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Watch the trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, starring Jennifer Lawrence.

The 10 best things to do this week

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Exploding apples and The Hunger Games, Nightmares Before Christmas and going Inside Out: here are the week’s must-dos from the worlds of music, film, art, comedy and theatre.

FILM

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

The queen of future-imperfect youth sagas comes to a spectacular conclusion (finally), regaining at least some of the steam it lost in Part 1 as Lawrence’s reluctant Joan of Arc figure leads the rebellion to the Capitol. As ever, she’s magnificent but, also as ever, it’s a battle muddied by doubt, mistrust and media manipulation. SR

All this week’s film releases

MUSIC

All Tomorrow’s Parties: Nightmare Before Christmas

(Pontins Holiday Centre, Prestatyn, Friday to 29 November)

Click here to see Holly Herndon’s Chorus.

A nightmare only if you feel yourself easily spooked by Fuck Buttons side projects, the return of the All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) franchise to this Welsh seaside holiday camp is a blessing indeed. Curators of ATP events come and go (this time it’s British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, who programmed the first Nightmare a decade ago), but the flavour of the music and the consistency of its quality is very much a constant. With a strong emphasis on the various strands of post-hardcore US alternative rock (there are showings here from minimal stoners Om, the hairy duo Lightning Bolt and Built To Spill), there’s a lot here for people who enjoy a conversation about Steve Albini now and then. Variety is the spice of ATP life, though, and particular highlights here include high-concept electronica from Holly Herndon and post-punk Cretan lute/drum jams from Xylouris White. JR

The rest of this week’s best live music


TALKS

Being A Man

(Southbank Centre, SE1, Friday to 29 November)

Presenter Gemma Cairney speaks to teen boys in the UK

Fear not, menfolk – this three-day festival of masculinity, now in its second year, is no aura-stroking love-in. The extensive lineup features talks on gang culture with ex-gangster Sheldon Thomas, debates on the lure of jihad with imam and former extremist Alyas Karmani, and a screening of Radio 1 presenter Gemma Cairney’s new film about being a young guy in the 21st century, followed by a Q&A with Cairney and her interviewees. For those needing further persuasion, there’s a night of live music, comedy and “man-to-man chat” from rapper and thinker Akala (above) and that hairy hunk of maleness (and taste-dodging humour), Frankie Boyle. Oh, and there’s also a beer-brewing workshop, so the lads can get the pints in. Other events will focus on fatherhood, footie, sex, sexuality, prison and mental health. With young men under constant pressure to aim high, look good and stay strong, and three times as likely to kill themselves as young women, even the most reticent of males, alpha or otherwise, can’t deny that the time is ripe for talking. CB

The rest of this week’s best talks


EXHIBITIONS

Revelations: Experiments in Photography

(National Media Museum, Bradford, to 3 February)

Bullet through Apple, 1964, Harold Edgerton.

All along, cameras have been used as much for extending human vision as for simply recording everyday appearances. This exhibition presents a broad range of such insights, most of them enabled through mind-boggling technical expertise, achieving a quite spooky, otherworldly grace. Here’s a bullet piercing an apple, an exploding bunch of roses, an x-ray of angel fish, a microscopic closeup of the proboscis of a hummingbird moth. Yet it’s not all museum-like documentary. The show’s best moments come as images by some big art world names are set alongside scientific enquiry. A 2009 photograph of a lightning field by Hiroshi Sugimoto is juxtaposed with an 1892 image by Alan Archibald Campbell of an electrical charge energising light-sensitive paper with something resembling a super-delicate fern frond. RC

The rest of this week’s new exhibitions


COMEDY

Noel Fielding

(Scarborough, Northampton, Scunthorpe, Oxford, Preston)

‘A style icon as well as a comedy inspiration’: Noel Fielding.

