Ben Hardy and Jason Patel excel in Sally El Hosaini’s gritty romance as a straight single white dad and a closet Asian nightclub performer navigate their mutual attraction

The world seems a little brighter when garage mechanic Luke (Ben Hardy) first meets drag artist Aysha (Jason Patel). Before stumbling by chance into an underground “gaysian” cabaret club, Luke, a straight single dad, plods from day to identical day in a life that seems to be painted in shades of dispiriting grey. Even his sex life – a functional, no-frills grapple with a disinterested woman in a patch of wasteland – is monochrome. But once he finds himself in Aysha’s orbit, colours flood the frame.

It’s an evocative visual leap that brings a touch of magic to this London, Essex and Manchester-set story, the latest picture from Sally El Hosaini, co-directed with long-term collaborator James Krishna Floyd (star of My Brother the Devil , and the screenwriter of this film). Here are characters with real-world problems. Luke is struggling with his rambunctious son; Aysha is living a double life, concealing her sexuality from her loving but conservative Muslim family, but there’s a shimmering fairytale romanticism that softens the harder edges of the story.

The Turner prize-winning artist on a glorious Italian painting, his favourite horror novel, and why he finally started to like podcasts

Born in Birkenhead in 1964, the artist Mark Leckey came to prominence with 1999’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore , which documented British nightclub culture. He won the 2008 Turner prize for the exhibition Industrial Light and Magic; in 2019, he recreated an M53 concrete flyover at Tate Britain. His most recent project, In the Offing , opened at Turner Contemporary, Margate in October 2023. He lives in London with his wife, curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas, and their two children. Leckey has created the sound for Oona Doherty’s Wall , performed by National Youth Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells, London on 13 July, then touring.

Aviva Studios, Manchester
The flawlessly classy US singer, actor – and so much more – unleashes costumes, speeches and body-positive party tunes in a virtuoso set spanning two decades of shapeshifting

Not all superheroes wear capes. This one does, though. Janelle Monáe arrives on stage two nights into a three-show residency at Factory International’s well-appointed new(ish) home resplendent in a giant robe made entirely from fabric flowers, paired with blooming boots and headdress. It’s the same outfit she wore at Glastonbury, and the one she has been wearing as support act to Coldplay in European stadiums. The wow factor is, though, undimmed – a tropicalist take on pagan that presages a series of eye-catching costume changes. Monáe asks us to lift up our cups, and we toast “the dreams we chase”: an apposite invocation for election eve.

She, and we, are on our “ Champagne Shit ” tonight. It’s the title of a party-forward track semi-inspired by political Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit . Monáe’s most recent album, The Age of Pleasure , is just over a year old, and it bumps and grinds the message home that life is for living, that pleasure is both a personal “birthright” and a political necessity, and that “the most abundant and sustainable resource is our love”.

Inside the north London house of the man who transformed British design

I had an idea of London inside my head from English films. Every film made in London was art, but from Hollywood it was junk. I was an arrogant teen!” says a smiling Ron Arad of his decision to leave Tel Aviv and move to London in 1973, at the age of 22.

Arad, who studied architecture, under pressure from his mother, at the Architectural Association school in London, is sporting his trademark round felt hat. He is sitting on a curvaceous Victoria & Albert crimson sofa, one of his own pieces, created for the Italian furniture brand Moroso , in the conservatory of his north London home. Along with his wife, Alma, who works as a psychologist, they have lived here for more than 30 years, raising their daughters, Lail and Dara, who both live nearby.

The singer, 51, on making memories, disliking therapy, and a terrifying meeting with Grace Jones

I used to ask my dad if I could marry him. He was my hero. My first memory is being devastated that he had to go to work, I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t stay at home with me. He wasn’t perfect. He made a mess of things in some ways. But he remained iconic to me, and showed me how to appreciate life. He made friends with everyone.

Dad died a few years ago and I was surprised. He once saved a monk falling down an escalator at Heathrow airport and they all blessed him afterwards. I thought it was impossible for him to die.

I always loved adults more than other kids. I grew up in a tribe of incredibly flawed people. People who made mistakes. But I could always see that they were amazing, too. I was patient with adults in a way that I wasn’t with other children, I think because I always had an interest in adult things.

My upbringing was cultured and exciting. I was surrounded by poetry and books and live music. One day, Dad came home with the cockpit of a Second World War bomber. It stayed in the living room for ages. That was my life growing up.

I’ve got a temper. I’m Irish. But it comes out much less than it used to. I guess that’s growing up. I’ve done therapy, it wasn’t great, it felt like a waste of time. I’m very good at talking people round to my side of things. The last therapist I had agreed with me too much. I put on a good show. I’m a performer.

I think our culture is too hedonistic. People really party now, it’s not like it was in the 90s, going out once in a while. The dance scene in the 80s and 90s was so wonderful, but I always thought that pure hedonism was a dead end. I was never interested in that. I was interested in adventure.

I mourn the passing of that time I knew. No phones, genuine freedom, actual connection with other people.

My biggest fear is losing my memory. Losing memories of the culture I grew up in. Losing history. I’m always trying to capture memories, to remember them. The fear is in me that I won’t be able to find them, I won’t remember these things any more.

