From Wild Horse Nine to Kings of Leon: Your Complete Week Ahead

John Malkovich is generating Oscar buzz for Wild Horse Nine, out now, and he anchors just one corner of a week that spans grime anniversaries, Elgar oratorios and a poker game with the devil. Martin McDonagh's dark comedy casts Malkovich as an ageing CIA agent with terminal cancer, sent to Easter Island with a younger colleague played by Sam Rockwell. It's the strongest single hook in a seven-day stretch packed with openings across film, music, art, stage and streaming.

What's new at the cinema?

Four films stand out:

• Wild Horse Nine — McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin) directs Malkovich and Rockwell on Easter Island.
• La Bola Negra — Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi expand Lorca's four-page fragment into a Spanish queer drama across three timelines, with Guitarricadelafuente, Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close.
• I Play Rocky — Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone in 1975, giving himself three days to write the role that became Rocky.
• One in a Million — the Sundance audience-award winner, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, follows a girl from childhood in Syria to adult life in Germany.

Which gigs and festivals matter?

Bristol's Simple Things festival (7 November, various venues) has hired guest curators for the first time in its 12-year history: Squid, Shabaka, Jeremy Deller and Cobrah pick acts including Hannah Diamond and the Avalanches. The London jazz festival runs 13–22 November; its opening night pairs a John Coltrane centenary celebration at the Barbican with Jazz Voice at the Royal Festival Hall, while saxophonist Jean Toussaint's JT5 plays World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens on Friday.

SBTV20 hits the O2 on Wednesday, marking 20 years of the pioneering grime platform with Chip, Ms Banks and Tinie Tempah, and honouring founder Jamal Edwards MBE, who died in 2022. In Gateshead on 8 November, Dinis Sousa conducts the Royal Northern Sinfonia, amateur choruses and soloists Sarah Connolly, Benjamin Hulett and Roderick Williams in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius — the oratorio at the heart of the 2025 film The Choral.

What do the galleries have?

Four shows open this week:

• Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires — V&A, London, 7 November to 9 May; 1,600 years of art and rarities including the 11th-century Enkolpion of Constantinos.
• Georg Wilson — Gainsborough's House, Sudbury, 8 November to 18 April; ecological, folkloric landscape painting.
• Ade Adesina — City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 7 November to 11 April; woodcuts and etchings on colonial history and the climate crisis.
• Katie Shannon — Goldsmith's Centre for Contemporary Art, London, to 13 December; lost musical histories and, in her words, "feminist rereadings of time and space".

Anything on stage?

Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish revisit 30 years of their cult series at the Royal Albert Hall on 11 November (Bristol, 5 December). Dominic Cooke revives Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 at the National's Lyttelton to 13 January; Michael Sheen plays Owain Glyndŵr in Gary Owen's Owain & Henry in Cardiff to 28 November; and Humanhood's duet-led Vortex runs at Sadler's Wells East, 10–14 November.

And for staying in?

Streaming brings 12 12 12 (Apple TV, 13 November), a heist thriller with Jamie Dornan and Anthony Mackie; Hunting Alice Bell (Channel 4, 11 November), co-created by Peter Bradshaw and David Baddiel with Simon Pegg; The Good Daughter (Sky Atlantic, 12 November), with Rose Byrne adapting Karin Slaughter's 2017 novel; and Diane Morgan's Cunk on Cinema (BBC Two, 12 November). Games deliver The Devil's Due and Shrek 2: Remastered, both 10 November. Albums arrive from Kings of Leon (O My My Beloved's predecessor vibes aside, O My Beloved is their self-produced 10th), Shyball's none — rather Shygirl's Swallow!, Skepta's first album in seven years (The Fork and Knife), and La Roux's Old Flames. For brain food: Josh Connolly's Talking Common podcast and chemist Asel Sartbaeva on The Life Scientific, explaining vaccines that could survive without refrigeration.

With Skepta back, Cunk on cinema and 1,600 years of Istanbul at the V&A, the week's only real problem is choosing.