What’s on this weekend? From His Dark Materials to Brittany Runs a Marathon

The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.

TELEVISION: His Dark Materials

Louisa Mellor for Den of Geek

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“In terms of family viewing, His Dark Materials is the real thing: as Douglas Adams might have said, it’s both complicated enough for children and simple enough for adults. Its richly constructed fantasy world is magical without being cutesy. There’s no wise-cracking sidekick or sickly sweetness. Fear, frustration and a sense of never knowing quite who or what you can trust – things that kids know all about – are woven thrillingly into the adventure.”

Sunday 3 November, 8pm on BBC One

MOVIE: Brittany Runs a Marathon

Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent

“How do we talk about obesity without demonising people over a number on a scale? It’s hard. As a society, we’re a long way from achieving the right balance. But Brittany Runs a Marathon, an inspirational fitness journey that’s still sensitive to the issues of body image, feels about as close as we can get for now. Jillian Bell stars as Brittany, a woman who’s thrown all ideas of self-care out of the window… The strength of Brittany Runs a Marathon is that it doesn’t claim to capture a universal experience. It tells one woman’s story – and it tells it well.”

Released 1 November

BOOK: Find Me by Andre Aciman

Alim Kheraj for inews

“If Call Me By Your Name gave Aciman a chance to explore how malleable and healing time could be, Find Me focuses on its cruelty. Each character’s life has splintered, creating layers that time has manipulated, some stuck by it and others caught in its relentless rapids. Each character is looking for a way to make peace with their missed opportunities, and it’s this that makes them feel human. Even if the plots are dreamlike – each section with its own watery and surreal texture – his characters, with their vulnerabilities and yearning, are real.”

Published 28 October

STAGE: Light Falls

Michael Billington for The Guardian

“Clearly [writer Simon] Stephens is doing several things at once in this play. In the words of a haunting Jarvis Cocker song that, in a cappella form threads its way through the action, he is writing a ‘hymn of the north’. This is a London-based writer’s guilt-ridden love-letter to his native soil suggesting that, even in a time of economic hardship, there is much kindness and charity to be found in the northern heartlands… Stephens heeds that advice while writing a play that does something relatively rare in modern theatre: it takes an optimistic view of humanity and suggests that the nuclear family is not going to explode any time soon.”

At Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre until 16 November