It makes total sense that Esther Perel, the couples therapist extraordinaire, is credited as a consultant on this new movie from director-star Olivia Wilde. It’s an insightful, sensual, grown-up take on the relationship drama, which also calls on some great Hollywood comedic performances for its ultimate effect. Wilde and Seth Rogen play an uptight, unhappy pair who invite their looser, sexier upstairs neighbours (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) for dinner. And while such chamber pieces can feel stagey and stilted, The Invite is pure cinema throughout, with cunning, claustrophobic camerawork and a lovely 70s celluloid texture.

Ellen E Jones, Nerve film critic

I haven't been hung up on a Madonna album since 2005's Confessions on a Dancefloor, so it's only fitting that its sequel, Confessions II, is a record to worship. What a time for such a club-hopping trip down Madonna lane to drop. This heatwave is forcing us to sweat, so why not do it dancing to a raucous expression of house, disco, EDM, ethereal pop and breakbeat? Conceived, like its predecessor, as a 16-track DJ set, it begins with I Feel So Free, a Donna Summer-esque deep house banger, and ends with L.E.S. Girl, a dreamily nostalgic nod to her 80s misadventures on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In between, collabs with Sabrina Carpenter (Bring Your Love), Martin Garrix (Bizarre) and Stromae (My Sins Are My Savior), remind us of Madonna's playfulness, vulnerability and evolving desires as an artist. After 21 years, it's good to have her back.

Hanna Flint, culture writer

A deeply researched, informative and often enraging podcast about female artists from the 1970s to the 1990s. Sixty artists and curators including Sonia Boyce, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Bobby Baker recount their experiences of misogyny and racism at art school and beyond, with episodes dedicated to representation, activism and class politics. There are some shocking anecdotes, such as Griselda Pollock being asked to give up her scholarship to male students with lower marks, because “you’ll just go off and get married and waste it”, or the tragic story of Cecily Brennan’s sister Felicity, who was turned away from art college because her baby didn’t have a student card. New episodes are released weekly on Thursdays between now and 20 August. 

Kathryn Bromwich, culture writer

Do you remember the name from your history lessons – Gavrilo Princip, the young Bosnian Serb student who, in 1914, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thus triggered (or didn’t?) the first world war? Rajiv Joseph, who was nominated for a Pulitzer for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, has reimagined the build-up to this momentous event for his whip-smart and often farcical new play. The tale follows three hapless young lads taking their instructions from the Captain of the Serbian Army, when their thoughts are more on women and sandwiches. Stunning stage designs by Es Devlin, with the first few minutes a very clever optical illusion.

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

Much more than a guide to the best ice creams in London, Ruby Tandoh’s new book is an ode to pleasure. Honestly, you could be a lactose-intolerant* ice-cream refusenik and still enjoy this beautifully written, witty and knowledgeable 80-page handbook/travel guide/celebration of London’s multiculturalism through food (*though fyi there are tons of vegan options). Tandoh, who shot to fame on 2013’s Great British Bake Off, has become one of our best food writers and here she revisits her 2023 online-only ice cream guide to create a new, dinky, iPhone-sized, print-only version charting her obsessive quest around London’s weird and wonderful corners to seek out the very best “gelato, soft serve, booza, bingsu, sheeryakh, bastani, sundaes, choc ices and more”. It’s also deliciously biting in places (she refuses to eat at Anya Hindmarch’s The Ice Cream Project, “part of a PR gimmick by a Conservative party fundraiser” and disses Hackney Gelato, “as pervasive as the New York rat”. Lol.) I devoured it in one sitting as though it were a novel.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

Writer-director Richard Nelson has already told the story of George VI’s 1939 state visit to the Roosevelts in a 2009 radio drama and a 2012 film (Hyde Park on Hudson), and he’s still obsessed with this tense encounter between “distant cousins”. This is an old-fashioned play – just talking and moving furniture – but an insightful, compassionate one. Then, as now, the “special relationship” was lopsided. The Windsors are awkward supplicants trying to win America’s vital support against Hitler; the Roosevelts know their country won’t stand for it, yet. “Can we help?” asks Jemma Redgrave’s Eleanor Roosevelt. More pertinently: “Will we help?” With the transatlantic alliance so fragile, how to eat a hot dog becomes a question of geopolitical significance. The Roosevelts have the stars (Robert Lindsay plays FDR with patrician charm) but the Brits have the upper hand, at least on stage. Though 18 years older than “Bertie” was, Andrew Havill is exceptional as a decent, diffident man fighting to overcome both his stammer and the sense that he’s the sub’s-bench monarch after the implosion of Edward VIII. Rebecca Night’s Elizabeth is a proud and brittle fish out of water. Springwood becomes a kind of love story about imperfect heads of state and the countries they embody.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

The London Parks exhibition is hidden in plain sight at the Southbank’s Riverside terrace, and features photos taken by refugees and asylum-seekers, through whose eyes we see the city's greenery. These talented young artists were given photographic training by photographer and filmmaker Laura Jane Coulson, Kazzum Arts, and participatory arts facilitator and community photographer Federico Rivas. The resulting photographs explore how we can all peacefully belong in a public park, underneath the corroded metal rim of the basketball hoop, in the shade of a large English oak, or with mates on a bench overlooking parched grass. In a country where basic equality has barriers to entry, natural third spaces afford something simpler: the ability to say “I am here, I exist, and I love this Earth too”.

Anandita Abraham, culture writer

LABEL
Modern Toss: Having an Exhibition Yeah?
(The Drawing Room, London SE1, 14 August-6 September 2026)

To celebrate their 21st anniversary, cartoonists and self-confessed “cack-handed troublemakers” Modern Toss are holding a show of more than 100 of their artworks, from a token-operated swearing machine to their classic sketches.

FESTIVAL
Bradford Festival
(18-19 July)

A free celebration of outdoor arts includes immersive dance, puppets, music and theatre.

THEATRE
a small and quiet light
(Minerva theatre, Chichester, 21 August-12 September, then Orange Tree theatre, London TW9, 21 September-24 October)

This new play by playwright and actor Stephanie Street is based on the life of Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914-1944), a courageous secret agent and the first female radio operator to be sent undercover into France during the second world war. Priyanga Burford plays Khan as she’s brought in for questioning by the Gestapo.