The Royal Exchange’s King Lear opens with a wild celebration. A well-dressed Lear, played by David Threlfall with his long silver hair neatly tied back, joins the partygoers as they dance to a disco mash-up. It’s his party and everybody loves him. Why would he not trust the words of the beautiful, powerful and strong women his daughters have become? He divides his inheritance accordingly. And Gloucester (an excellent Jonathan Slinger) is similarly charmed by his illegitimate son Edmund (Paddy Stafford), whom Nadine Shah as a strident Goneril (and also the composer for this production) and Lisa Diveney as Regan compete over. The war games play out on a stage that features a huge crack, made more evident by its visible gold kintsugi mend, and designer Anna Fleischle’s series of chain walls divide as well as isolate characters. Interestingly, director Matthew Dunster’s adaptation has put the words of the Fool into the mouth of Lear, which amplifies his solitude as the play unfolds. In the throes of his delirium, when Cordelia and her troops rescue him, the biggest laugh of the night comes as Lear shouts: “Am I in France?” Forget Celebrity Traitors, this is a King Lear for our times.

Susan Ferguson, Nerve events

“Naza” is Hebrew military slang for “collateral damage”: put simply, one officer in this film explains that they don’t say “15 women and children”; they say “15 naza”. If 2024’s No Other Land showed us the destruction of a Palestinian community, this latest film from the same directors explores how military jargon and remote-control warfare make that destruction possible. Over three years of investigative work, Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor follow Abraham as he meets 24 anonymous military whistleblowers under cover of darkness on rooftops across Tel Aviv, who reveal how they use phone hacking and AI to commit mass murder. One of them recalls travelling to Poland as a child, before asking: “The Nazis were the devil, but what am I?” The Israeli government’s threat last month to revoke the directors’ citizenship, following the film’s record 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival, speaks to the film’s potential impact. Set against Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers and ordinary daily life, the moral disorientation it portrays is perhaps what makes the film so threatening to the government, and why forcing Israeli society to confront these systems of killing may be its biggest achievement.

Brenna Spain, Nerve writer

This autumn, amid the monied streets of Mayfair, you’ll find a sculpture towering over the Royal Academy’s courtyard comprising the unlikely combo of an enormous potato, an even bigger barrel of wine, a brown cat and the British sculptor Phyllida Barlow. Staggering beneath this pile is a figure representing the New York-based artist Nicole Eisenman, her tatty Birkenstocks taped up, arm outstretched for a glass of wine. It’s a gloriously witty monument to creativity, to life’s daily pleasures. “These are the things I need in my life, the basics,” Eisenman has said: “Food, wine, art, something to show affection to, like a cat.” Wander a little up the road to Sadie Coles HQ and there are eight new Eisenman works, mostly paintings, a follow-up to her much-loved mid-career retrospective at the Whitechapel in 2023. These range from abstract, fleshy canvases celebrating entangled human bodies to the Gustonesque social commentary of Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions, its clown car full of ICE-like agents foregrounding a woman bent awkwardly over a shopping trolley. It’s at once funny and unsettling, like so much of Eisenman’s brilliant work.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

When writer Jimmy McGovern’s gut-punch prison drama – starring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham – debuted five years ago, it won two Baftas. McGovern ambitiously turned Time into a triptych, with each miniseries set in a different penal institution, linked by the presence of Siobhan Finneran’s prison chaplain. The 2023 sequel saw Jodie Whittaker, Tamara Lawrence and Bella Ramsey banged up together in a women’s jail. The third and final chapter unfolds in a young offenders’ institute, with David Tennant on top form as a veteran custodial officer, worn down by a system that often keeps boys locked in their cells for 23 hours a day. Simmeringly tense and profoundly moving, it rivals Adolescence as an urgent portrait of masculinity in crisis. No wonder Tennant calls McGovern “the guv’nor”.

