Things to do in London this week

Find out what the UK’s most promising fine art graduates have been up to in this annual showcase of up-and-coming talent from across the UK, which is now in its 76th year. Featuring 22 exhibitors selected by renowned artists Pio Abad, Louise Giovanelli and Grace Ndiritu, the London leg of the exhibition this year takes place at Camberwell’s South London Gallery

Ciao ragazzi! Celebrate the end of your January health kick in style at the London branch of Eataly for a two-day celebration of the bougie Italian food hall chain’s nineteenth birthday. Expect tasting stations, regional Italian dishes, wines, cocktails and live food demos, all designed for grazing rather than sitting still. Tickets get you a festival glass, a pouch and a pocketful of tokens to spend as you please. It’s relaxed, family-friendly and built for wandering. Come hungry, and leave planning your next trip to Italy.

Park Chan-wook’s new film No Other Choice is a remake of The Ax (2005) by Costa-Gavras. With humour blacker than black bean noodles, the film is a masterful work of cinema which might well be Chan-wook’s masterpiece. Man-soo (a brilliant Lee Byung-hun) has the perfect life. He is respected by his company, his loving wife (Son Ye-jin), with a son from a former marriage who he considers his own, supports and loves him. So naturally, everything goes wrong. The obvious point of comparison for this comedy of murderous errors is Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Oscar winner Parasite. Both deal with late capitalism’s smashing of a family with violent intent; both mix violence and we’re-all-screwed-anyway humour. But Park Chan-wook’s film feels like a successor rather than a competitor. 

High Noon is an adaptation of the classic allegorical 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. It’s an impressive show in a lot of ways. Thea Sharrock’s direction deftly conjures a dusty desert town using flexible sets, lovely period costumes and some sparse but effective gun slingin’. It’s theatrical, too, in the sense that the cast sing a lot more Bruce Springsteen songs than they did in the film, and an ever-present clock implacably ticks down to the title time. And it’s got two sensational leads.

You have to hand it to Hanbaagaasuuteeki for its supremely confident choice of location. This Asian-inspired burger joint has opened up in Victoria. A drop-in spot with high stools, counter-top tables and bright red splashes of colour, it feels a lot like In-N-Out with a K-pop twist. As well as a few cursory sides, the menu features nine burgers, including a ‘1950s-style’ double cheeseburger with a gentle Japanese lilt (its onions are rehydrated in dashi vinegar). But, it’s the freakier fringes of the menu where the magic happens. Take the shrimp kong baga – a beef patty topped with crispy, deep-fried shrimps, tangy 1000 island-style dressing and melted cheese. There are many, many burger bars in London, and Hanbaagaasuuteeki isn’t like the others.

Brazillian multi-disciplinary artist Laura Lima brings her first London solo exhibition to the ICA. Known for her genre-defying practice that merges sculpture, performance, and living bodies, The Drawing Drawing will display a new interactive sculptural installation that riffs on the traditional life drawing class, with an anarchic take that blurs the line between audience and artwork. 

Frost Fairs have a storied history in London. Between 1605 and 1814 the surface of the River Thames froze over 24 times, so locals took to the ice creating ‘Frost Fairs’ with markets, amusements, food, drink, games and general revelry. Global warming might have scuppered the frozen river bit, but Bankside is recreating the roistering atmosphere with this weekend shindig. Look out for Victorian games, outdoor performances, artisan markets, and family-friendly craft workshops, including a ‘create your own elephant mask’, and winter crown crafting sessions. After 7pm, pubs along Bankside will host after-hours live folk music sessions. 

Writer-director Jamie Armitage is back with an ambitious oddity of a production: A Ghost in Your Ear, an MR James-ish horror story with a mischievous metatheatrical gleam in its eye. Created with sound designer siblings Ben and Max Ringham, it makes use of sophisticated binaural design – meaning the audience wears headphones, with some of what is being heard pre-recorded. Part of the treat here is seeing something so technically accomplished in Hampstead’s tiny Downstairs studio theatre. Horror theatre is a small, weird and often terrible genre and this is a proper scary little gem. 

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football. Happily for co-directors Lisa Barros D’sa and Glenn Leyburn’s (Good Vibrations) sports flick, a psychological drama full of quirky touches and dry wit, not much of the Republic of Ireland’s pre-2002 World Cup prep on the Pacific island of Saipan made it as far as the pitch. As still-traumatised Irish fans will tell you, the reward for seeing their team qualify for the tournament in Japan and South Korea was to witness their star player and manager fall out in spectacular fashion. D’sa and Leyburn aren’t going for strict reconstruction so much as an exploration of the tensions within the Irish psyche.

The Barbican is celebrating 20 years of comissioning artists for The Curve in 2026. Chicago-based artist Julia Phillips will be the first to exhibit in the free space this year, with her first UK solo exhibition Inside, Before They Speak. Showing new sculptures that combine glazed ceramics sculpted on her body with metal hardware, Phillips explores ideas about the body, conception, technology and human connection. 

