From Bong Joon-ho to Van Gogh: Observer critics’ culture highlights for 2024
FilmMake time for three masterly movies
There comes a point when the buzz about a movie release starts to be deafening. Then the pre-emptive backlash kicks in. Can it really be the masterpiece that people are claiming it is, or have the critics and festival punters fallen prey to collective hysteria? It’s a fair question, but for three forthcoming releases the hype is very much justified.
First up is Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous and rude feminist reworking of Alasdair Gray’s Frankenstein pastiche, Poor Things (12 January). Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a young woman who, after a vividly imagined journey of self-discovery, becomes her own glorious creation. It might be possible to have more fun in the cinema but I can’t imagine how.
Next it’s Andrew Haigh’s exquisite, heartbreaking All of Us Strangers (26 January), which takes as its source a novel by Taichi Yamada and, with the sterling work of Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy and, in particular, a superb Andrew Scott, proceeds to wring out the audience like tear sponges.
Finally, having laughed and cried, it’s time to be deeply and permanently traumatised. Jonathan Glazer’s latest, The Zone of Interest (2 February), is a remarkable achievement. Formally bold and utterly chilling, the story is set in the family home of the camp commandant of Auschwitz. This domestic idyll is separated by a wall from the unimaginable horrors of the death camp. We never see behind the wall, but the extraordinary, enveloping sound design gives the picture a suffocating intensity. Wendy Ide
Music
Catch some powerhouse pop tours
‘Raw, snarly pop’: Olivia Rodrigo. Photograph: Shaniqwa Jarvis/The Guardian
The highest-grossing tour in the history of tours finally hits the UK in June when the feminist warrior queen of rights management (oh, and pop star) Taylor Swift brings over her Eras extravaganza – weirdly, after we’ve all seen the movie version. That’s also the top-grossing concert film ever. No spoilers!
She will be preceded in May by vampire slayer Olivia Rodrigo, shaping up to be the gen Z successor to Swift’s tell-all tune-maker crown. Rodrigo’s second album of raw, snarly pop – the excellently named Guts – has ranked high in a number of end-of-year lists, underlining the former Disney star’s staying power.
Around the same time, and about a decade after their acrimonious split, our own Girls Aloud have announced a reunion jaunt in memory of singer Sarah Harding, who died from breast cancer in 2021. And although no dates have been announced, it’s an open secret that Dua Lipa is preparing an album, due out this year, her first since 2020’s Future Nostalgia. A tour is rumoured to follow, possibly in the summer. Kitty Empire
Art
Soak up the wonder of Van Gogh at the National Gallery
The Bedroom, 1889 by Vincent van Gogh. Photograph: © The Art Institute of Chicago
The National Gallery in London is celebrating its bicentennial year in numerous ways, including sending some of its masterpieces around the UK on tour, but nothing compares to its massive, once-in-a-lifetime spectacular opening on 14 September. Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (until 19 January 2025) follows the painter’s life in Provence. It will begin in Arles, with Van Gogh newly stunned by the southern sun, and continue to the year spent in the asylum at Saint-Rémy. The title refers to the poet’s garden, as Van Gogh described the local park in Arles, and to the lovers who appear in his art, if not his own life. His way of making art, his inspirations, his euphoric response to everything from the leaves on the ground to the clouds in the sky, will be explored in masterpieces of painting and drawing, as well as Van Gogh’s incomparable letters. Major loans will include his Starry Night, The Yellow House at Arles and more than one vase of sunflowers. Book fast! Laura Cumming
Theatre
See film and TV stars on the London stage
Sarah Jessica Parker will make her West End debut opposite husband Matthew Broderick in Plaza Suite. Photograph: Joan Marcus
There are particularly promising roles for screen stars this year. Themed casting for Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker (making her West End debut) in Neil Simon’s 1968 romantic comedy Plaza Suite (Savoy, 17 January to 31 March): the real-life Hollywood marrieds will playing three different couples in John Benjamin Hickey’s Broadway production. And dream casting for Michael Sheen when he plays Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, who led the creation of the NHS. Written by Tim Price, author of Teh Internet Is Serious Business, and billed as “surreal and spectacular”, Nye (Olivier, 24 February to 11 May) imagines Bevan looking back on his childhood, his days as a miner and his fights with Churchill. The “epic Welsh fantasia” is directed by Rufus Norris in his final year as the National’s artistic director.
