She’s one of history’s most famous faces but, stepping into this show, Marilyn Monroe’s incandescence hits you afresh. Her skin glows, the red lipstick sizzles, the camera loves her. As she purrs from every wall, you sense the thrill that every photographer who ever worked with her felt. It opens with the tiniest photobooth picture of her as a teenager, one you almost need a magnifying glass to see properly. Within moments she’s leaping for one of Philippe Halsman’s famed jump series, beaming on the beach for André de Dienes, transfixing millions on the cover of endless magazines. The show is mostly divided into collaborations with specific photographers, from Eve Arnold to Allan Grant, who shot her the day before her death aged 36 of a barbiturate overdose. But there are paintings too (by the likes of Warhol and Pauline Boty) and ephemera including her well-worn, unexpectedly poignant white Ferragamo heels, which – like some of the photographs in the latter half of the show that hint that she was struggling – are a reminder that she was only human, and that we will never truly know what was going on under her surface.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

This album, for me, confirms pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo's status as a voice of her generation. Not because the album is full of earworms or bangers – because, to be honest, it doesn't have either in spades (Drop Dead notwithstanding, which is an absolute bop) – but because the lyricism and the melodies are truly exceptional and a cut above anything she's ever produced. The songwriting on this album is poetic and cohesive, and the writing chops she shows in these songs demonstrate a true artist at work. I absolutely love every song on this album and I love how beautifully they are woven together.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

Under The Shadow opens at the dead of night in Tehran. The stage is dark, save for a spotlight on a terrified child gazing upwards as the sound of bombs intensifies. It could be a scene from last night’s 10 o’clock news. But the action is set in 1988, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, making us horribly aware how little life has changed since then for ordinary Iranians. Shideh – a magnetic Leila Farzad – has been thrown out of medical school for political activism and is now losing her mind with boredom, confined to a small flat with her seven-year-old daughter, while her husband is on the frontline. Frazzled with fury after a lifetime of oppression, she also has fretful neighbours and nightly air raids to contend with and, even scarier, the possibility that her family building might be haunted by a djinn, a malevolent spirit.

Based on Babak Anvari’s 2016 film, Carmen Nasr’s tense adaptation, directed by Nadia Latif, is a hugely satisfying and genuinely scary psychological drama. We’re aware that the djinn is a manifestation of both Shideh’s anger and the psychosis of war, but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying, as proved more than once by the screams of the audience. 

Lisa O’Kelly, Nerve writer

At their best, Netflix celebrity documentaries are impeccably controlled, star-elevating triumphs, and this three-parter on Kylie is up there with David Beckham's as a finely-tuned, glossy, archive-filled delight. Nevertheless, there are many moments that add grit, including chats with the singer’s parents and siblings around the campfire, and coverage of paparazzi outside her family home in 2005 after her first cancer diagnosis, alongside Kylie's revelation of her second diagnosis in 2021. The second episode also provides a more hilarious shock – a frequently smiling Nick Cave. He's especially funny about his sense that Kylie's young fans despised him when the two duetted on Top of the Pops in 1995, singing his murder ballad When The Wild Roses Grow. "They did not like me to go near their princess. And these little girls say, ‘You fucking old bastard! What are you doing, you horrible old cunt?’ Evil, evil people!" Kylie, of course, as sweet as ever, says he's being silly.

Jude Rogers, culture writer

Before he moved to London and eventually became Keeper of the Royal Academy schools, painter Maurice Cockrill spent 1978-82 living and working in a large but freezing studio in a former police station in Liverpool. Still a working space for artists almost 50 years later, Bridewell Studios and Gallery is showing a selection of his works in the very room in which they were created. Very different from the abstract style for which he is better known, they include Nocturne to the City (1979-80) which Cockrill painted at night on the studio’s roof. It depicts the now demolished Royal Liverpool hospital, a formidable brutalist edifice, yet the light pools beckoningly from its glass doors.

Laura Davis, culture writer

In the past few years, shoegaze has had an unprecedented renaissance on TikTok, going from 90s underdog to mid-2000s dirty word to beloved genre of Gen Z-ers, who use songs by Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Duster to soundtrack their charity shop hauls and makeup tutorials. It makes sense, then, that acclaimed music writer Simon Reynolds would rewind to what he calls "the most exciting time of my life" to give his eyewitness account of the "Lost Generation" between 1984-1994, the period bookended by the classic 4AD dream-pop of Cocteau Twins and trippy haze of Spiritualized (via a bit of grunge, a touch of Britpop, a smidge of alt-rock and Björk). His links between sounds, scenes and his memories of how they mapped out in real time are typically brilliant, with a breathless fervour that now feels all but lost from music writing. I particularly enjoyed his memories of his early years as an enthusiastic rock scribe, high on the sheer joy of filing copy. 

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

THEATRE
The Standard of Living
(Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1, 21 September-12 December)

Dynamo director Nicholas Hytner unites with playwriting ace James Graham for the world premiere of The Standard of Living, a portrait of the radical economist and member of the Bloomsbury Group John Maynard Keynes. It will star Rory Kinnear as Keynes and Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova as Lydia Lopokova, the celebrated Russian ballet dancer with whom he fell in love.

MUSIC
Sigur Rós: ÁRA
(Schwarzman Centre, Oxford, 26 June-19 July)

The pioneering Icelandic band present a multi-sensory listening experience featuring live recordings from their orchestral world tour in a hand-built environment, produced in collaboration with spatial audio specialists Loss><Gain and Oxford University academics.

THEATRE
Fences
(At Leeds Playhouse 11-26 September, then touring to Oxford, London, Manchester and Nottingham through the autumn)

This autumn, Headlong Theatre Company, in co-production with Leeds Playhouse, Lyric Hammersmith and Home Manchester, will tour a new production of August Wilson’s seminal play, directed by Daniel Bailey to Leeds, Oxford, London, Manchester and Nottingham.