Things to do in London this weekend (23-25 August)

Expectations for Canal are high. That’s what happens when your team already runs one of London’s best restaurants; distinguished sausage slingers of Shoreditch, Bistro Freddie. Does Canal match their majesty? Yes. The glossy riverside retreat sits pretty on a new-build chunk of yet-to-be battered brickwork by the Grand Union Canal. The chef, New York-born Adrian Hernandez Farina, has the kind of CV that most cooks would chop off a finger for. The Mangalitza sausage is juicy and draped with fronds of pickled chilli. Bream crudo with moody cherries is also a winner, and honeydew melon slices taste like taking an entire Sicilian beach into your mouth, minus the sand. 

How do you rebuild your sense of self after a traumatic event? There lies the question at the heart of Eva Victor’s charmingly sincere and very funny feature debut – a nuanced, character-driven story that Victor wrote, directed, and takes the star-making lead in. Agnes is an English literature lecturer at a liberal arts college in New England who’s stuck in a rut, and when her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) visits after a long separation, there’s underlying tension. It’s a captivating comedy-drama that avoids the reductive binary of hero or villain. Instead, Victor articulates the flaws of humanity, of people, but also the hope we can find in each other and ourselves.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Aug 22. 

Want a drink? You've come to the right place. This is Time Out’s list of best bars in London, our curated guide to London’s drinking scene, featuring the buzziest bars in the capital right now. These are the 50 places we’d recommend to a friend, because we love drinking in them and have done many, many times over. From classy cocktail counters to delightful dives, London’s got them all.

Do you remember when the first Gorillaz album came out? It felt like we were catapulted into a new era of music and visuals. Created by musician Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz is the artificial foursome of bassist Murdoc Niccals, singer 2D, drummer Russel Hobbs and guitarist Noodle, and House of Kong is their fabled homeland. This exhibition, of the same name, lifts a veil on how the group first came together to blow up a pre-digital world with the release of ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ all the way back in 2000. It documents their past misadventures, musical innovation and ground-breaking virtual performances via an all-new immersive experience.

London’s queer nightlife festival Body Movements is back in Southwark Park with five stages showcasing the great and good of the LGBTQ+ party scene in the capital and beyond. On the absolutely stacked line-up for 2025 are a host of new and returning queer nightlife collectives, from London stalwarts like Adonis, Pxssy Palace and Little Gay Brother to international crews including Berlin’s Power Dance Club and Brooklyn’s Function. The likes of I.Jordan, HAAi and Mura Masa will be DJing, while there’ll also be live sets from US rapper Cakes da Killer, queer pop sensation Romy, viral rapper Ceechyna (you’ll have heard her song Peggy on TikTok for sure), experimental Parisian artist Coucou Chloe and anonymous London pop maverick Lynks. Nobody is doing it like Body Movements, in short!

If a trip to Hampton Court has been on your to-do list, why not time your visit to coincide with this foodie extravaganza? Over the August Bank Holiday weekend entrance tickets to Henry VIII’s former gaff give you access to more than 150 speciality food stalls, so you can feast like like a Tudor king in the palace's gorgeous green spaces. There's also pop-up bars, kids’ activities, and an array of local musicians taking to the bandstand to soundtrack your culinary adventure. 

It’s not been staged in this country for over 30 years, but Lerner & Loewe’s Brigadoon, the story of the two Americans who happen to stumble across a Scottish town that only appears once a century, is here and top Scots playwright Rona Munro has partly rewritten the book, doing stuff like setting the story during WW2 and having the time-displaced villagers speak Scots Gaelic to each other. Munro is a bloody good playwright and gives the absurdly flyweight musical a bit of genuine heft. There’s a sumptuous score, too, and ultimately it’s just very fun that this level of time and care has been pumped into resuscitating what is essentially a curio. 

Real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, star as long-term, not-yet-married couple Tim and Millie in their new horror film. We find them at a difficult crossroads, with a growing distance between them. Then, on a hiking trip, they stumble into cave and find themselves infected by a strange medical condition. They cannot be physically apart. The metaphor is deployed with delicious and surprising twists. Bone-cracking and fleshy and disgusting in all the most satisfying ways a body horror should be. You feel their sticky, fleshy, monstrous, codependent love.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 15. 

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews and performed all across the globe. Now it’s on the West End. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but we see Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. The conversation about mental health has moved on since 2014. Nevertheless, the play’s message still lands today. For all its sorrow, the play gleams with hope. It is a truly brilliant thing.

‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’. The Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s new commission for Somerset House takes the sleep of reason as its starting point. In the grand Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, she has installed a ten-metre-tall blue figure, who lays supine, gently breathing with closed eyes. We’re told that this ethereal, childlike giant has slept through ‘warnings of present and imminent catastrophes, political and social disaster and environmental collapse.’ Art with a message often risks being didactic, prioritising its statement over its aesthetic experience. Here, though, is a deft balance of content and form: a nuanced message, contained within immediately impressive and accessible art.