Bold casting for Sarah Snook. The actor, last seen on the London stage in The Master Builder in 2016, succeeds Succession by taking on all 26 roles in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s pact-with-the-devil novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (Haymarket, 6 February to 11 May). Williams, artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, promises a contemporary version and a staging that aims to deliver “an explosive interplay of live performance and video”.
Matt Smith will star in an English-language version of Thomas Ostermeier’s reimagining of An Enemy of the People (Duke of York’s, 6 February to 6 April), Ibsen’s powerful, complicated play about whistleblowing and the dangerous power of crowd opinion. After his 2023 appearance as Bach in Bath, Brian Cox takes on one of the best and biggest of theatrical parts, and one with Succession echoes. He is the patriarch of another troubled family in Eugene O’Neill’s mighty Long Day’s Journey into Night (Wyndham’s, 19 March to 8 June). Jeremy Herrin, of Best of Enemies, directs. Susannah Clapp
Classical
Enjoy big names and big works at a reborn Bristol venue
The Kronos Quartet will play at the Bristol Beacon this month. Photograph: Lenny Gonzalez
After a five-year transformation, Bristol Beacon, the former Colston Hall, continues its opening season with a sparse but high-quality programme of orchestral concerts (on average three a month), including the excellent Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Spring season visitors include the London Symphony Orchestra with Simon Rattle (works by Gershwin, John Adams, with pianist Kirill Gerstein, 4 March), and Antonio Pappano (works by Ravel and Wynton Marsalis, with trumpeter Alison Balsom, 12 April) and, later in the season, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hallé and more. One unmissable highlight: the Kronos Quartet, on the American group’s 50th anniversary tour, playing Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, with UK premieres by Angélique Kidjo and Sun Ra/Terry Riley (18 January). Also worth catching: the Royal Northern Sinfonia with their rising star principal conductor, Dinis Sousa, in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto (soloist Julian Bliss), Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Beethoven’s Symphony No 3, “Eroica” (22 February). Fiona Maddocks
Dance
Celebrate the classics and revivals of recent triumphs
Lauren Cuthbertson as Hermione in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale. Photograph: Johan Persson/Royal Opera House/ArenaPAL
The Royal Ballet spends 2024 honouring its own. Its celebration of the work of Kenneth MacMillan begins with an epic run of his dramatic 1974 narrative ballet Manon (Royal Opera House, London, 17 January to 8 March). A range of dancers will have the chance to get inside the tragic story of a courtesan torn between her love for a poor student and a rich patron. Later, there’s a triple bill (20 March to 13 April) of the airily abstract Danses Concertantes, the gruelling Different Drummer, based on Büchner’s Woyzeck, and the moving Requiem, to Fauré.
The Royal’s founder choreographer, Frederick Ashton, has his own moment in the sun with two programmes (6 to 19 June and 7 to 22 June), both including The Dream and Rhapsody. There’s also a major 10th anniversary revival of artistic associate Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale (3 May to 1 June) and a premiere in the autumn of resident choreographer Wayne McGregor’s MaddAddam, a three-act ballet based on the Margaret Atwood trilogy.
Meanwhile at English National Ballet, incoming director Aaron Watkin begins to put his own mark on the company by staging the UK premiere of Swedish choreographer Johan Inger’s Carmen (Sadler’s Wells, London, 26 March to 6 April). Northern Ballet is staging a welcome revival of its own version of Romeo and Juliet (Leeds Grand theatre, 8-16 March, then touring). Directed by the late and great Christopher Gable and choreographed by Massimo Moricone, it was once the most popular production in its repertory.