There have been a lot of pin-ups from the world of comedy over the years: Rob Newman and Sean Hughes are two who spring to mind. Both were fixtures on teenage bedroom walls back in the day, but they’ve since developed a mature style to suit their older audiences. Such a journey may soon await Noel Fielding. As one half of the Mighty Boosh, he seemed to be a style icon as well as a comedy inspiration during the 00s. Now he’s in his early 40s, and his fans are ageing with him. Fortunately, Fielding’s stuff won’t ever go out of date, largely since it has only the most tangential relationship with the outside world. He’s a pure-bred surrealist, mashing up language, symbols and ideas into a stew from which the most unlikely characters, situations and jokes are pulled forth. JK

The rest of this week’s best live comedy


CLUBS

Tiga

(Koko, London, Saturday)

Tiga has never played live in London before now, which seems incredible given his contribution to club culture. He emerged in the early 00s as a keystone in the electroclash scene, where etiolated Europeans would make tinnily gothic pop that moved with all the sensuality of a porn actor on their eighth take. It was great. Tiga’s American Gigolo compilation is still the definitive document, and he used it, as well as his Sunglasses At Night cover, to launch himself as the nearly man of pop. You Gonna Want Me and Far From Home were beloved underground but didn’t break the top 40. In 2014 the pattern repeated with Bugatti (above), a camp strut through Ibiza that was one of the year’s best tracks; even a guest rap from Pusha T couldn’t get it into the charts. No matter: they should all make for a witty and constantly peaking show, along with material from his forthcoming third album and collaborative tracks with Hudson Mohawke, Boys Noize and Paranoid London. The latter support with their own live set. BB-T

The rest of this week’s best clubs


TV

The Bridge

(Saturday, 9pm, BBC4)

Click here to see a trailer for The Bridge.

The police procedural returns for a third series, the first of the post-Martin era, on account of Saga’s ex-sidekick having been banged up for murder. But life and death go on, and the analytical Swedish detective soon has a new Danish partner as she investigates the eerie slaying of a campaigner on gender issues. Meanwhile, we also learn more about Saga’s family, one of several plot strands that, by the end of tonight’s double bill, have begun to weave together in sometimes unexpected ways. Excellent. JW


THEATRE

Wonder.land

(National Theatre: Olivier, London, Monday to 30 April)

Click here to see a trailer for Wonder.land. Guardian

Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland is a much visited source for creative types. Damon Albarn was inspired by the story (and apparently the nightmares it’s caused him since childhood) to create Wonder.land, which comes to the National for Christmas. The alternative wonderland here is cyberspace, where 12-year-old Aly – who is having trouble at home and at school – encounters some familiar Carroll characters and becomes the smart, savvy Alice. Colourful and visually stunning when staged in Manchester, only Albarn’s score failed to satisfy some. Also at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre is Caryl Churchill’s Here We Go, from Wed to 19 Dec. MC

The rest of this week’s best theatre


FILM EVENT

Artist Film Weekender

(Home, Manchester, Friday to 29 November)

Click here to view Wong Ping’s An Emo Nose.

Artists’ films have been a modern British success story, but rather than jumping on the bandwagon, Home, formerly known as Cornerhouse, can claim to have been part of the reason why. In the past it has funded projects by Gillian Wearing, Andrew Kötting and Bob and Roberta Smith, among others. Now it presents a horizon-broadening weekend of 33 films by 26 artists, plus Q&As. Guests include Jarman award-winner John Smith, presenting his rarely screened Shine So Hard (originally made for Echo And The Bunnymen), pop-culture soulmates David Blandy and Wong Ping (whose An Emo Nose is above), and Declan Clarke, whose new Home-funded The Most Cruel Of All Goddesses pays homage to honorary local lad and proud commie Friedrich Engels, who documented the lives of the city’s working poor in the 1840s. SR

The rest of this week’s best film events


ON DEMAND

Storyville: Dreamcatcher - Surviving Chicago’s Streets

(BBC iPlayer)

Click here to watch a trailer for Dreamcatcher - Surviving Chicago’s Streets.

The brilliant Storyville strand remains one of the BBC’s true crown jewels. This offering from Kim Longinotto is particularly startling, presenting a brutally intense and intimate insight into the lives of prostitutes on the streets of Chicago. It’s a grim business but redemptive too, thanks to the incredible work of Brenda Myers-Powell, who worked the streets for 25 years herself but now spends her time giving succour to the city’s lost and exploited souls. Remarkable. PH

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