Billed as a “fresh take” for a new generation, this wild and windblown new Sense and Sensibility, directed by Blue Jean’s Georgia Oakley, feels like the perfect Jane Austen adaptation for our tempestuous times. Three decades on from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s classic 1995 version, but by no means in its shadow, it stars a luminous Daisy Edgar-Jones as sensible Elinor and a magnetic Esmé Creed-Miles as emotional Marianne. George MacKay makes a thoughtful, charming Edward Ferrars and Frank Dillane a wonderfully caddish John Willoughby, while a hilarious Fiona Shaw as Mrs Jennings all but steals the show.  It’s beautifully shot but far from chocolate-box: the disinherited Dashwood women’s Barton Cottage is small and dimly lit, underlining the way their security and choices are shaped by inheritance laws and marriage prospects. We see them damp and dishevelled, their hair un-done. Crucially, the film’s emotional centre is not simply the sisters’ romances but their tender and touching relationship with each other. 

Lisa O’Kelly, writer

Sunil Gupta’s commitment to exploring queer love, everyday life and politics has been unerring. Many of the key projects in his more than 50 years of photographic endeavour feature in this survey. It begins with his early forays with the camera in Montreal and New York, which set the tone for a practice informed ever since by a documentary impulse allied to a profound and moving personal intimacy. Among much else, Gupta has explored clandestine gay love in Delhi, the movement against Section 28 in the UK, his own HIV diagnosis, and most recently (with his partner, the photographer Charan Singh) contemporary queer coupledom. And Gupta is as experimental with form as he is rigorous in exploring his subjects. It adds up to one of the most original and inventive bodies of work in contemporary photography, which makes this show essential.

Ben Luke, Nerve art critic

When young couple Lil (Lara Ricote) and Ben (Samuel Bottomley) break up seconds after signing the lease on their new London flat, they’re stuck with each other in this entirely charming new comedy from writer Jess Bray. Ricote made an impact last year as a cast member on Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping and is already a high achiever on the live circuit, but this is her first acting role. You wouldn’t know it. There’s something insanely appealing and naturalistic about her performance; it’s difficult to take your eyes off her. The supporting cast of friends and new love interests bulges with brilliant comedy talent including Charlie Clive, Catherine Cohen and SNL UK’s Jack Shep and Hammed Animashaun. A tender, spiky and ultimately adorable addition to the Channel 4 comedy stable.

Julia Raeside, writer

Emily St John Mandel has a real knack for taking the biggest, scariest dangers of our modern world (pandemics, extreme wealth, technology) and exploring them through gripping speculative fiction. Her 2014 breakthrough novel Station Eleven was a perfect literary dystopia, which was turned into a pretty much perfect TV drama. Her latest, Exit Party, doesn’t hit those heights but it’s completely absorbing. It weaves together the themes of climate collapse and surveillance tech, and the settings are a near-future Paris, covered in a protective weather dome, and an Orwellian LA where, for the price of stability, citizens are subject to total surveillance. There’s some tricksy, not entirely successful, multiverse plotting, but this will make you read news stories about Palantir with new levels of anxiety.

Sarah Donaldson, Nerve co-founder

Last September, Simon Russell Beale was forced to pull out of a production of Titus Andronicus following a colon cancer diagnosis. Now, he returns to the stage at Pitlochry Festival theatre in some style, starring as Liberace in Martin Sherman's meta-theatrical fantasia about the legendarily extravagant musician. Under Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti's direction, Fra Fee plays a hedonistic young writer who wants to take Liberace to task for his desecration of classical music, his shameless materialism and his refusal to publicly admit his sexuality. Beale's lurid Liberace, though, would rather entertain the audience with a stream of innuendo, OTT acting and flamboyant recitals. It is a witty, wacky exploration of art, identity and legacy – and what a joy it is to see Beale back on stage, having such fun.

Fergus Morgan, writer

Not to be confused with The Wargame, also on Sky, which sees Michael Gove cosplaying as the prime minister during a Russian attack on Britain, this legal thriller is less disturbing – and way more glamorous. A sharply scripted and soapily addictive eight-parter follows the bitter divorce battle between a fading film star (Sienna Miller) and her slimy tech-billionaire husband (Dominic West). When the high-profile couple’s marriage breaks down, they hire rival divorce lawyers to play dirty. Cue ruthless tactics, courtroom fireworks and copious plot twists. A second season, chronicling a different case, is already filmed. Enjoyably juicy, with not a Gove in sight.

Michael Hogan, writer

It’s a rare treat to see an 85-minute romcom on stage and Douglas Lyons’s Table 17, a hit in New York and LA, is a real charmer. Flight attendant Jada and music producer Dallas meet for dinner years after a broken engagement to thrash out what went wrong and see if there’s anything worth reviving. A rotating banquette and clever lighting break up the conversation to whisk us through their relationship, from meet-cute to proposal to death spiral, and the actors regularly turn to the audience to reveal what they’re really thinking. Musical theatre star Marisha Wallace and Hamilton alumnus Jamael Westman make for a winning ex-couple, while scene-stealer Michael Rishawn does triple duty as a douchebro barman, a smooth love rival and a bitchy waiter with a buffet of zingers. Slickly directed by Zhailon Levingston, Table 17 isn’t a play of big ideas or hidden depths but it’s a hell of a crowd-pleaser.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

Ross McElwee is one of the world’s top documentarians so here’s an early admission… I was pretty ignorant of his 50-year back catalogue when I saw an early preview of his devastating, elegiac new film. Always an artist who has turned the camera on himself and his family, here McElwee uses archive footage of his son Adrian interwoven with scenes of a Hollywood attempt to recreate his classic 1985 documentary Sherman’s March. We watch Adrian as a young kid catching crayfish, continue through his college years and his own burgeoning film-making efforts, up to his desperate struggles with drugs and final tragic death from a fentanyl overdose, aged just 27. Remake won the Golden Globe’s impact award at last year’s Venice Film Festival. I emerged from the cinema keen to see more of McElwee’s work – which sadly is hard to track down, at least in the UK.

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

THEATRE
The Bed and Breakfast Star
(Polka Theatre, London SW19, 25 March-25 April 2027; Mercury Theatre, Colchester, 29 April-2 May 2027 – with further tour venues and dates to be announced)

The pioneering theatre company Cardboard Citizens, which has spent over three decades making work exploring themes of homelessness and poverty, has joined forces with Crisis to present its first show for children. The Bed and Breakfast Star, an adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson’s much-loved book, explores homelessness from a child’s perspective. With more than 177,000 children living in temporary accommodation in England today, the show promises to be incredibly timely.

PERFORMANCE
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith: Correspondences
(Southbank Centre, London SE1, 4 February 2027)

Part of a decades-long collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, this live performance is billed as “a singular encounter between sound, poetry, film and installation… through fragile landscapes, human histories and the invisible forces that bind them.” Tickets are selling fast!

PODCASTING/TALK
The Blindboy Podcast Live
(UK tour starts 18 October, Brighton Dome, ends 1 November in Nottingham)

Combining history, psychology, politics, art, science, music and storytelling, Blindboy’s podcast has more than 60 million listeners globally and he’s been described as “one of Ireland’s most distinctive cultural voices”. He’s now taking the show on the road for his biggest tour to date and promises a special guest and thoughtful conversation at every venue.