Wall Street meets Melrose Place”. A BBC/HBO co-production, with Dunham exec-producing and directing episode one, it’s a sexy, druggy, high-class soap about graduates competing for jobs at a London investment bank. Michael Hogan
Fiction: Martin Amis reveals himself
Martin Amis’s autobiographical novel is one of his finest. Photograph: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Inside Story by Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 24 Sep
Martin Amis’s 15th novel (subtitled How to Write) begins with a nod to Vladimir Nabokov, the author who, along with Saul Bellow, has done the most to shape Amis’s distinctive style. Nabokov, Amis writes, was “a very rare case: a writer to whom things actually happened”. As such, “he had every right and warrant to attempt an autobiographical novel”. Which is, of course, just what Amis is giving us now, a novel that appears to veer only marginally from the truth, a memoir dressed up as fiction.
Inside Story, in prose that is disarmingly avuncular, self-revealing, digressive, takes us through the signature events of Amis’s life from cradle to late middle age. It feels as if Amis has found his mature voice, one that is warm, generous and deeply moving, whether on the subject of fatherhood, love or friendship (particularly with Christopher Hitchens). This is not only the best book Amis has written in years; it is up there with Money and London Fields as the finest work he’s produced.
Five more to read
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury, 15 Sep
A strange and magical novel about an alternate world accessed by a group of academics, from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Jack by Marilynne Robinson Virago, 29 Sep
The fourth in Robinson’s luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet, a sad story about love, race and midwestern mores.
There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura Bloomsbury, 26 Nov
Tsumura is feted in her homeland of Japan. This surreal and unsettling tale of office life is her first novel to be translated into English (by Polly Barton).
Mr Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe Viking, 5 Nov
Coe’s follow-up to Middle England is a smart and evocative novel about memory and film.
The Silence by Don DeLillo Scribner, 20 Oct
DeLillo has written another eerily prescient masterpiece. This short novel, set in 2022, imagines a world where all the links between us are suddenly broken. Alex Preston
Nonfiction: Boris Johnson gets the Tom Bower treatment
Boris Johnson in the Downing Street rose garden in July. Photograph: Hannah McKay/AP