Major new work is thin on the ground, but the terrific Boy Blue launch Cycles, which celebrates the tenacity of the natural world (Barbican, London, 30 April to 4 May). The most intriguing premiere comes, almost inevitably, from thoughtful Canadian creator Crystal Pite, who at Sadler’s Wells unveils Assembly Hall (20 to 23 March), co-created with Jonathon Young. He provides a script to which, as in their previous collaborations Betroffenheit and Revisor, the dancers mime. Danced by her own Kidd Pivot company, this new work is set among the members of a medieval re-enactment society and mingles myth and magic, humour and despair, pure dance and narrative. Other notable premieres include Aakash Odedra Company’s Mehek, a collaboration between Odedra and Aditi Mangaldas, both fine exponents of contemporary kathak, which opens at Leicester’s Peepul Centre (4-7 April) and then tours. Sarah Crompton
Film
Thrill at the sci-fi return of Bong Joon-ho
Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17.
Plot specifics are currently under wraps for director Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, the hotly anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite. But the few details that can be gleaned are tantalising. The English-language film (released on 29 March), which is based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 science fiction novel Mickey7, stars Robert Pattinson in the lead role. He plays an “expendable” – a disposable employee (he’s working on a risky mission to colonise a planet) who can be regenerated each time he dies. WI
TV
Get glued to period adventures, epic fantasies and returning favourites
Louisa Harland in Renegade Nell. Photograph: Robert Viglasky/Disney
It’s shaping up to be another outstanding year of television. Fresh from bringing Happy Valley to its stunning conclusion, writer Sally Wainwright’s next creation is the eight-part Renegade Nell (Disney+, spring). Expect a star-making turn from Louisa Harland (Orla from Derry Girls) as 18th-century fugitive Nell Jackson. Framed for murder and on the run with her sisters, she turns to highway robbery to survive.
Another promising period piece is Masters of the Air (Apple TV+, 26 January) from executive producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and the people who brought us Band of Brothers. This nine-part airborne epic follows the US Army Air Force’s 100th bomb group, “the bloody 100th”, during the second world war. Barry Keoghan, Ncuti Gatwa, Callum Turner, Austin Butler and Raff “son of Jude” Law are among an ensemble cast teeming with talent.
Also inspired by a true story is courtly psychodrama series Mary & George (Sky Atlantic/Now, March). Julianne Moore stars as icily ambitious Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, who moulded her handsome son George to seduce King James I and become his influential lover. More recent history is brought to musical life in This Town (BBC One, March), a passion project of Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, set in the 1980s Midlands ska scene.
We’ll get a double dose of playwright James Graham, who not only returns to Sherwood (BBC One, date to be confirmed) but has also co-created politically charged drama The Way (BBC One, February) with actor Michael Sheen and film-maker Adam Curtis.
It will be fire-breathing Westeros warfare in Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic/Now, summer), which seriously ramps up the scale for season two. Talking of GoT, its former showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss are now masterminding 3 Body Problem (Netflix, 21 March), an ambitious adaptation of Liu Cixin’s bestselling sci-fi novel.
