Annely Juda Fine Art, London
With this new collection of bright and bold still lifes, iPad experiments and splotchy portraits, the art-world titan is beginning to show his age in intriguing, unsteady ways that remain inimitably Hockney

He’s still at it, is David Hockney. At 88 years old, and more than 60 years into a career that has seen him rise to the very top of the contemporary art pile, Hockney is still painting, still experimenting, still innovating, and still having shows.

This exhibition – the first in a swish ultra-central London location for Annely Juda, his gallery since the 1990s – is packed with paintings so new you can almost smell the wet paint. The opening room is all eye-searingly bright still lifes: chairs, tables, fruit and flowers. It’s the most old-fashioned and staid of subject matter, but nothing Hockney does is that dull, is it?

Albert Hall, Manchester
The Chicago musician’s fans are delighted by her alt-R&B, but for all the adventurous new songs tonight’s show does not quite live up to its ambition

Chicago-born Ravyn Lenae has been a cult darling of alt-R&B since the mid-2010s, an art-school dreamer whose whimsical, pop-tinged sound first drew notice when indie-slacker wunderkind Steve Lacy produced her Crush EP back in 2018. Tonight in Manchester, her kooky on-stage persona is mirrored by a surprisingly baby-faced group of misfits pressed against the barrier: a sea of trend-conscious twentysomethings in slouchy cargos and Y2K outfits desperate for a chance to brush against the singer’s hand. Supported by a guitarist, drummer and backing track, Lenae twirls on to the stage with the groove-heavy Sticky, and a lone wind machine whooshes her curls into the air.

Some songs from her 2024 album Bird’s Eye land on eager ears. The new material takes a sweet yet sharp turn from her earlier work, bouncing from the fun, rocksteady dubby speaker rattles in Candy to the tender, heart-on-chest ballad Love Is Blind. She airs her ruptured romantic frustrations in plaintive pleas: “How do you love me if you leave me behind?” But feels such as the slower, sad-girl moments on the new record, including Pilot, struggle to maintain the same momentum. Her recent melancholy undoubtedly means a great deal to her: Lenae punctuates the set with warm reflections on her own growth as an artist and offers a healthy, relatable dose of sisterly love and guidance: “Stay the course. Time is a gift.”

After Guardian writers shared their scariest Halloween watches , readers respond with their picks, from Jaws to The Blair Witch Project

My parents took me to see it in the theatre, under the impression that it would be appropriate for a seven-year-old. Princess Mombi’s macabre wardrobe of disembodied heads; the psychopathic laughter of the “wheelers”, with all four limbs ending in squeaky wheels; Nicol Williamson’s sinister, vicious Nome King – all are permanent fixtures in my unconscious hall of famous terrors. And Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy is eerie to match, a perfect uncanny heroine for a truly twisted “children’s” film. gradeoneirony

Low-key but well-designed Brazil-set chiller, which starts with a mysterious emergency call from a nightmarishly mouldering care home

The year is 1996, the country is Brazil, and young firefighter Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is returning to work after freezing up on the job. We see in flashback that, as a young child, she survived the horrific experience of her disturbed mother attempting to carry out a murder-suicide. Unluckily, one of her first jobs after returning to work is to respond to a call from a dilapidated nursing home in the middle of nowhere. The first sign that something is amiss when she and the crew rock up, is that nobody at the home will admit to having made the call in the first place. The place itself is also obviously trouble; it’s got the kind of damp in the walls that isn’t just a challenge for estate agents, but might also seep into your soul.

The stage is thus set for Ana’s past and present day perils to collide. Of course, people with traumatic backgrounds are 10 a penny in the horror genre at the moment; gone are the days when terror and unease sprang from the fact that this gnarly stuff was happening to a normal family, a nice young girl or an average bunch of teens, and could therefore happen to you, too. Perhaps film-makers have cottoned on to the fact that nobody really perceives themselves as having lived an untroubled life. Everybody is vulnerable.

A Mother’s Embrace turns out to be a minor but interestingly woozy and off-kilter entry into the canon of thoughtful trauma horror; its strongest suit is vibes and imagery, with the persistent queasy sensation that Ana has wandered into a bad dream. But is it her bad dream or someone else’s? The excellent and nightmarish production design suggests the answer doesn’t matter; she’s in trouble either way.