Boris Johnson, The Gambler by Tom Bower (WH Allen, 15 Oct)
It’s interesting to ponder the recent ennoblement by the prime minister of Tom Bower’s wife, the former newspaper editor Veronica Wadley, in the context of his forthcoming biography of Johnson. Bower, who has also written about Tony Blair, Richard Branson, Jeremy Corbyn and many others, is known for his indefatigable digging; if true to form, this volume will include major scoops. If not, well…
Whatever he turns up, Bower’s book joins a raft of political titles this autumn, including Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? by the leading pollster Deborah Mattinson, which promises both new research and interviews with constituents; and This Land: The Story of a Movement by Owen Jones, an “insider’s honest and unflinching appraisal” of where the left went wrong in 2019. Only by facing up to its failures, Jones insists, will the Labour movement be able to begin building a better future for Britain.
Five more to read
The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale Bloomsbury Circus, 1 Oct
London, 1938, and a young woman begins to experience supernatural events. Is she really haunted, or is something else going on? The author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher investigates.
Tom Stoppard, A Life by Hermione Lee Faber, 1 Oct
The biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf turns her attention, for the first time, to a living subject: the man who is, perhaps, our greatest living playwright.
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books 4th Estate, Oct
Prize for worst pun of the year certainly goes to this collection, which includes that essay – yes, the one in which she calls the now Duchess of Cambridge a “shop-window mannequin” whose only purpose is to breed. Crisp and delicious.
War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan Random House, 6 Oct
In which the distinguished historian asks whether we will ever be free of conflict, or if war is simply an inevitable, even an essential, part of being human.
To the End of the World: Travels With Oscar Wilde by Rupert Everett Little Brown, 8 Oct
In his third memoir, the actor tells the story of how he set out to make a film about Wilde’s last days – a 10-year quest that almost destroyed him. Rachel Cooke
Theatre: Giles Terera reveals the black British psyche
Giles Terera will play the title role in Death of England: Delroy. Photograph: Helen Murray
Death of England: Delroy Olivier, London SE1, late Oct
One of the most ferocious dramas of this stricken year roared across the stage in February. Death of England, which closed a few weeks before lockdown, was a monologue written for a furious white British male by two black British men, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams. Designers Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ strikingly reconfigured the Dorfman as a St George’s Cross, torn bleeding from the Union Jack. Rafe Spall gave a tremendous performance, propelled by rage, taunting the audience with possibilities of racism.
The same writers and designers have now returned to the National with a companion piece; they are the first artists to work in the building since it closed five months ago. Giles Terera, who was impressively chilly last year in Rosmersholm, stars as Delroy, the black best friend of the character played by Spall. As before, Dyer directs. The playwrights aim “to take audiences on an illuminating journey into the black British psyche and realities of a ‘tolerant’ England in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Five more to see
Bridge monologues season Bridge theatre, London, 7 Sep–31 Oct
Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads performed for a socially distanced live audience alongside work by Inua Ellams, Yolanda Mercy and Zodwa Nyoni.
846 Live Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, 12 Sep
Performed outside, these short pieces by black and Asian writers examine racial inequality after the death of George Floyd.
Shades of Tay Pitlochry Festival theatre, until Nov
Throughout the month, the Pitlochry Festival theatre launches new online dramas by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Jo Clifford, Peter Arnott and Abi Zakarian.
Bubble, Nottingham Playhouse, 23-24 October
Live premiere of a new James Graham play, giving two versions of a couple’s future during lockdown.
Betrayal Theatre Royal Bath, 15-31 Oct
A classics season begins with Pinter, followed in November by Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and David Mamet’s Oleanna. Susannah Clapp
Classical: from Brahms to Weinberg in 100 concerts
The Arditti Quartet will play as part of the Wigmore Hall 100. Photograph: Artur Nizicki
Wigmore Hall 100 London, 13 Sep-22 Dec
Wigmore Hall, often thought of as a bastion of tradition, leads the way with a busy, diverse and imaginative autumn programme of 100 concerts – with audiences (initially 56 people, or 10% capacity, with a view to increasing to a maximum of 112 people/20% capacity) or, if Covid-19 regulations change, without. Every concert will be live-streamed in HD and available worldwide, free, for a month, with donations encouraged. This is the best news for musicians.
The 200 artists, two-thirds UK born or based, include Roderick Williams (baritone), Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano), Tai Murray (violin), Matthew Wadsworth (lute) and ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet and Apartment House. Among composers in focus are three neglected trailblazers: American pioneer minimalist Julius Eastman, Croydon-born Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the Polish-Russian Mieczysław Weinberg. Also look out for talks on Poulenc, Brahms, anti-apartheid and antisemitism. Radio 3 will broadcast 28 lunchtime concerts live.
Five more to see
Scottish Opera: La Bohème Edington Street Production Studios, Glasgow, 5-13 Sep
Jonathan Dove’s abridged version of Puccini’s tragedy, with a top cast, performed outdoors under a canopy.
Opera North: Song of Our Heartland Oct
A new community opera by Will Todd, delayed by Covid but now being rehearsed (via Zoom) as a film for release in October.
Chineke! Royal Festival Hall, London, 19 Oct
A premiere by James B Wilson, a collaboration with the poet Yomi Sode, in a work inspired by the UK’s Black Lives Matter protests; and Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, a reflection on police brutality in the US.
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 1 Oct–14 Nov
14 one-hour, socially distanced concerts, including three premieres, with chief conductor Vasily Petrenko and chief conductor designate Domingo Hindoyan.
12 Years 8-25 Oct
Pianist and composer Sarah Nicolls performs her distinctive inside-out piano in a radical one-hour, 12-movement work, inspired by the 2018 IPCC special report which said we had just 12 years to save the planet. Fiona Maddocks
Architecture: the cool joys of the Memphis design group
A playful sofa from the exhibition Memphis: Plastic Field at Milton Keynes Art Gallery. Photograph: Pariano Angelantonio. Courtesy Memphis Srl
Memphis: Plastic Field Milton Keynes Art Gallery, 21 Nov–24 Apr
