You’ll need to set aside a significant portion of your day to embark on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2-hour-and-41-minute voyage into the dark heart of Brazil’s 1970s military dictatorship, but it’s absolutely worth it. Narcos star Wagner Moura has been Oscar-nominated for his nuanced and time-jumping performance as an academic both fleeing persecution, and participating in the resistance. It’s the rogues' gallery of minor characters, however — each with their own set of moral compromises — which truly captivates. 

Ellen E Jones, Nerve film critic 

A wildly entertaining debut from 29-year-old New York author Madeline Cash. Suburban couple Bud and Catherine Flynn’s decision to open up their marriage has unleashed chaos in their household and neighbourhood, sending their three highly strung teenage daughters into spiralling crises of their own. Lost Lambs has everything you would want in a book of this kind: acerbic yet affecting one-liners (“While Abigail never looked down on her sister, except for in the obvious physical sense, jealousy and inferiority brewed inside Louise”), madcap subplots involving conspiracy theories and gnat infestations, and a host of memorable characters, from surly ex-soldier War Crimes Wes to local do-gooder Miss Winkle and a shadowy tech-billionaire with a penchant for blood.

Kathryn Bromwich, writer

Forget the film (but please read Ellen E Jones's fantastic Nerve column about it before you do): Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights soundtrack has got enough bodice-rippers to stand alone. This is the musician's first full-length release since the brat summer of 2025: the consensus is that it's goth spring next and we'll all be moping in our petticoats to the likes of 'Dying For You', 'Altars' and 'Seeing Things'. There's a lot of scratchy violin, drone and crushing Nine Inch Nails-style maximalism going on, some spoken word from John Cale and a very Kim Gordon-like cameo from Sky Ferreira. But no amount of sonic tulle and sounding miserable can distract from the very strong pop at its blackened core. I'll be lighting the candles for 80s power ballad 'Chains of Love' this week.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

A sequence of huge black and white photographs are projected on the back wall: they show Nazis at play - Helferinnenkorps (the female clerical staff) giggling and eating blueberries, families relaxing in deckchairs, a decorated Christmas tree - in the shadow of the Auschwitz concentration camp. These pictures resurfaced in 2007 when an album was handed in to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. 

Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s mesmerising documentary drama unfolds like a detective story as the archivists investigate: who was the collector? Who are the subjects? And, crucially, should they put the pictures on display? Turns out they were taken in the camp run by Rudolf Hoss - the officer whose family was at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film Zone of Interest. Tectonic Theater Project, who first staged the work in New York, are co-producers in London with a great ensemble cast. A strong start for the theatre’s new artistic director Lisa Spirling. 

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

Artist Delaine Le Bas works with painting, textiles, embroidery, video and performance to explore folklore, witchcraft and questions of identity, shaped by her Roma heritage. Her first solo museum show since her Turner prize nomination in 2024, Un-Fair-Ground is a mixed media installation featuring paintings, sculpture, and video. It’s full to the brim of Delaine’s spirit of love and collaboration, and is a total delight.

Delaine has transformed the gallery spaces, painting the floor white - with an occasional brick path - and clothing several walls in calico. As well as displaying her own work - including the monumental mural she made in-situ at Glastonbury 2024 - she has taken a deep and affectionate dive into the Whitworth archives, in particular the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection. She has also shared the space with Leslie Thompson and Sarah Lee from Venture Arts, an organisation working with neurodiverse and differently abled artists in Manchester. But there is no hierarchy in this show: works by artists including William Blake and Paula Rego are revealed behind openings, torn by Delaine, in her ‘Meet Your Neighbours’ wallpaper. 

Susan Ferguson, Nerve events

The dark web was originally created by the US department of defence so their spies could communicate in complete secrecy but in 2004 it was made public. As this chilling but deeply informative documentary explores, it wasn't long before it became a place for widespread child sexual exploitation, and today it's estimated that there are "over one million active users on child sexual abuse forums on the dark web." For this BBC Eye investigation for the reliably excellent Storyville strand, director Sam Piranty spent over seven years following US agent Greg Squire and a network of undercover investigators around the world - from Brazil to Russia - in their tireless attempts to track down paedophiles. 

Combining real footage of criminals being apprehended and interviews covering both how cases were cracked but also the emotional toll this work has on the lives and families of the investigators, Piranty handles the subject matter sensitively, never sensationalising but demonstrating the scale of the problem while attempting to offer a little hope in the darkness. A meeting between agent Greg Squire and one of the victims he saved many years later is particularly moving. A harrowing but necessary watch.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

No play epitomises Tom Stoppard’s improbable ambition more than his 1993 masterpiece Arcadia. Cutting between 1809 and the 1990s, while exploring poetry, mathematics, free will, sex, botany, England and the geometry of the universe, it dances on the edge of being incomprehensibly cerebral. The play’s success therefore rests on charm, comedy and trusting the audience to keep up. It also requires an agile director (Carrie Cracknell) and a virtuosic cast, including Isis Hainsworth and Seamus Dillane as a teenage genius and her Byronic tutor in one timeframe, with Leila Farzad and Prasanna Puwanarajah as duelling academics in the other. As the stage rotates beneath cosmic orbs, they bounce off each other like atoms until the present kisses the past and the heart meets the head. Famously, dauntingly clever, Arcadia is rarely staged for good reason but the challenge is the thing.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

THEATRE
Tao of Glass
(@sohoplace W1, London, 24 July – 12 September 2026)

West End premiere of an acclaimed collaboration between composer Philip Glass and performer-director Phelim McDermott (of Improbable theatre company) which “marries ten meditations on life, death and Taoist wisdom with ten brand new pieces of music from Glass”.

THEATRE
The Sea
(Theatre Royal Bath, 22 October - 7 November)

Booking opens this Monday, 23 February, for a new production of Edward Bond’s The Sea starring much-loved comedian and actor Jennifer Saunders with Jonathan Munby directing.