A new restoration of Donnie Darko gets one screening and a live introduction on Halloween weekend. A Tenerife noise label takes over Café OTO for three nights running, and an actor performs Dickens’s own ghost story by candlelight a few rooms from where he wrote it. Frieze Sculpture and a posthumous Martin Parr show both close Sunday, and Battersea Arts Centre turns its whole programme over mid-week.
A hand-checked shortlist of the week in London culture · new every Thursday
Friday is the hinge of the week: a new Donnie Darko restoration at the Garden Cinema, a candlelit Dickens ghost story opening at his own former house, a rare book fair in Chelsea, and Café OTO's takeover already a night in. Saturday is for things that won’t be there Monday — a posthumous Martin Parr show in Hackney, a young American painter’s first London exhibition in Mayfair — and Sunday closes out Frieze Sculpture before the park empties for winter. Battersea Arts Centre spends the week turning over: its immersive horror takes its last bow Sunday, and by Wednesday an unrehearsed new show has taken the same stage.
No food pick this issue — the one lead we found rested on a single marketplace listing with nothing to back it up, and a Day-of-the-Dead dinner elsewhere was Fever-ticketed, which rules it out on principle rather than quality. Vortex Jazz Club and Kings Place are sitting this one out too, for reasons in the footer below.
A new restoration of Richard Kelly's time-loop teen apocalypse gets a single Halloween-weekend screening, introduced live by film historian Ellisha Izumi. One showing, not a week-long run — the kind of thing you plan an evening around, not catch on a whim.
Twenty-five years on, still the strangest thing a studio ever greenlit. You get exactly one night to see the new print.
Keroxen, the experimental festival and label based in Tenerife, takes over OTO for three different lineups across three nights — Thursday runs from Akane to Nkisi, Friday brings Mauricio Takara and Memotone, Saturday closes with Alejandra Cárdenas (Ale Hop) and a Spencer Clark performance billed as "The Spectacle of Light Abductions." Each night gets its own light installation and a record stall carrying both labels' catalogues; every ticket includes a free vinyl.
A festival and its own label, flown in whole, for one week at one address.
Actor James Swanton performs Dickens's own ghost story "The Signal-Man" alongside "The Trial for Murder," solo, inside the house where Dickens wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Swanton has built a career on horror roles for the BBC and on screen; here it's one man, one room, and two of the creepiest things Dickens ever wrote.
A ghost story, told once a night, in the house its author actually lived in — no gimmick, just the right room.
More than 80 dealers in rare books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera fill Chelsea Old Town Hall for the 34th year of this fair, with guided tours and signings alongside the stands. No theme, no curation beyond "genuinely old and genuinely interesting" — the pleasure is in the browsing.
Free entry on Saturday to wander past stock most of us will only ever see behind glass.
Classical guitarist Samrat Majumder traces the instrument's debt to John Dowland and Bach's lute writing, then premieres a new commission by Arthur Keegan, YCAT's 2026–27 Composer Fellow. An hour at lunchtime, in a hall built for exactly this kind of close listening.
A lunch hour spent properly, with a world premiere built into the ticket.
Dead Centre, the company behind some of the sharpest formal experiments in London theatre this decade, team up with writer Emilie Pine for a show that resets itself nightly: the script stays fixed, but two new performers each night are fed every line through an earpiece, having never rehearsed it.
Unrehearsed actors, a fixed script, an earpiece feeding every line: reason enough on its own to book opening night.
Fifteen new oil paintings, all made this year, in American painter Louis Fratino's first-ever London solo show — nudes, a sauna, two New York subway scenes, a self-portrait, after years of showing almost exclusively in New York.
Fujicolour prints from Parr's 1983–85 New Brighton series, printed from the original negatives and shown as Rocket's fifteenth solo exhibition of his work — the first since his death last December. Seaside Britain at its most overexposed and most tender.
Seven weeks of large-scale outdoor sculpture across the park's English Gardens comes down this weekend — last chance to walk the full trail before the park empties out for winter.
Immersive Octopus's horror — the team behind Peaky Blinders: The Rise — takes its final bow three days before Good Sex opens in the same room.