Dante or Die’s resurrected 2013 show feels like a sweet throwback to the glory days of the site-specific theatre era. Site-specific work is no longer massively modish, but Dante or Die have kept the flame going for 20 years now. Much of their work is fringier and more radically intimate than I Do. But it’s the company’s greatest hit, originally staged under the auspices of the Almeida. It’s a series of sweetly earnest interconnecting playlets about the build-up to a wedding that is staged in a hotel, in this case, the Malmaisson. It’s a little gem of a show. 

If you thought you’d have to wait until 2027 for another global women’s football tournament, think again. In January and February, London will host the final rounds of the inaugural FIFA Women’s Champions Cup. The new competition brings together the champions from six different continental tournaments, with UEFA Champions League winners Arsenal repping Europe. The semi finals between the Gunners and ASFAR (from Morocco), and Gotham FC (the US) and the Corinthians (Brazil) will take place at Brentford FC’s Gtech Community Stadium while the third place play-off and grand final will be held at Emirates Stadium. 

In Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir H is for Hawk, a young woman named Helen trains an ill-mannered goshawk and eventually sees it off to an aviary for moulting season. Part meditative exploration of grief in the wake of the sudden loss of her father, part exhaustive detailing of the process of training a complicated and challenging creature, the film adaptation hews closely to the same description. Claire Foy plays the stiff-upper-lipped protagonist, an academic who avoids moping at all costs even after her beloved photojournalist father passes away suddenly. He’s played by Brendan Gleeson with warmth and humour in occasional mournful flashbacks, and the relationship between dad and daughter is poignantly sketched as a special one. 

Short films are where many of the greats – Martin Scorsese, Lynne Ramsay, Paul Thomas Anderson et al – got started, and for over two decades, the London Short Film Festival has been a trusty showcase of new talents and small, but perfectly formed short films. Returning for its 22nd year, the 2026 edition features a whopping 204 new shorts across more than 60 programmes, as well as a bunch of talks, workshops and walking tours. Loads of great cinemas and arts spaces across the city are hosting screenings, including the BFI Southbank, the ICA, Rich Mix, the Rio and SET Peckham. Highlights of the programme include the opening night which features new work from Andrea Luka Zimmerman and John Smith who delve into their own lives as artists across the decades, from Smith’s emergence in the early 70s artschool scene to Zimmerman’s own forays into 90s music and fashion; Trans Sister Seventies! featuring newly unearthed archival shorts charting the trans-feminine experience of the 1970s; My Eye Is My Ear – a selection of new UK short films exploring Deaf lives, culture and identity; Everybody’s Darling: Melodrama in 80s & 90s Punk Cinema – a series of short films platforming women and queer artistes and the legacy of Warhol’s ‘superstars’, John Waters’ trash cinema and the Cinema of Transgression and a night of films exploring emo subculture in the early 2000s. 

Photography fans are in for a real treat this month, as Nan Goldin’s seminal series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency goes on display in full for the first time ever in the UK. Staged at the St Davis Street branch of Gagosian, the exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Goldin’s formative photobook, featuring 126 photographs shot between 1973 and 1986. An intimate, wistful portrait of Goldin’s downtown NYC community it includes photographes of pop culture icons like Cookie Mueller and Greer Lankton, shot in Goldin’s signature saturated, moody hues. Don’t miss a very rare chance to see it in all its glory.

Condo is the best thing to hit London’s art scene every January: a citywide mega-exhibition where galleries from around the world take over spaces across the capital. The idea’s simple, London galleries invite international ones to share their walls for a month, but the results are anything but. In 2026, 50 galleries show across 23 venues, from Sadie Coles HQ hosting Paris’s Sans Titre to The Sunday Painter welcoming Mumbai’s Jhaveri Contemporary. It’s a brilliant way to sample global contemporary art in one hit, and to enjoy watching London’s art crowd parade their questionable winter fashion between stops.

Rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. It’s a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory, but it’s also a fiddly musical with a lot of moving parts. You need to get it right, and Fein smashes it, largely thanks to exceptional casting. The whole thing looks astonishing: Tom Scutt’s astonishingly lush, vivid woods are glistening, eerie and primal. The costumes are similarly ravishing. It’s just great, really, a sublime production of a sublime musical with a sublime cast.

January 2026 marks one whole year since the film world lost one of its greatest auteurs, and the BFI is marking the occasion with a month-long season celebrating the mastermind behind Mullholland Drive, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. ‘David Lynch: The Dreamer’ promises to be a joyful deep-dive into the director’s wonderfully warped world, featuring big-screen revivals of Eraserhead, Lost Highway and The Elephant Man alongside shorts, documentary portraits and a bunch of Lynch-themed goings-on. If you're a fan this is not one to miss.

The London International Mime Festival was a true city staple, bringing weird and wild physical theatre from across the globe to the capital each year. Rarely ‘mime’ in the stereotypical sense, the fest brought mind-expanding theatre to London for 47 years straight. The 2023 edition was its last, but MimeLondon is the same idea in all but name, and returns for its third year in January 2026. With the iconic Barbican shut this year for upgrade works, MimeLondon will go travelling, with shows at Sadler’s Wells and The Place. If you're keen to see one of the biggies, we'd reccommend physical theatre legends Gecko’s returning dystopian classic The Wedding (Sadler’s Wells, Jan 21-24), which was a big hit at LIMF in 2019.