Michael Hogan, writer

Rent’s ragged urgency is its USP. Had its creator Jonathan Larson not died suddenly just before its off-Broadway debut in 1996, he would surely have tightened it up, but it ran for 12 years on Broadway and Luke Sheppard’s dynamic revival has already been extended so it’s clearly doing something right. Gaten Matarazzo plays Mark, the geeky chronicler of his misfit found family’s chaotic lives in 90s New York. (After Sadie Sink’s superb Juliet and Noah Schnapp’s disastrous Affluenza at Riverside Studios currently, the Stranger Things kids are scoring two to one.) What Mark is filming is broadcast on boxy TV sets scattered around a set (by David Woodhead) that filters Alphabet City through steampunk and cyberpunk, just as the songs are given a harder edge. This is a cold, hostile world — Aids, heroin, homelessness – lit up by friendship and force of personality. Alexa Lopez (Mimi), Lazy Violet (Maureen) and Jeevan Braich (Angel) all burn the candle at both ends. Like its characters, Rent is young, hungry, unfinished and irresistibly alive.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

If you’re a regular hotlist reader, you might know that I love an ensemble album. Give me an unexpected team-up and a bizarre genre blend any day. This week, Aussie trio and plunderphonics pioneers the Avalanches assemble their A-team, including Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, Faith No More’s Mike Patton, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, THE Carly! Simon! and polymath Haruomi Hosono, alongside the likes of sound artist Ryoji Ikeda, early electronic innovator Suzanne Ciani and Jamie xx – whose collaborative track, Every Single Weekend, sounded colossal when it was pumped out by the Avalanches at London’s Drumsheds last Saturday. 

Their fourth album doesn’t have the easiest sell – it’s inspired by the nostalgia of old tech brands and the almost quaint childhood consumerism of the past, from cereal jingles to floppy disks. But the result is a bit like being on the Shibuya Crossing in the early hours of the morning, headphones on, listening to a warm and fuzzy megamix on a Discman and drifting through the surrounding arcades. Disco, soul, drum’n’bass, Chicago footwork, city pop and other shimmery, cosmic beats form a new kind of environmental rave music.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

Aaron Sorkin’s new film charts the story of how Frances Haugen, a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, finds the moral courage to blow the whistle on the company’s pernicious algorithms. The narrative explores the whistleblower-reporter relationship between Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, and Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal, played by Jeremy Allen White. “I don’t know what the fuck that girl thinks she’s doing,” a Facebook PR tells Horwitz at one point. “She’s disrupting,” Horwitz replies.

As a film, The Social Reckoning does not quite live up to its predecessor from 2010, The Social Network – whose antihero, a young Mark Zuckerberg, both repulsed and enticed viewers. But its message of speaking truth to power lands even more urgently in the age of AI. After the screening I attended, Haugen, in a pre-recorded video, urged “anyone who is working at one of these superintelligence companies” to have the bravery to speak out. “Do you want to be the keeper of a secret?” she said. “Because it’s not free to keep a secret. So if you see something, say something.”

Jem Bartholomew, writer

ART
Marc Chagall: The Circus
(The Hepworth, Wakefield, 21 November-25 April 2027)

The great Belarusian-born French artist returned time and again to images of acrobats, clowns and circus performers in his work and this exhibition will feature lithographs, paintings and archival material to explore his fascination with the circus.

PERFORMANCE
Factory International’s 2027 season
(Manchester)

Factory International’s 2027 season features nine UK and world premieres including mixed reality pioneer Todd Eckert’s An Ark featuring Ian McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel, Arinzé Kene and Rosie Sheehy. Tickets for the newly announced programme are on sale to members now and go on general sale on 20 October.

THEATRE
The Inquest
(The Big House, London N1, 25 November-19 December)

Young people leaving care in England are four times more likely to die between the ages of 18 and 24 than their peers. Developed by the Big House production company, who work with care-affected young people, this promenade court drama telling the story of Jordan and his foster father David explores how the UK care system is plagued by fragmented mental health services and institutional neglect.

FILM
Colossal Wreck + panel discussion
(BFI Imax, London SE1, 15 November)

To coincide with COP31, the latest edition of the annual UN-backed climate change conference being held in Turkey, the BFI is hosting a screening and panel discussion of Josh Appignanesi’s singular documentary essay Colossal Wreck. Filmed at the COP climate conference in Dubai,  it’s been described as an “urgent and honest dispatch from the hypocrisy-fuelled frontline of an increasingly precarious future”.