Amid the venue crisis, Manchester nightclub XLR is trying a new model to stay afloat. On opening night, intoxication is down and women say they feel safer from spiking

‘If it doesn’t work, I can say I tried something,” shrugs Chris Hindle. We are sat in XLR, his 200-capacity club in Manchester’s student-filled Withington suburb, discussing the figurative anvil dangling over club culture.

The Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) recently reported that the UK has lost three venues a week in the past three months, seven in 10 venues are failing to make a profit and a quarter of towns and cities that had nightclubs in 2020 now have none.

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Disney CEO Bob Iger has been under fire for several days now for pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air "indefinitely," with Disney+'s cancellation page actually crashing a couple of times from all the traffic as people rushed to make their displeasure known. So what better time for the studio to release the first teaser trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu , a feature film spinoff from its megahit Star Wars series The Mandalorian ? Grogu and Mando, together again on an exciting space adventure, will certainly be a crowd-pleaser.

Grogu (aka Baby Yoda) won viewers' hearts from the moment he first appeared onscreen in the first season of The Mandalorian , and the relationship between the little green creature and his father-figure bounty hunter has only gotten stronger. With the 2023 Hollywood strikes delaying production on S4 of the series, director Jon Favreau got the green light to make this spinoff film.

Per the official logline:

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The Last Week Tonight host spoke about the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and why we should be worried about what this means for the US

John Oliver has voiced his concern for the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show and his support of his fellow late-night TV host.

On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, the comedian started by speaking about the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “A person getting shot is tragic and a person getting shot for their ideas is horrifying, that is true no matter what their ideas are,” he said.

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He is arguably America’s greatest living painter, elevating everyday black life to the level of epic, jaw-dropping masterpieces. Now, for his biggest European show, the artist talks us through his disturbing new works

History weighs on Kerry James Marshall, though not all that heavily. When he talks about the hefty subjects of his art – from slavery to civil rights – he does so with a disarming, disquieting lightness. Maybe that’s because at almost 70 years old, and at the peak of his popularity, he’s seen it all.

Marshall grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, just a few blocks away from where the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a white supremacist attack that killed four young black girls, took place in 1963. When his family moved to Los Angeles, they ended up right in the middle of the 1965 Watts riots, a six-day uprising fuelled by growing racial tension in the poorest part of the city.

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Starring Rosamund Pike as a judge whose son is accused of sexual assault, a filmed version of the hit play lands in UK and Australian cinemas this month

When Prima Facie premiered at the Stables Theatre in Sydney in 2019, it sliced through the theatre landscape. Suzie Miller’s one-woman drama about a criminal barrister confronting the brutal inadequacies of sexual-assault prosecutions has since become a global phenomenon.

Starring Jodie Comer in London and on Broadway, it won an Olivier award in 2024 , broke box-office records, has been staged in nearly 50 countries in many languages and resulted in real changes to how the law works .

For Miller, who came late to theatre after working as a human rights lawyer, the play’s success was both a vindication and a provocation.

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Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver and Jeremy Allen White team up for first movie in Star Wars universe since 2019

The Star Wars universe is returning to the big screen with our first look at The Mandalorian and Grogu , next summer’s big bet from Disney.

The film follows the hit Disney+ show The Mandalorian and was born out of the delay insisted on the fourth season by the Hollywood strikes of 2023. In that time, the strategy for the franchise was re-evaluated and a film was prioritised over the fourth season.

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Still an arena-filling prospect long after their late-80s heyday, the veteran band bring political bite and pop prowess to a crowd-pleasing set

Towards the end of their two-hour set, Deacon Blue play a song from their most recent album, The Great Western Road , called Late ’88. A sweet slice of disco-infused pop, it is about the moment that Deacon Blue’s career took off, in the wake of their debut album Raintown, a point rammed home by the stageside screens, which show the band in their youth: a veritable riot of white denim, leather jackets and questionable millinery. “We seemed to do it all and it all seemed so easy,” sings Ricky Ross, his voice echoed by that of co-vocalist Lorraine McIntosh, as indeed it was then.

You can’t really blame Deacon Blue for re-asserting how successful they were. They are the kind of band pop histories generally overlook – squeezed out of the late 80s narrative by the rise of acid house and Madchester at one extreme and Stock Aitken Waterman at the other – but they were, by any metric, both huge and inescapable: when they play their 1989 hit Fergus Sings the Blues, you find yourself automatically imagining it coming out of a radio, so omnipresent was it on BBC Radio 1 at the time.

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Last week, the celebrated US music video director died of breast cancer aged 63. We chart her best – and most controversial – music videos

The first music video Diane Martel directed was for the debut single by hardcore hip-hop group Onyx. Filmed predominantly in South Jamaica, Queens, and allegedly featuring real guns, it’s a grimy and energetic video, yo-yoing between the group performing on a beach and aggressive closeups shot in dimly lit basements. Martel, a young white woman who had directed two documentaries, might have seemed like an unlikely choice, but according to Onyx member Fredro Starr, she properly mucked in. “She would be getting on the floor, like getting dirty with it,” he said in one interview . “She made that video. If you wasn’t a director who was willing to get dirty, that video wouldn’t have came out like that. I gotta give her the props.”

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The former presidential candidate sticks to the script in a memoir that will only cause further bad blood

Almost a year after the 2024 election there are still some houses with “Harris” signs in their windows dotted around my liberal Philadelphia neighbourhood. The result left many people in a state of shock and denial, unable to process exactly what went wrong.

No one was more shocked than Kamala Harris, whose inner circle had been confident on election night that they’d eked out a win during the whirlwind campaign. Cupcakes with “Madam President” toppings were ready to go; champagne on ice. “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, which functions as a political postmortem.

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