From Joker: Folie à Deux to Francis Bacon: a complete guide to this week’s entertainment

Going out: Cinema

Joker: Folie à Deux
Out now
The first Joker film was one of the best recent efforts to make a genuinely compelling piece of cinema out of comic-book source material. The second Joker film aims to keep fans of the first one on their toes by throwing Lady Gaga, as Harley Quinn, into the mix for a bit of jailhouse rock – this instalment being a musical, set mainly in prison.

A Different Man
Out now
Sebastian Stan, currently having a bit of a moment (see also: Trump biopic The Apprentice) and Adam Pearson (Under the Skin) star in this psychological thriller about a man with neurofibromatosis who undergoes transformative facial surgery, then becomes obsessed with an actor who is playing him in a play based on his life before surgery.

Young Frankenstein
Out now
Who needs new films when you have so many great rereleases? It’s 50 years since this classic Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder comedy first had audiences rolling in the aisles (and the hay) with its inventive, silly and pitch-perfect spoof of old Frankenstein moviess, in which the grandson of Dr Frankenstein attempts to distance himself from his wacko family before inevitably following suit.

BFI London film festival
Various venues, 9 to 20 October
Grab your tickets now for a veritable smorgasbord of gala screenings, premieres and events. This year’s treasures include Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora, Pablo Larraín’s Maria and Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch. Catherine Bray

Going out: Gigs

Becky Hill
10 to 24 October; tour starts Dublin
Multiple Brit winner Hill brings the party to a host of arenas on this celebration of June’s Top 3 album, Believe Me Now?. While drum’n’bass bangers such as Disconnect will go down a storm, the highlight should be the emotionally cathartic True Colours. Michael Cragg

Bernstein double bill
Royal Opera House: Linbury Theatre, London, 10 to 24 October
With Nicholas Chalmers conducting, Leonard Bernstein’s one-act operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place are reunited as the double bill he conceived. In Oliver Mears’ productions Henry Neill is Sam and Wallis Giunta as Dinah in Trouble in Tahiti, with Grant Doyle as the older Sam in A Quiet Place, which takes place 30 years later. Andrew Clements

Jasper Høiby’s 3Elements
7 October to 22 November; tour starts Manchester
A big UK tour for the co-founder of power-trio Phronesis, for 15 years one of the most exciting small bands on the European new music scene. Bassist Høiby’s new 3Elements trio features fast-rising young pianist Chaerin Im, with drum prodigy Jamie Peet. John Fordham

Crowded House
6 to 17 October; tour starts Liverpool
The 15m-selling Australian-Kiwi soft-rockers arrive for an arena tour. Nominally in support of May’s eighth album, Gravity Stairs, it’s really about 1986 to 1992, the period that gave us Don’t Dream It’s Over, Fall at Your Feet and Weather With You. MC

Going out: Art

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998
Barbican Art Gallery, London, 5 October to 5 January
This exhibition explores a period in India’s modern history between Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in 1975 and the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests: two and a half decades that saw India become a world power. The era is chronicled by artists such as Gulammohammed Sheikh who documented and challenged their time.

Francis Bacon
National Portrait Gallery, London, 10 October to 19 January
At once ghostly and ethereal, yet shockingly bloody, the human face and body as painted by Bacon throb with vicious life. He looked with a total refusal of sentiment or illusion. Yet his people are unforgettable, perversely heroic survivors of the modern world. And he is modern British art’s true genius.

Drawing the Unspeakable
Towner Eastbourne, 5 October to 27 April
From the horrors of war to the anguish of mental illness, the drawings here explore abysses of human experience that can’t be put into words. Curated by David Dimbleby and his artist daughter Liza, it sets Madge Gill alongside James Gillray, David Hockney, Alice Neel, LS Lowry and many more insightful artists.

Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 11 October to 26 January
If you suspect, like me, that the pre-Raphaelites stink as artists, this exhibition may challenge your eyes as well as nose. It focuses on the ways these painters tried to evoke nice perfumes by depicting aromatic flowers and incense. This was a reaction to the industrial stenches of Victorian England. Jonathan Jones

Going out: Stage

Sophie Duker
Soho theatre, London, 7 to 19 October
The standup’s latest, But Daddy I Love Her, does cover both romance and daddies (not only her real, emotionally distant father but also a sugar daddy she met online). Yet it works primarily as a paean to delusion, or delulu – its less tragic TikTok offshoot – which the comedian advocates with typical enthusiasm. Rachel Aroesti

The Fear of 13
Donmar Warehouse, London, to 30 November
Adrien Brody makes his UK stage debut, directed by Prima Facie’s Justin Martin. Lindsey Ferrentino’s new play adapts a documentary about a man who spent 22 years on death row. Kate Wyver

WRESTLELADSWRESTLE
Home, Manchester, to 12 October
As a teenager, Jenni Jackson was a judo champion. Today she’s a choreographer. In this play, devised with Simon Carroll Jones, she brings the fight on stage in an exploration of violence and empowerment that blends dance, judo and Bolivian Ccholita wrestlin. KW

DeNada Dance Theatre: Mariposa
8 October to 21 March; tour starts Lancaster
Someone once called Carlos Pons Guerra the Almodóvar of dance. He must have been delighted – and it’s not far wrong. With a distinctive theatrical sensibility and themes of gender, sexuality and identity, Mariposa is billed as a queer tragedy inspired by Madame Butterfly, set in post-revolutionary Cuba. Lyndsey Winship