‘Insidious’, Weezer and incredible photography: The best things to do, hear, see or watch in Europe this week

A Week of Culture Across Europe: From Lens to Screen to Sound

Poinews.com – The sky has returned to its ordinary brightness after the eclipse, yet the continent still offers more than enough spectacle for the curious eye. This week’s cultural calendar spans gallery walls packed with photographic ambition, a new chapter in a beloved horror franchise, a comedian wandering foreign streets, and a rock band confronting the passage of time. Whether you prefer air-conditioned silence or the electric buzz of a concert hall, there is a thread to pull.

Photography at Its Most Ambitious: RPS International Photography Exhibition 167

Housed in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the world’s longest-running contemporary photography show returns with its 167th edition. More than 5,200 entries were submitted; from that pool, 113 prints by 48 photographers from around the globe earned a place on the walls. The resulting body of work spans an extraordinary range of subjects, techniques, and cultural viewpoints, assembling what amounts to a layered portrait of the present moment.

Two artists anchor the shortlist. Marcy Palmer’s selected images interrogate reproductive rights, while Léa Chen turns the lens toward generational memory. Together they frame the exhibition’s central tension: how individual experience collides with collective history.

Rothko Recontextualised in Florence

Also occupying the Palazzo Strozzi’s historic halls, a major retrospective of Mark Rothko’s Colour Field paintings — over 70 works in total — exploits the architecture in ways a conventional white-cube gallery never could. Florence was a city Rothko adored; its churches, its layered past, and its particular spiritual gravity shaped decades of his practice. Returning those canvases to the very setting that once provoked them reframes each piece in a light both intimate and overwhelming, exposing the friction between classical restraint and expressive excess that ran through his career.

Bonus: Kunstmuseum Basel’s landmark Helen Frankenthaler survey closes on 23 August. This week represents the final window to see it.

Horror and Drama on the Big Screen

The supernatural franchise co-created by Leigh Whannell and directed by James Wan arrives at its fifth instalment, and the demonic stakes escalate considerably. Amelia Eve stars as Gemma, a mother raising her daughter inside the childhood home where she discovers a perilous gift: the power to collapse the boundary between everyday reality and a spiritual plane called The Further, dragging its hostile entities into the physical world. After earlier entries struggled to sustain the atmospheric tension and originality of the series’ introduction, this outing attempts a fresh angle — though fans should expect the franchise’s signature pale-faced Blumhouse scares.

Bonus: Fjord, the Palme d’Or-winning drama following a family of Romanian evangelicals, begins its European theatrical run this week. A full review lands Friday.

Conan O’Brien Steps Outside the Studio

The American comedian’s travel series enters its third season, shedding the podcast format of ‘Conan O’Brien Needs a Fan’ for something far more unpredictable. Rather than hosting from a fixed set, O’Brien surprises fans in person across India, the Netherlands, Morocco, and the Philippines, absorbing local customs while generating the socially awkward, chaotic observations that define his brand of hyperactive charm. The result is deliberately unserious, and that is precisely the point.

Bonus: Lanterns, a sophisticated reworking of the superhero genre centred on DC Comics’ glowing green justice warriors, is now streaming on HBO Max.

Weezer’s ‘Gold Album’: Desert Grooves and the Question of Time

From ‘Say It Ain’t So’ to ‘Island In The Sun,’ the American rock quartet has spent three decades conjuring melodies that lodge themselves in the listener’s head. Since their self-titled 1994 debut, the band has released a staggering 20 studio albums. Their latest, ‘Gold Album,’ reportedly draws on the dusty, dreamy textures of desert rock and marks a shift toward more collaborative songwriting. The sound is simultaneously unfamiliar and deeply nostalgic — one accompanying music video even features skateboarder Tony Hawk.

Ageing sits at the album’s thematic core. Each track threads past and present together, working through questions of confidence, perspective, and where all the accumulated years have gone. It is, in short, music to lay down in the last warm hours of summer and simply wonder.

Bonus: Julia Holter, the critically acclaimed American singer-songwriter, releases her seventh studio album ‘Materia’ on 21 August. The seven-track record functions as a companion piece to her 2024 LP, Something in the Room She Moves.