Later in the year, expect returns for The Bear, Stranger Things, Squid Game, The Last of Us, Bridgerton, The White Lotus and Wednesday. Last but not least, there’s the tantalising prospect of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbusting Rivals (Disney+, spring), with Aidan Turner, David Tennant and Danny Dyer bed-hopping their way around Rutshire. Saddle up. Michael Hogan
Music
Check out the Brixton art-rockers tipped for the top
The Last Dinner Party. Photograph: Cal McIntyre
London art-rock quintet the Last Dinner Party spent 2023 becoming the most talked-about band in Britain. Despite releasing only a handful of singles, the group won the Brit rising star award, supported Florence + the Machine, played a packed debut show at Glastonbury filled with onstage theatrics, and were last week named the BBC’s Sound of 2024. Their rapid ascent has prompted the usual online backlash of being labelled “industry plants” – similar charges faced by 2022 newcomers Wet Leg – but their highly anticipated debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, looks set to prove the naysayers wrong, combining Abigail Morris’s vibrato-laden vocals with earworming melodies and arena-sized choruses. Ammar Kalia
Classical
Indulge in the high drama of some big opera productions
Nina Stemme will play Elektra at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: © Laura Stevens
Obsession and a lust for revenge: one way to kick off the new year. Elektra (12 to 30 January), Richard Strauss’s bracing adaptation of Greek tragedy to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is the high-profile, high-passion event to launch the spring season at the Royal Opera House in a new production by Christof Loy conducted by Antonio Pappano, with two big names, Nina Stemme and Karita Mattila, heading the cast.
Set in feverish, end-of-summer Venice, Benjamin Britten’s last opera, Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novella, is staged by Welsh National Opera (Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 7 to 9 March; touring until 11 May), directed by Olivia Fuchs and conducted by Leo Hussain. An atmosphere of decay and infatuation is offset by Britten’s ravishing, gamelan-inspired music.
Billed as London’s biggest opera production of the century, “staged like never before”, Verdi’s much-loved tragedy Aida, about an Ethiopian princess in love with an enemy Egyptian, runs for three performances at Ovo Arena Wembley (23 to 24 March). Expect digital projections, “huge-scale” puppetry, a cast of more than 250, 578 costumes, the 60-piece Hanseatic Symphony Orchestra, the “real” scent of lotus blossoms and pine trees and 692 square metres of fabric to create a Nile that flows into the audience. Prepare yourself. FM
Games
Get your thumbs ready for blockbuster action
The open-world game Star Wars Outlaws. Photograph: Ubisoft
In 2023, seeds sown during the pandemic months blossomed into some of the best video games of the decade. This year’s slate looks empty by comparison, an issue compounded by recent industry-wide layoffs. Still, a few towers of promise loom before Grand Theft Auto VI’s arrival in 2025, a game that will surely become the highest-grossing work of human entertainment yet made.
Where Winds Meet is a big-budget Chinese attempt to transpose GTA’s freedoms to 10th-century China in a game that draws influence from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Star Wars Outlaws takes a more sci-fi approach. It’s not the first open-world game set in George Lucas’s universe, but it is the first developed by Massive Entertainment, the respectable studio behind Tom Clancy’s The Division series. Simon Parkin
Theatre
Be excited that Jez Butterworth is back
Jez Butterworth returns with The Hills of California. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
It’s a guaranteed gold rush for The Hills of California, a new play by Jez (Jerusalem) Butterworth, especially as it’s directed by Sam Mendes: the two worked together on The Ferryman, the fastest-selling production in the Royal Court’s 60-year history. Tracing the life of a family through several generations, Butterworth’s new drama (Harold Pinter, London, 27 January to 15 June) takes off from the heat of Blackpool in 1976, where in the driest summer for 200 years, two sisters return to their dying mother’s down-at-heel guesthouse in the back streets: “It’s called Sea View… You can’t see the sea.” The cast is led by Leanne Best, Laura Donnelly, Ophelia Lovibond and Helena Wilson. The designer is Rob Howell and the sound designer and arranger is Nick Powell – both of whom worked on The Ferryman. SCl
Art
Take in the Tate Modern’s blockbuster shows
Yoko Ono in her Half-a-Room, 1967. Photograph: © Yoko Ono
London’s Tate Modern is breaking right out this year with an unexpected run of true originals – all rarely seen, and profoundly influential. Yoko Ono is first (15 Febuary to 1 September), with a retrospective stretching back to her time as a pioneering conceptual artist in 1960s London. Almost seven decades of art and activism will include her famous Cut Piece, in which visitors were invited to cut off fragments of her clothing, with shocking consequences, and her banned Film No 4, where bare bottoms were strung together like signatures in a petition for world peace. Music, drawings, films and photographs will culminate in the interactive Wish Tree. About 40 years overdue, but better late than never.
