In Superman: Man of Tomorrow, will the Man of Steel team up with Lex Luthor? Duke it out with him in the galaxy’s most unexpected custody battle? Or tackle climate change and LGBTQ+ rights?

Is tomorrow just another day, as the adage goes? Or is it suddenly a franchise-within-a-franchise, a special wing of the nascent DC Universe focused in hard on what all those nutty Kryptonian super-cousins have been up to? What we do know, thanks to studio boss James Gunn in a series of social media splurts , is that Tomorrow is most definitely the future. Gunn has revealed that his follow-up to Superman will be titled Superman: Man of Tomorrow, due out in 2027. Now you might think you’ve heard the title before, and that would be because you have: next year sees the release of the already announced Supergirl, which up until June was titled Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow .

What are we to make of that title? In the comics, “Man of Tomorrow” has long been one of Superman’s many sobriquets, a hopeful tagline suggesting he represents the future rather than the past. It’s cropped up in everything from old radio serials to Alan Moore’s bittersweet Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? graphic novel, and even lent its name to a 2020 animated movie. It’s a phrase that carries the weight of the best part of a century of mythology. And yet given Gunn’s online spats with Trumpian anti-immigration types – hello Dean Cain! – over what the latter saw as Superman’s overly friendly attitude towards immigrants, it’s hard not to imagine the film-maker chuckling to himself at the new title’s liberal undertones.

Manchester Opera House
Endlessly entertaining jukebox show frames its plot around a seaside store’s workers to purvey the band’s hits

Under a stark spotlight a woman sings an ode to her stillborn son who was “born sleeping” 13 years previously. “You are only a heartbeat away,” she sings. “And my love one day will find you.” It’s a beautiful, sombre moment, made all the more moving by the fact that 10 minutes earlier the same character was line-dancing to dance-pop hoedown 5,6,7,8 with a giant cardboard cutout of a cactus on her head.

Welcome to the whiplash world of Here & Now, the latest in a lengthy line of jukebox musicals based around pop back catalogues. This one – directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, with a book by Shaun Kitchener – fuses the myriad hits of Steps on to a storyline based in a seaside supermarket, Better Best Bargains. There we find best friends Caz (an excellent Rebecca Lock), Vel (Jacqui Dubois), Robbie (Blake Patrick Anderson) and Neeta (Rosie Singha), each determined to have a “summer of love” and change their lives while dealing with, variously, useless straight men, pesky adoption agencies, anxiety, latent homosexuality, daddy issues, and via an odd end-of-act-one twist, a faux French ladies man turned capitalist landlord scumbag.

A flourishing lineup of immersive storytelling experiments are taking visitors into novels, nightclubs and outer space

In the largest cinema at the Venice film festival, guests gather for the premiere of Frankenstein , Guillermo del Toro’s lavish account of a man who dared to play God and created a monster. When the young scientist reanimates a dead body for his colleagues, some see it as a trick while others are outraged. “It’s an abomination, an obscenity,” shouts one hide-bound old timer, and his alarm is partly justified. Every technological breakthrough opens Pandora’s box. You don’t know what’s going to crawl out or where it will then choose to go.

Behind the main festival venue sits the small ruined island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Since 2017, it’s been home to Venice Immersive, the event’s groundbreaking section dedicated to showcasing and supporting XR (extended reality) storytelling. Before that it was a storage facility, before that a plague quarantine zone. Eliza McNitt, this year’s jury president, remembers the time when work on the exhibits had to be paused because the builders had uncovered human bones in the ground. “There’s something haunting about the fact that we come to the oldest film festival in the world to present this new form of cinema,” she says. “We’re exploring the medium of the future, but we’re also in conversation with ghosts.”

Barn theatre, Cirencester
Featuring extraordinary voice acting, this play about the birth of the BBC’s farming drama will equally satisfy superfans and everyday folk

Even regular listeners to Radio 4’s The Archers can balk at the laborious annual plotline of Lynda Snell’s amateur dramatic production in Ambridge. So the BBC’s licensing of a spin-off stage play to mark January’s 75th anniversary of the farming drama raised fears of a Snelly cavalcade of arch jokes for superfans.

In fact, Haywire – written by Tim Stimpson, author of almost 500 Archers scripts – is, across the length of eight radio episodes, a smart drama with a strong sense of broadcasting and social history.

Hammersmith Apollo, London
The Egot-winning actor presents semi-formed thoughts on things from ageing to AI in an undemanding show

Beginning an evening of amiable waffling, Whoopi Goldberg announces that she isn’t about to discuss all the terrible things happening in the world. From an audience not too shy to heckle (albeit mostly with variations on “We love you!”) comes an unsolicited plea to engage with one such inflammatory topic: the current US president. Goldberg doesn’t flinch. “It’s worse than that,” she says. “I’m turning 70.”