The 1980s gave us the Milan-based design group Memphis, which lit up the decade with its playful furniture and joyous demolition of notions of modernist propriety. “Imagine a new world”, it proclaimed, and it did. The 1980s also gave us the cool glass architecture of Central Milton Keynes, in the middle of which the rebuilt Milton Keynes Art Gallery is located. Now the latter will host the former in a show of pieces by designers including Shiro Kuramata, Michele De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Martine Bedin, Michael Graves and the group’s founder Ettore Sottsass.
Expect colour, pattern, forms that don’t follow function, plenty of plastic laminate and Terrazzo, and storage units that look like robots or tribal fetishes. Also expect, as this was a feature of Memphis, the objects to be skilfully made. Don’t expect quiet good taste. If you have ever wondered where the look of the 80s came from, with triangles and circles and primary colours doing angular dance moves across album covers and bar interiors, this is the place to start.
Five more to look out for
Le Monde Group Headquarters, Paris by Snøhetta Architects
A gleaming, curving new complex that promises to offer “intimate relationships” between the public and the French media giant.
Carlisle Cathedral Fratry by Feilden Fowles
An education and heritage centre realised with a touch of contemporary Gothic by a rising young practice.
Our Days are Like Full Years Harriet Pattison, Yale, 27 Oct
In this memoir, Pattison, the lover of the great American architect Louis Kahn, tells her side of the story previously told in the film My Architect by their son Nathaniel.
Maggie’s Centre, Southampton by Amanda Levete Architects
An “ethereal” structure which aims to soothe people affected by cancer with a “haven of garden transported from the New Forest”.
22 Bishopsgate London, by PLP Architecture
The biggest, fattest, tallest office block in the City of London will seek to lure home-workers back into town with a “vertical village” of wellness, culture and work. Rowan Moore
Audio: a documentary series on 90s rave culture
A raver at a Pleasuredome event in 1997. Photograph: PYMCA/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave BBC 5 live and BBC Sounds podcast, 11 Sep
BBC 5 live’s Chris Warburton takes an investigative approach to acid house: tracing ecstasy’s first arrival in the UK, its immediate impact on the club scene and tracking how the involvement of organised crime, plus public disapproval and heavy policing, led to raving being changed for ever. Though Shaun Ryder and Graeme Park make appearances, many of the interviewees are far from the usual suspects. There are interviews with people who produced and sold millions of pills, people involved in the scene who were put under surveillance by the police, as well as with those whose friends died… this six-part documentary promises to be less Hacienda, more Blackburn warehouse rave.
Alongside each factual episode, there’s a drama that focuses on an individual story, with meticulously researched monologues written by Bafta-winner Danny Brocklehurst. Meera Syal plays a raver, Ian Hart a dealer, Monica Dolan a DJ, Ade Edmondson a promoter and David Morrissey an undercover cop. And there’s a round-up episode, with Warburton, Brocklehurst and a key contributor, reformed criminal John. Plus, of course, looooooads of music. I’d say call the cops, but it sounds like the researcher already did.
Five more to listen to
The Secret Life of Prisons All podcast platforms, Sep
The podcast that tells stories from behind bars kicks off a new season with a two-part deep dive into the 1990 Strangeways riots.
The Fault Line: Blair, Bush and Iraq All platforms, 29 Sep
David Dimbleby investigates the crucial 18 months between the September 11 attacks and March 2003, when George W Bush and Tony Blair led an international coalition into the Iraq war.
Goodbye To All This BBC World Service/BBC Sounds, Oct
Australian audio-maker Sophie Townsend presents a beautifully produced 12-part memoir, telling of how she lost her husband and continued without him, raising their two daughters.
Southbank Centre and Radio 3 BBC Radio 3/BBC Sounds, 19-30 Oct
Radio 3 takes up residency as part of Southbank Centre’s three-month Inside Out festival, broadcasting at least 10 live concerts every night for 12 nights from the Royal Festival Hall.
Zakia Swell’s Albion BBC Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 17 Nov
Swell, of English and Caribbean heritage, has a “complicated” relationship to Britishness. In her four-part series exploring identity and nationality, she wonders if a new vision of Albion might help us all. Miranda Sawyer
Dance: a new blue ballet from Acosta and Tuckett
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Lazuli Sky.
Lazuli Sky Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham Repertory theatre, 22–24 Oct, and Sadler’s Wells, London, 29–31 Oct
Birmingham Royal Ballet returns to the stage with Lazuli Sky, a new ballet by Will Tuckett. The company, now under the directorship of Carlos Acosta, has a new director in Sean Foley, and the two are offering an ambitious programme of dance, which will include Our Waltzes, a piece for 10 dancers, by the Venezuelan choreographer Vicente Nebrada, and Liebestod, a now rarely seen solo by the former Soviet dissident Valery Panov.
But the highlight will be the new creation, which takes its title from the blue used by Renaissance painters and its inspiration from the emphasis on nature in the early days of lockdown. Using its own costumes to socially distance the dancers, it will be performed to John Adams’s wonderful Shaker Loops, played live by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia. Socially distanced audiences of 150 can see the performance live, and from November it will be available online on pay-per-view.

Five more to see
The Royal Ballet: In Concert Royal Opera House, London, 9 Oct
The flagship company returns with a celebration that reunites its dancers in a mixed programme broadcast live (for a fee) and later shown on the BBC.

ENB At Home: Emerging Dancer London City Island, 22 Sep
The company launches a new video-on-demand platform with this popular talent competition, this year filmed in ENB’s studios and live streamed for £5. Other new works and performances will follow in November.

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer Barbican Art Gallery, London, 7 Oct–3 January 2021
An exhibition to mark 15 years of the Michael Clark Company explores the radical impact of this groundbreaking and unique choreographer and dancer.

Rosie Kay: Absolute Solo II Birmingham Repertory theatre, 21 Nov; Dance City, Newcastle, 28 Nov, and online
The choreographer of 5 Soldiers returns as a dancer after five years of retirement in a triple bill which includes a film, an older piece and a new solo.

New Adventures in Film Online, autumn
Three female choreographers – Tasha Chu, Monique Jonas and Anjali Mehra – are making new dance films for Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Film project, which aims to provide career opportunities for women from a variety of backgrounds. Sarah Crompton