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider (25 April to 20 October) pays tribute to this pioneering painter couple. The German Gabriele Münter – mirthful, spontaneous, lush and dynamic in her expressive stroke and colour – falls in love with the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Their relationship does not last, but together they form the Blue Rider group, committed to the expression of soul and spirit in art. With 130 works, as well as sound and performance, this will be the biggest anthology of this era in more than 80 years.
And for art as spectacular experience, look no further than the solid-light art of the English-born, US-based Anthony McCall (27 June to 27 April 2025). Spots and beams projected across pitch-black galleries, these points of light grow into engulfing mist, or vast hollow cones, through which your fellow visitors will seem to disappear. Cinema reduced to its basic elements – light passing through time – McCall’s work is enthralling and endlessly mysterious. LC
Film
Race to the cinema for the return of British auteurs
Barry Keoghan filming for Andrea Arnold’s forthcoming film Bird. Photograph: Fraser Gray/Shutterstock
Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay and Steve McQueen occupy the top rank of British auteurs: film-makers from whom a new feature qualifies as an event, in part because they don’t come along all that often. It’s been seven years since Scottish iconoclast Ramsay teamed up with Joaquin Phoenix for the immaculately hardboiled neo-noir You Were Never Really Here, and they’ve reunited for Polaris, the director’s first original screenplay since her 1999 debut, Ratcatcher. It’s set in 19th-century Alaska, and the synopsis merely states that “an ice photographer meets the devil”.
That’s more information than we have about Bird, Arnold’s first fiction film since 2016’s dazzling American Honey (she has since made the documentary Cow), but the casting of Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski in the leads is already a draw.
McQueen – still the only person to boast a Turner prize and an Oscar – has also been busy with nonfiction, Occupied City (9 February) as well as the TV anthology Small Axe, but he’s returning to narrative cinema with the grand-scale, Apple-backed second world war drama Blitz. Its ensemble cast includes Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson and Stephen Graham. Guy Lodge
Music
See the next best thing to an Oasis reunion
Rolling with it… Liam Gallagher back in his 90s Oasis heyday. Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns
Ever since Oasis called it quits in 2009, speculation has been rife about whether Liam and Noel Gallagher would ever reconcile and reunite. If recent interviews are anything to go by, it doesn’t seem as if the brothers will be burying the hatchet soon, but this summer’s tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of the group’s debut record, Definitely Maybe, is shaping up to be the next best thing. Featuring Liam on vocals and original Oasis guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, expect renditions of classics such as Rock’n’Roll Star, Supersonic and Live Forever. In a further plot twist, Liam and the Stone Roses’ John Squire have announced a collaborative album, due this year. Watch this space. AK
Theatre
See your favourites films on stage
Sean Foley, Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci have adapted Dr Strangelove for the stage. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
Bruce Robinson has written the first stage adaptation of Withnail and I (Birmingham Rep, 3 to 25 May), his 1987 film, which starred Richard E Grant, Paul McGann and a huge joint known as the Camberwell Carrot. Based on Robinson’s experiences as an out-of-work actor in Camden Town, the plot, which casts an anti-idyllic eye on the English countryside, has been described by director Sean Foley as a picture of “a friendship falling apart”. Foley also directs a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (Noël Coward, London, from 8 October), co-written with The Thick of It’s Armando Iannucci, in which Steve Coogan takes on “hugely contrasting roles”. In the movie, released in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis, Peter Sellers played an ex-Nazi scientist, a British officer and the US president. Granted access to the director’s archive, Iannucci has found papers containing “little shards of ideas” unused in the film, some of which he has developed for the stage. “It seems the right time,” he says, “to remind people of the mad logic behind these dangerous games that superpowers play.” SCl
Art
Give an overlooked trailblazer her due at a Serpentine solo show
In the Beginning from Birth Project, 1982 by Judy Chicago. Photograph: Donald Woodman/ ARS