So begins an undemanding set which often plays like a Grumpy Old Women spin-off and echoes the title of Goldberg’s 2010 book Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There? The Egot-winning actor, host of The View and great-grandmother dispenses semi-formed thoughts on everything from ageing and AI (“Fuck Alexa”) to misbehaving children (she once threatened to eat one). She is sharp on the discomfort of being attracted to “some kid” of 60, her worry being that she will be branded not a cradle-snatcher but a grave-robber. Other moments, such as a warning about how to opt out of sharing personal information via mobile phones, are like reading a boomer relative’s Facebook page.

The US author on his early love of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the genius of Judy Blume, and finding perfection in Agatha Christie and Gustave Flaubert

My earliest reading memory
I recall lying in the bath, age seven or eight, reading the final page of Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself, then turning to the novel’s opening and beginning again. Memory is untrustworthy, but Blume is a genius who has that effect on her reader.

My favourite book growing up
We’re always growing up; we’re always choosing a new favourite. For me, once, this was Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. Later I’d have said JD Salinger’s Nine Stories. Later, still, John Cheever’s Collected Stories, Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, my favourite changing as I did. Maybe I’m finally old enough to understand that favourite is impossible to designate. Or maybe I’d say my current favourite is Don DeLillo ’s Underworld.

(Avon Terror Corps)
Matthieu Ruben N’Dongo amps up the intensity on a second album that makes an uncanny atmosphere out of swarming electronics, grisly vocals and polyrhythmic percussion

Sacred Lodge is the side project of Paris-based producer and sound artist Matthieu Ruben N’Dongo. Rooted in his ethnomusicological research, which explores the role of music in ritual contexts and his own Equatoguinean heritage, the results are unsettling but compelling, characterised by heady percussion and swarming electronics. But while his 2019 debut Hijos Del Sol was made up of murky downtempo instrumentals, N’Dongo’s follow-up amps up the intensity almost beyond recognition, with a collection of sludgy, abrasive tracks.

One of the starkest differences is the use of vocals, which have previously only featured as echoey background textures. On Ambam, N’Dongo makes full use of his voice. Inspired by the tradition of field hollers and ritual chants (specifically of the Fang people, from which his father originates), he ranges from guttural metal-style growls to distorted screams and yelps; some lyrics are delivered in a panting, rap-like cadence. On opening track Wa Wa Ke Wa Wa Yi, N’Dongo’s grisly tone is offset by composer and vocalist Sara Persico, whose smoky, seductive drawl only reinforces the uncanny atmosphere.

(4AD)
Classic melodies, spring water acoustics and pared-back poeticism about living in the moment fill Adrianne Lenker and co’s latest with life

Is love enough? It can feel twee to suggest as much in the face of so many monumental existential crises. But if anyone can restore your faith in human connection, it’s US folk-rockers Big Thief , fronted by Adrianne Lenker at her most earnest. The 34-year-old lives minute-to-minute with such intensity that it might be all too much for some listeners: “At the bridge of two infinities / What’s been lost and what lies waiting,” is how she sees her life on the title track. But whether coming to terms with ageing on Incomprehensible or reconciling with an estranged friend on Los Angeles , always in the moment whether in bed with a lover or standing under a rainswept Eiffel Tower, her poetic but unadorned lyrics are a field guide to living well.

Big Thief have contracted to a trio after the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik, but a sizeable supporting cast build these songs into big, rumpled arrangements. These nine perfect songs bristle with life, from the classic melodies to the spring water acoustic riffs to the bustling rhythm section. Ambient legend Laraaji contributes zither and percussion, and his wordless vocal expressions on Grandmother articulate everything about the joy of existence.

(Chandos)
The teeming textures of Nielsen’s 5th symphony are controlled with care and refinement by Edward Gardner, with the Bergen Philharmonic – and soloist Alessandro Carbonare – outstanding

E dward Gardner ’s nine years as principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic came to an end in July 2024, but their recording projects together continue to appear. This is the third instalment of Gardner’s Nielsen series with the orchestra, after previous discs featuring the third and fourth symphonies. Like its predecessors, the latest release pairs a symphony with one of Nielsen’s concertos, in this case the Fifth Symphony, completed in 1922, with the work for clarinet composed six years later.

Both works, as well as the early Helios Overture, receive outstanding performances from the Bergen players, and Gardner controls the teeming textures of the symphony with great refinement. Perhaps there’s just a little too much control towards the close of the magnificent opening movement, when the snare-drum player is instructed to do his best to disrupt the rest of the orchestra; a bit more wildness might have made that passage even more powerfully effective, and the surge into the second movement that follows even more cathartic.