What’s on this weekend? From Brexit Live to A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
Your guide to what’s worth seeing and reading this weekend
The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: Brexit Live: An ITV News Special
“Tom Bradby is joined by special guests in the studio, and ITV News presenters and correspondents around the country, for the countdown to the historic moment the UK leaves the European Union. Tonight’s event comes after three extensions and three-and-a-half years following the referendum on the issue of continued membership.”
ITV, 10pm on Friday 31 January
MOVIE: A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
Ian Freer in Empire
“There’s something potentially too on the nose about casting Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers. Hollywood’s nicest man playing the iconic children’s TV host who schooled a nation in kindness, decency and humanity seemingly writes itself. Only in Marielle Heller’s hands, it isn’t... It could easily be twee twaddle, but A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood is a nuanced, formally playful delight, a perfectly pitched and played ode to goodness. All hail Marielle Heller.”
Released Friday 31 January
BOOK: Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now by Joshua Wong and Jason Y Ng
Richard Lloyd Parry for The Times
“Wong is 23, but he has already spent close to a decade in active politics, served two prison sentences and established a look - specs, cropped fringe and skinny arms emerging from a short-sleeve shirt - that has made him internationally recognisable. Twenty-three years of life don’t add up to much of a memoir, but Wong and his ghostwriter have successfully and readably padded out the account with prison diaries, essays and manifestos. They communicate a sense of inevitability about the way that ‘a scrawny, nerdy Hong Kong schoolboy’ ended up becoming the chief antagonist of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Published Thursday 30 January
STAGE: Poet In Da Corner
Fiona Mountford in the London Evening Standard
“It’s rare to come across a piece of theatre that is so gloriously and absolutely itself as this sparks-flying homage to grime music and its role in shaping the life of a bullied, dyslexic teenage girl. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve seen all year and marks out writer/performer/lyricist/dancer Debris Stevenson as one of the brightest emerging talents around. It is, in short, the real deal.”
Returning for a limited run at the Royal Court Theatre, London, after its original premiere in 2018 - with previews from Thursday 30 January