American art star Judy Chicago gets a solo show in her 80s at the Serpentine Gallery, London (22 May to 1 September), her first major exhibition in a London gallery. Most famous for her 1970s installation The Dinner Party, which is pretty much Exhibit A of any feminist history of art, with its famous 39 settings for historic heroines, Chicago has spent her life fighting male domination of art and culture. The Dinner Party is too fragile now to travel outside the US, but this show will journey through her career, mainly via the drawings that underpin all her feminist thinking, and the political campaigns. Take a friend; prepare to argue. LC
Dance
Catch the finest visiting companies
São Paulo Dance Company performing Goyo Montero’s Anthem. Photograph: Lari Davies
There’ll be great excitement when New York City Ballet, celebrating its 75th anniversary, makes its debut at Sadler’s Wells (7 to 10 March), and its first UK visit since 2008, with a mixed bill featuring work by Justin Peck, George Balanchine, Kyle Abraham and Pam Tanowitz. Meanwhile, São Paulo Dance Company’s tour starts in Dublin (5 and 6 February), before making its way over to London and 12 other cities including Southampton, Canterbury, Bradford and Norwich, with a triple bill of work by Goyo Montero, Nacho Duato and Brazilian choreographer Cassi Abranches. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch returns (Sadler’s Wells, 14 to 22 February) with one of the company’s most defining works, Nelken (Carnations), danced by a new generation. It’s the first time the company has been seen here since Boris Charmatz took over as artistic director; it was the first Bausch piece he saw, when he was just 18. SCr
Music
Be inspired by the wildest new rock memoirs
The Jesus and Mary Chain, 1985 (l-r): Douglas Hart, William Reid, Jim Reid and Bobby Gillespie. Photograph: Icon and Image/Getty Images
The pandemic continues to spit out fascinating accounts of musical lives. Chris Stein – guitarist and prime mover of the pop/punk band Blondie – has penned the “no-holds-barred” Under a Rock (Macmillan, 6 June). It promises to be starry, with names such as Bowie, Warhol and Basquiat. “It’s got a lot of weird-ass stuff that actually happened even if it might seem made up,” noted Stein on Instagram. Debbie Harry has written the foreword.
Before the Gallaghers cornered the market in volatile brotherhood, the Reid siblings’ tempestuous relationship formed the crucible for the seminal Scottish noise-pop outfit the Jesus and Mary Chain. Saturnine guitarist William and only slightly more easygoing singer Jim have, somehow, co-authored a musical autobiography alongside music journalist Ben Thompson. Never Understand: The Story of the Jesus and Mary Chain (Orion, 29 August) promises to be “the story of the band in the first person by the brothers in alternate, and sometimes conflicting, accounts”. Of course.
Yet all of the Mary Chain gigs that descended into riots struggle to hold a candle to the madness of 1970s LA. Eccentric rock musician Frank Zappa started the trend for strange pop star baby names. His daughter Moon Unit Zappa’s frank and funny memoir, Earth to Moon (Orion, 1 August), offers copious nudity, white magic and trauma from her hippy upbringing, as well as her own spell as a nepo baby pop star with her sardonic 1982 hit, Valley Girl. KE
Classical
Go big with a Bruckner weekend
Portrait of Anton Bruckner by Ferry Beraton, 1889. Photograph: Album/Alamy
The Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-96) attracts passionate devotion as much as total resistance: few listeners are neutral. His epic symphonies are often called “cathedrals of sound” – a cliche, but useful as a route into this majestic, brass-rich music. The Big Bruckner Weekend (the Glasshouse, Gateshead; 1 to 3 March), featuring four orchestras – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Northern Sinfonia, BBC Scottish SO and the Hallé – offers a rare chance to hear the last three symphonies (Seventh, Eighth and the unfinished Ninth) and the “Great” Mass No 3. Full exposure should leave you clear about how you feel towards this eccentric genius. FM
Film
Remember that prequels, sequels and remakes aren’t all bad
Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya in the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Ordinarily, Hollywood’s reliance on sequels prompts jaded eye-rolling from film fans, but this year’s franchise extensions are more enticing than usual. First, and most impatiently awaited after its planned 2023 release was delayed by the actors’ strike, Denis Villeneuve returns with Dune: Part Two, the next chapter in his spectacular adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi tome, in March. May brings George Miller’s Mad Max prequel Furiosa, with Anya Taylor-Joy inheriting the role Charlize Theron made famous. In October there’s Joker: Folie à Deux, in which Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn joins Joaquin Phoenix’s tortured supervillain – and yes, it’s said to be a musical.
