Tabard theatre, London
A man returns home having been reported missing for 24 hours in this welcome revival of RC Sherriff’s postwar hit

Our perceptions of the first world war are greatly shaped by RC Sherriff. His 1928 trench tragedy Journey’s End, a drama for doomed youth, became a school play staple and has been filmed or televised, with degrees of looseness, six times, as well as explicitly being a model for Blackadder Goes Forth.

As can happen to authors of a classic, Sherriff suffered from his other output being overlooked, but the punchy above-pub Tabard theatre in west London has revived Home at Seven, a now forgotten 1950 success. In a curious parallel to the Blackadder link, Home at Seven’s main cultural prominence has been in Dad’s Army studies, as the play in which the Captain Mainwaring actor Arthur Lowe was touring the UK when he died in 1982.

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Toronto film festival: the actor makes for a hit-and-miss first time film-maker with the undeniably involving true story of Scottish rappers who pretended to be American

At the start of the century, a struggling Scottish rap duo decided to overhaul their image in extreme fashion: they began posing as two Americans from California, and managed to secure themselves a record deal with a label in London. Eventually the hoax was revealed, and one of them released a memoir about the charade. That wild story has now been adapted into a film, California Schemin’, which marks the alternately confident and unsteady directorial debut of actor James McAvoy.

McAvoy is a son of Scotland himself, and perhaps feels some kinship with rappers Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, who found the cultural tastemakers of the south to be indifferent or even hostile to Scottish artists. Though McAvoy has fared just fine as an actor, Bain and Boyd – who would come to be known as Silibil N’ Brains – had a much tougher go of it as rappers, an art form that has long been preoccupied with image and street cred. But in the time of Eminem, these two white boys from Dundee figured that they might have a proper shot at stardom if they simply changed accents and invented a little backstory. California Schemin’ is a chronicle of that deception, and a portrait of a tightly bonded friendship straining terribly under the stress of a massive lie.

California Schemin’ is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution

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Toronto film festival: after Glass Onion underwhelmed, Rian Johnson’s self-aware, star-packed Benoit Blanc series makes a barnstorming return to form

If Glass Onion wasn’t quite the deserving follow-up to Knives Out that many of us had hoped it would be (it was more focused on the bigger rather than better), it was at the very least a deserved victory lap. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit brought us back to the starry, slippery fun of the 70s and 80s, when films like this would be a dime a dozen and it was a surprise hit, making almost eight times its budget at the global box office. While Kenneth Branagh had seen commercial success already with his Poirot revival two years prior, his retreads felt too musty, and the actor-director too miscast, for the genre to truly feel like it was entering an exciting new period.

Johnson’s threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, is the second as part of his Netflix deal (one that cost an estimated $450m) and arrives as the whodunnit genre has found itself close to over-saturation on both big but mostly small screen. Yet as many murders as there might have now been in buildings or residences involving couples and strangers of questionable perfection, nothing has quite captured that same sense of kicky, sharp-witted fun that Johnson had shared with us way back when. His first Knives Out film premiered at the Toronto film festival to one of the most buzzed audience reactions I can remember, a thrill I was able to feel once again as he returned to unveil his latest chapter, a rip-roaring return to form that shows the series to be confidently back on track and heading somewhere with plenty more places to go on the way.

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Many felt Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza docufiction was robbed when Jim Jarmusch’s latest took the top prize. Yet accusations of moral cowardice on the part of the jury are naive and unfair

There are standing ovations and there are jury decisions.

Jim Jarmusch’s droll, quirky, very charming film Father Mother Sister Brother got a mere six minutes for its standing ovation at Venice – though one day we’re going to have to introduce some Olympic-style standardisation to these timings. But it got the top prize, the Golden Lion, from Alexander Payne’s jury.

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Utilita Arena, Sheffield
The singer announces he is thrilled to begin his first tour since taking time off for his mental health, but is visibly nervous and at one moment breaks into tears

Lewis Capaldi is a pop star known for his patter. But tonight, he warns the crowd he is feeling too overwhelmed to perform his usual funnyman routine. “I probably won’t say lots this evening because I don’t know what to say,” he says. “I’m just genuinely thrilled that this is still a possibility for me.”

The 28-year-old being lost for words tonight is understandable. In 2023, Capaldi announced he was taking a hiatus from touring, after sharing his struggles with his mental health and his diagnosis in 2022 of Tourette syndrome. Having disappeared from the spotlight for the better part of two years, he made a triumphant return at Glastonbury earlier this summer for an unannounced and emotional set on the Pyramid stage. Tonight’s Sheffield show, however, marks the Scottish singer’s first headline performance since his extended break. “We’re back baby,” he tells the crowd at one point.

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The author’s blackly comic breakout novel won her awards and tattooed superfans. As she releases a follow-up, she talks about growing up as an outsider – and the best advice she received from Margaret Atwood

Mona Awad was trying on a forest-green, deer-patterned dress when she realised that the psychotically twee characters from her 2019 novel, Bunny, had burrowed back into her psyche.

“I looked in the mirror and thought: This isn’t a dress for me, this is a dress for Cupcake,” she says, referencing one of the antagonists from her breakout book. “I started thinking about her, and the other bunnies,” says the Canadian author, “and I was like: I have to go back.”

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The cricket mentor takes on his trickiest challenge yet in Liverpool. Plus, the shocking death of a promising young jockey. Here’s what to watch this evening

8.10pm, BBC One

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Growing up dirt poor in Arizona’s Church of Immortal Consciousness, I showed an early talent for the game. Soon the cult’s leader began grooming me to become a grandmaster – even if it meant separating me from my mother …

When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Because of its title, many people think the film is about Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who bested the Soviet Union in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky to become the first US-born world chess champion in history. Really, it’s about how the American chess world was desperate to find the next Bobby Fischer after the first one disappeared. The story follows Josh Waitzkin, a kid from Greenwich Village in New York, who sits down at a chess board with a bunch of homeless dudes in the park one day and miraculously discovers that he’s a child prodigy – at least that is the Hollywood version of the story.

Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I didn’t simply love the movie. I was obsessed with it. Any kid who’s ever felt lost or misunderstood or stuck in the middle of nowhere has dreamed of picking up a lightsaber and discovering the Jedi master within. That was me in the summer of 1995, only with chess.

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Toronto film festival: the Oscar nominee makes for a compelling heroine in a solid and intermittently suspenseful tale of a professor stuck in a nightmare

The specific brilliance of Lesley Manville had been on display for those who knew where to look long before her first Oscar nomination. She’d been part of the enviable Mike Leigh troupe (her first nomination should have been for Another Year) and a permanent small-screen fixture, even if the size of her roles hadn’t correlated to the size of her talent. But after Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s singular magnum opus, Manville has enjoyed a spectacular boom, a long-deserved reward for her and an even bigger one for those of us watching.

The role came as she was entering her 60s, a period that can often leave female actors with grimly limited options, but she’s bucked the trend, not just through the sheer amount of work she’s found but also the unusual variety. She’s avoided the post-Book Club subgenre of mostly patronising comedies that squander older actors on pained pratfalls and found herself in far more interesting, and challenging, territory. She was a wife experiencing later stage sexual dissatisfaction in I Am Maria, a vicious Ma Barker type reigning over a North Dakota family of criminals in Let Him Go , a gun-toting ayahuasca-farming jungle doctor in Queer , the devious antagonist of the spy series Citadel , a cleaner turned fashionista in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris and an OnlyFans stripper in Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie. It’s hard to think of many post-Oscar recognition careers that have been quite so uniquely rewarding.

Winter of the Crow is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution

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