(Columbia)
The Catalan star’s monumental fourth LP features lyrics in 13 languages, references to female saints, the London Symphony Orchestra – and Björk on ‘divine intervention’

Last week, Rosalía appeared on a US podcast to discuss her fourth album. At one juncture, the interviewer asked if she didn’t think that Lux was demanding a lot from her listeners: a not entirely unreasonable question, given that it features a song cycle in four “movements”, based on the lives of various female saints and involves the 33-year-old Catalan star singing in 13 different languages to the thunderous accompaniment of the London Symphony Orchestra; and that it sounds nothing whatsoever like its predecessor, 2022’s Motomami. “Absolutely,” she responded, framing Lux as a reaction to the quick-fix dopamine hit of idly scrolling social media: something you had to focus on.

Demanding a lot from her listeners didn’t seem like something Rosalía was terribly bothered about, which is, in a sense, surprising. Pop has seldom seemed more prone to user-friendliness, to demanding as little as it can from its audience, as if the convenience of its primary means of transmission has affected its sound: it occasionally feels as though streaming’s algorithms – always coming up with something new that’s similar to stuff you already know – have started to define the way artists prosecute their careers. Then again, Rosalía has form when it comes to challenging her fanbase: variously infused with reggaeton, hip-hop, dubstep, dembow and experimental electronica, Motomami represented a dramatic pivot away from her 2018 breakthrough, El Mal Querer, a pop overhaul of flamenco that – incredibly – began life as the singer’s college project. It seems oddly telling that the biggest guest star on Lux is Björk, whose distinctive tone appears during Berghain, somewhere in between a resounding orchestral arrangement , Rosalía’s own operatic vocals and the sound of Yves Tumor reprising Mike Tyson’s “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me” tirade over and over again. It’s hard not to suspect that Rosalía sees Björk as a kindred spirit or even a model, someone who has predicated a decades-long solo career on making artistic handbrake turns through a glossy aesthetic.

Obsidian Entertainment; PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, PC
While its story fails to deliver, this enjoyable follow-up to Obsidian’s 2019 adventure makes it up with considerable advances elsewhere

The Outer Worlds 2 was originally announced in June for £70/$80 – making it Xbox’s most expensive game at the time. This was short-lived: Microsoft backtracked barely a month later, and kept it at the standard £60/$70. While The Outer Worlds 2 is technically bigger than its 2019 predecessor , that decision was smart: this is not a £70 game.

It is, however, a thoroughly enjoyable adventure that can easily suck up hours of your time, and one that improves upon the original game in meaningful ways. With far better combat and deeper role-playing mechanics, The Outer Worlds 2 smartly expands without spreading itself too thin – even if its story fails to delight.

His parable of collective social responsibility is a hardy classic but the Yorkshire playwright’s wider legacy should not be neglected

How on earth does one sum up JB Priestley? He wrote 39 plays, 26 novels and a huge amount of nonfiction and was dismissed by Virginia Woolf, with characteristic snootiness, as “one of the tradesmen of letters”. But, in art as in life, tradespeople are invaluable and with one of Priestley’s most popular plays, When We Are Married, about to be revived at London’s Donmar Warehouse, it is worth asking what the qualities are that make him a durable dramatist.

It makes sense to start with An Inspector Calls, which was famously revived by Stephen Daldry in 1992 in a production that has lasted for more than 30 years. What Daldry and his designer, Ian MacNeil , did was to cut through the play’s schematic outline and treat it as an expressionist fable about a family poised on the edge of self-destruction.

Performance artist’s aggressive art historian shouts at visitors and insults curators – and his tours are sold out

On a recent autumn evening in Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast museum, the guide Joseph Langelinck paused next to a Renaissance sculpture of a man with a wooden club and challenged his flock of 18 visitors to name the mythical hero depicted.

“Hercules?” a woman in the front row proposed in a soft voice. “If you know the answer, why can’t you tell us in a way that those at the back can hear you, too?” Langelinck admonished the visitor, before challenging her to name the 12 labours in chronological order. A non-answer elicited an eye roll and a tut. “Oh god, I feel like I’m back at school,” sighed the woman, 62-year-old Corinna Schröder.

A special haunted episode conjures supernatural forces, including the ghost of Melania, for another attack on the president and his cronies

The second episode of South Park ’s abrupt 28th season was meant to air this past Wednesday (the immediately preceding season 27 was just five episodes) but ended up being pushed back to Friday. This worked in the show’s favor, since tonight’s installment, titled The Woman in the Hat, is very much a Halloween special.

After shuttering Tegridy Farms, the Marsh family find themselves rudderless, living out of motels while patriarch Randy looks for work (thanks to the federal government shutdown , he can’t go back to his former job as a government geologist). Out of desperation, Randy moves his family into the old folk’s home where he’s stashed his elderly father.