We’ll have to wait until November, meanwhile, for the long-gestating Gladiator 2, with Paul Mescal stepping into Russell Crowe’s sandals, and Paddington in Peru, which sees everyone’s favourite gentleman bear returning to his Amazonian roots. And speaking of talking animals, who knows what to expect from the unlikely pairing of Moonlight director Barry Jenkins and Disney’s blockbuster prequel Mufasa: The Lion King? As for outright remakes, gourmet prospects include Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, but it’s feminist French auteur Audrey Diwan (Happening) taking on the softcore landmark Emmanuelle that has us most intrigued. GL
Art
Discover the work of sculptor Ronald Moody at a groundbreaking retrospective
Ronald Moody working on his sculpture Johanaan, 1963. Photograph: © Val Wilmer
One of the most eagerly awaited shows of the year is Ronald Moody: His Universe at the Hepworth Wakefield (22 June to 3 November). Works by the Jamaican-born sculptor are scattered here and there but never shown in their full eloquent force. Small portrait heads, in wood and bronze, all condensed personality; witty and quixotic figures in stone, bronze and even the dental plaster with which he started – Moody is a poet of a sculptor. His art spans the 20th century, from the Caribbean island of his birth to modernist Paris and London in the 1940s. A contemporary of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, but with a more figurative and wide-ranging cast of mind. LC
Theatre
Be scared by a brace of Bluebeards
Katy Owen in Emma Rice’s Blue Beard. Photograph: Steve Tanner
Bluebeard is having a moment this spring. The ever-inventive Emma Rice will direct her own version of the legend (Blue Beard, Theatre Royal, Bath; 2 to 10 February), a music-fuelled feminist revenge on the magician who first seduces, then obliterates: “With a wink, a stroke and a flick – things just seem to vanish. Cards, coins, scarves… and women.” ENO will present Béla Bartók’s dark and glorious one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (London Coliseum, 21 to 23 March; first performed in Budapest in 1918) in a semi-staged, hour-long concert performance, sung in the original Hungarian, with surtitles. Soprano Allison Cook will be Judith and the Canadian bass John Relyea is Bluebeard. Lidiya Yankovskaya conducts. SCl
Games
Play in person at a games festival
GameCity festival in Nottingham. Photograph: Ash Bird
Since the closure of the celebratory Nottingham GameCity event in 2016, most video game live events have become boisterous, noisy affairs where aromatic punters vie for a quick go on the games of tomorrow. The Humanise festival of Play is an attempt to wrench the video game festival from the clutches of the marketers. It will transform the Cumbrian town of Kendal and its surroundings into a playable map filled with diversions real and virtual. The hope, its organisers say, is to resituate play in the physical world and thereby to “reconnect games to the human experience”. Whether players can be so easily prised from their screens remains to be seen. SP
This article was amended on 8 January 2024. An earlier version said Judy Chicago’s show at the Serpentine Gallery would be her first major exhibition in Britain. It should have said “in London”; her work was previously shown at the Baltic in Gateshead in 2019.