Jean-Francois Millet was an artist of the people. Born to a farming family, he spent his life painting rural workers and the conditions of their labour. This exhibition, marking the 150th anniversary of his death, presents an impressive array of his work, which went on to inspire Vincent van Gogh among other artists. Heads down and backs bent, there is a melancholic, weathered beauty to Millet’s characters.

In the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space, two Iranian-Canadian artists are having fun with language. Sculpture, video and found objects all find their place in this playful exhibition that juxtaposes words and images to show us the precarity of truth and meaning in today’s world. From a hyper-realistic sculpture to a repurposed electric motorway sign, Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi find many ways to combine the quotidian with the uncanny.

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris. This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. It's fragmentary and frantic – culminating in a truly virtuosic piano performance by a spotlit Hayes, who looks agonisingly at his own hands as if they belong to a stranger. It’s hauntingly powerful and the apex of this funny and devastating play.  

Love sushi, dumplings or noodles? Inamo’s got you covered. This high-tech spot in Soho or Covent Garden lets you order from interactive tabletops, play over 20 games while you wait and even doodle on your table. Then it’s all you can eat pan-Asian dishes like Sichuan chicken, red dragon rolls and Korean wings with bottomless drinks. Usually £113.35, now just £33 or £26 if you're in early at the weekend!

Get Inamo’s best ever bottomless food & drink brunch from only £26 with Time Out Offers.

Edinburgh isn't the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed, as the Scottish capital’s iconic annual event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious alternative for the London-based. Returning for its nineteenth edition, it’s smaller than Edinburgh by a long shot, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from the expected stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. Runs tend to be for a night or two rather than the entire month, and prices are bargain basement by London standards: many shows are less than a tenner, none are much more than that. 

Hollywood stars don’t come as classy as Sophia Loren. This programme of films curates by the BFI, Cinecittà and Cinema Department of the Ministry of Culture of Italy, celebrates oven 70 years of the glamazon actress with screenings of 4K restorations and cinematic classics. Loook out for talks including Sophia Loren: Hollywood Italian Style as well as screening including: Good Folk’s Sunday (Anton Giulio Majano, 1953), Heller in Pink Tights (George Cukor, 1960), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Vittorio De Sica, 1963), Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966), Saturday, Sunday and Monday (Lina Wertmüller, 1990) and The Life Ahead (Edoardo Ponti, 2020).

You’ve probably heard of ‘Instagram face’. This summer, Somerset House is dedicating a whole exhibition to things like the internet’s inclination for everyone to look exactly the same. In Virtural Beauty, Somerset House will explore the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The show will display more than 20 artworks from the 'Post-Internet' era, an art movement concerned with the influence of the internet on art and culture. It will feature sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance art, with highlights including ORLAN’s Omniprésence (1993), a groundbreaking performance in which the artist live-streamed her own facial aesthetic surgery, and AI-generated portraits by Minnie Atairu, Ben Cullen Williams, and Isamaya Ffrench. 

★★★★ 'Frameless has managed to create something genuinely exciting' – Time Out

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £24!

Get £24.80 tickets (originally £31), only through Time Out Offers.

Emily Kam Kngwarray, an Anmatyerr artist from the Sandover region in the Northern Territory of Australia, didn’t start making art until she was 70. Her prolific and vibrant output during the ensuing decade paved the way for Aboriginal artists, women artists and Australian artists – and is the subject of this, her first major solo exhibition in Europe. Expect monumental canvases adorned with batik and acrylic patterns whose networks of dots and lines are almost immersive.

Another year, another spectacular line-up of classical music. In 2025, the orchestral extravaganza will feature 86 concerts across eight weeks, with over 3,000 artists taking to the stage, with the majority of the action taking place inside the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall. This weekend, look out for a BBC Young Composer Workshops, which give those aged 15 to 18 the chance to meet leading composers; a rendition of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony from Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra; and a concert from French period-instrument outfit Le Concert Spiritue. 

Imagine indulging in all the dumplings, rolls, and buns you can handle, crafted by a Chinatown favourite with over a decade of culinary excellence. Savour Taiwanese pork buns, savoury pork and prawn soup dumplings, and luxurious crab meat xiao long bao. To top it off, enjoy a chilled glass of prosecco to elevate your feast. Cheers to a truly delightful dining experience at Leong’s Legend!

In Mansfield, the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov). The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. 

The Arcola Theatre's alt-opera festival Grimeborn returns for its eighteenth year in 2025 and it’s as eclectic as ever, from a stripped back reworking of Wagner’s magnum opus Tristan und Isolde (Aug 13-16) to the first ever full staging of John Joubert’s final opera Jane Eyre (Aug 6-9)  and the return of last year’s bit of fun Sense & Senibility, The Musical (Aug 19-23) which is, you know, a bit more musical-y, and also last year’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which is, you know, bleak.