The last time I cried was at Christmas. I was sick and coughing in the middle of the night and it wouldn’t go away. I didn’t have cancer, though, just a chest infection. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. It’s a guilt thing. I think to myself, “You can’t be having this much fun and not pay some kind of price for it.”

I love Grace Jones, but I was petrified of meeting her. A few years back a friend and I went to see her in Florence. She’s one of my biggest influences and she was brilliant that night. We ended up back at the hotel she was staying in because we knew the gig promoter. She walked in, took one look at us, turned to her people, and said, “Get these people out of here.”

I like getting older. I hesitate to call it wisdom, because you can think you’re wise and then very quickly life can remind you that you’re not. But I’m proud of what I’ve done as an artist.

Hit Parade Remixes by Róisín Murphy is out now. Róisín plays London’s Love Motion festival on 26 July

Garsington Opera, High Wycombe; Queen Elizabeth Hall; Wigmore Hall, London
A top cast and young local chorus share the honours in Netia Jones’s stylish new Britten staging; Finnish live wire Pekka Kuusisto and friends conjure Shostakovich in the dark. Plus, Bruckner’s 6th for 10 players…

“Darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.” Who wouldn’t want to pass that line off as their own? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 , full of shadows, sleep and dreams, has an affinity with his A Midsummer Night’s Dream , in which human mystery speaks more powerfully than sweet fairy magic. When Benjamin Britten made the play into an opera in 1960 for the reopening of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, he and his partner, Peter Pears, chopped and reordered the text but introduced only six words (apparently) that were not Shakespeare’s own. Directors have mined the opera’s hints of eroticism and deviance, setting it in ink-splattered schoolroom, country house nursery and Cabaret -style Berlin with Thisbe memorably twirling her nipple tassels .

Garsington’s new staging, conducted by Douglas Boyd and directed and designed by Netia Jones, has returned it to a wood. It revels in the darkly bright. Boyd and the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing superbly, kept the pace swift and flowing; it was hard to imagine that this work can, usually does, sag. (Oh no, the rude mechanicals. Oh no, the lost lovers. But no oh-no-ing here.) The sinister clatterings of harpsichord or xylophone, the glissando swoops of double bass and two harps, the lurching solo trombone: all always ear-catching, were especially vivid.

(Delphian)
No sound is left unturned as the soprano-composer-musician and friends range from Barbara Strozzi to Errollyn Wallen and Werner’s own work

The multitalented Héloïse Werner , a singer, cellist, composer, narrator, verbal acrobat and linguistic chameleon, can hardly be summed up in a short phrase. Close-ups , her second disc for Delphian, recorded at SJE Arts, Oxford, brings together a group of like-minded musician friends: Max Baillie (violin, viola, fiddle), Julian Azkoul (violin), Ruth Gibson (viola), Colin Alexander (cello), Marianne Schofield (double bass) and Kit Downes (cello).

Werner is preoccupied with the many aural ways of expressing emotion: through the convention of vocal beauty (as in Barbara Strozzi’s Che si può fare, arranged by Richard Birchall) or through the adventure of spoken text, tongue-twisting, riddles or lip-smacking noises (Werner’s own compositions, Les Leçons du Mardi, Close-ups, Unspecified Intentions). For a more lyrical mood, there’s Tree by Errollyn Wallen and O vis eternitatis by Hildegard of Bingen, as well as Werner’s Lullaby for a Sister.

Tom Hanks is an affecting lead but the popularity of Robert Zemeckis’s much-loved Oscar-winner is still a curious mystery

In the 30 years since becoming a box-office phenomenon, en route to winning six Oscars, including best picture, director, actor and adapted screenplay, Forrest Gump has settled into the culture as a significant achievement, canonized by its induction into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry – and, to a slightly lesser extent, by the few dozen Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurants worldwide. Other best picture nominees may be more beloved, like The Shawshank Redemption, or influential, like Pulp Fiction, but none that captured the public imagination on quite the same scale.

And yet it’s still worth asking, after all this time: What is the deal with this movie? What is it actually trying to say?

Globe-trotting in search of picture-perfect scenes for the screen is not always as glamorous as it sounds. But to better understand these unsung heroes’ shadowy art, you first have to track them down …

The script called for a tree: a magical kind that looked like no tree on Earth. It would need to look like it had been standing for thousands of years. It would need to be in a wood full of dark twisty branches and dense canopies. It would need to seem like the place that a hardened nobleman might escape to for a moment of quiet. And Robert Boake knew just the one.

Boake had been working as a location scout in Northern Ireland for a few years, when in 2008 a producer sent him the script for the pilot episode of Game of Thrones . The producer “got me in my car exploring Ireland”, Boake explains, his excitement clear over the phone. “He said: ‘Go anywhere you want, and find me cool stuff and send it back to me.’ It was an unbelievable time of exploring and getting lost and photographing castles. There’s such an array of different looks. You’ve got Georgian stuff, Victorian stuff. You’ve got cliffs, you’ve got forests, you’ve got big open plains, big grasslands.”