As L’Atalante is re-released, we count down the best movies set largely on ships, boats, barges, yachts, steamers and trimarans. Submarines banned, as they’re under water

Stephen Sommers’ sci-fi horror pulp follows a bunch of scene-stealing character actors playing mercenaries hired to destroy the cruise ship Argonautica for insurance purposes. But a giant mutant octopus has got there first! Among the potential cephalopod fodder are Treat Williams, Kevin J O’Connor, and Famke Janssen as a jewel thief.

The Canadian electroclash icon on No Lube So Rude, her first album in a decade, the state of global politics, the ‘punk energy’ of the older generation and her love of ping-pong

Why is your forthcoming album your first in over a decade and who is/are the “you” in comeback single Not in Your Mouth None of Your Business? k4ren123
I’ve been very busy – touring, working with dance troupes, performance art, sculptures, playing the lead role in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins in Stuttgart, and on and on. Then, finally, I started on new music. The “you” in the single are people who feel they have the right to have autonomy over other people’s bodies and make it unsafe for people to be who they want to be. I’m especially talking about queer and mostly trans rights. The song’s like a mantra or chant, a way to empower people in only a few sentences.

As a fan of your concert costume design as much as your music, what can we expect from the upcoming tour? Kelechica
I was thinking about sustainability and went to a costume sale at the Berlin opera and bought a bunch of opera costumes. I’m working with Charlie Le Mindu, who is transforming them into weird new creations. In the video for Not in Your Mouth, I’m wearing my sister’s leather jacket. It’s just been the fifth anniversary of her passing, and I wanted to keep something of her, so I kept her leather jacket that she wore the crap out of since the 90s. So, in a way, she’ll be in the show.

In his new book The World in a Phrase, author James Geary shares aphorisms from David Byrne, James Baldwin and more that speak to the modern day

When it comes to aphorisms, the biggest hits are familiar: “a penny saved is a penny earned”, “a picture is worth 1,000 words”, the one about why teaching fishing is better than fish donations. These phrases have been around so long they can feel as old as language itself.

But aphorisms aren’t just historical artifacts. People regularly come up with new ones, and even if they haven’t come from the pen of Confucius or Emily Dickinson, they can shed light on the modern human experience with just a few words. In fact, “the aphorism is, in some ways, perfectly suited to the digital age: the oldest form of literature finds its ideal vehicle in the most modern short modes of communication,” writes James Geary in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism.

Idiotic US war secretary Pete Hegseth launches an attack on a turkey-based festivity in frustration at his inability to outsmart a buffoonish police detective. A wild season finale looms

Tonight’s South Park is something of a breather in what has been their most story-driven season (or seasons, as it turned out) ever. There is some advancement to the overriding plot of Donald Trump attempting to kill the unborn baby he’s expecting with his lover, Satan, before it can unleash the prophesied apocalypse – a plot that involves master manipulator (and new Trump sex partner) JD Vance and billionaire/self-proclaimed antichrist expert Peter Thiel (recently incarcerated by South Park’s finest for kidnapping Eric Cartman). But tonight’s instalment, Turkey Trot, focuses more on the goings-on in the titular town than in Washington DC.

As Thanksgiving approaches, South Park finds its annual holiday marathon in jeopardy. None of its regular sponsors – Stan Marsh’s Tegridy Weed Farms, recently shuttered, and City Asian Popup Store, beset by high tariffs – can afford to pay for it. Desperate for a solution, the town reaches out to the one entity that has plenty of money to spend in America: the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Riverside Studios, London
The madcap sci-fi tale is retold on a lavish scale, complete with in-show merch, but it never really blasts off

Douglas Adams’s sci-fi comedy about Earth’s destruction and Arthur Dent’s intergalactic adventures has become a stratospheric enterprise since the original radio series in 1978. That spawned six books, a TV series, a film, comics, stage adaptations – and branded bath towels.

Booming business indeed yet it is odd to see the sale of merchandise as part of this immersive show (there is one booth selling branded goods within the production and a second in the foyer), as well as a bar at every turn. That commercial opportunism grates. Is this an attempt to take the audience into Adams’s imaginative universe in a new, interactive way – or merely a cash cow?

The kids growing up might have changed this show’s appeal, but they manage to go out in a flame-throwing, bullet-dodging blaze of glory – while still being more moving than ever before

Time’s up for Stranger Things. The fifth and last season arrives almost three-and-a-half years after a fourth run that felt like a finale, not least because it seemed the kids had grown up. Having originally aped beloved 1980s films where stubbornly brave children avert apocalypse, the franchise now starred young adults and had adjusted plotlines and dialogue accordingly. Life lessons had been learned. Selves had been found. Adolescent anxieties – as personified by Vecna, the narky telekinetic tree-man who rules a parallel dimension adjacent to the humdrum town of Hawkins, Indiana – had been put aside.

But Stranger Things now belatedly returns, with the cast all visibly in their 20s. This is a problem. The whole point is that it’s fun to watch kids outrun monsters by pedalling faster on their BMX bikes, or ignoring their mum calling them to dinner because they’re in the basement with their school pals, drawing up plans to bamboozle the US military using pencils, bubblegum and Dungeons & Dragons figurines. If everyone looks old enough to have a studio apartment and a stocks portfolio, none of the above really flies.

Documentary series of Interview with the Vampire writer available to stream with potential for further releases

The worst heartbreak and most riveting triumph of Anne Rice’s life happened in relatively quick succession, each beginning when the US novelist’s daughter – Michele, then about three – told her she was too tired to play.

Rice had never heard such a comment from a child that age, and subsequent blood tests ordered by a doctor revealed that her beloved “Mouse” had acute granulocytic leukemia, considered untreatable for her.

When the great artist saw a shocking play by Martin McDonagh about the torture of children, she asked him for more dark stories. As the vivid, extraordinary works they triggered go on show, the playwright looks back

In the summer of 2004, Paula Rego wrote to Martin McDonagh asking for permission to name some pictures after his play The Pillowman. His shocking investigation into the relationship between art and life featured two brothers under interrogation for the torture and murder of children. One is a writer whose stories are summarised by an investigator as: “A hundred and one ways to skewer a fucking five-year-old.”

Rego, then a 69-year-old grandmother as well as a world famous artist, had been taken to see the play at the National Theatre in London by one of her daughters, who knew it would resonate with her. “The brutality and beauty and humour rang very true and like something I had known all my life,” she wrote to McDonagh. “I am actually Portuguese, although I have lived in London for 50 years, and our stories are brusque and cruel like yours.”

Author tells high court her public support for group means her books could disappear from UK stores altogether

The Irish author Sally Rooney has told the high court she is highly unlikely to be able to publish new work in the UK while the ban on Palestine Action remains in effect because of her public support for the group.

On the second day of the legal challenge to Palestine Action’s proscription, the effect on Rooney, who said her books could disappear from UK stores altogether, was held up as an example of its impact on freedom of expression.

Irish actor, who had first amputation after football injury, reveals new wheelchair in TikTok video

The actor and The Celebrity Traitors star Ruth Codd has announced that she is recovering after a second leg amputation operation.

The 29-year-old Irish performer had her first amputation six years ago after injuring her foot playing football as a teenager, which led to years of surgeries and chronic pain.

The company is being sued under the new Elvis act, which protects a person’s voice from exploitation without consent

The estate of Johnny Cash is suing Coca-Cola for illegally hiring a tribute act to impersonate the late US country singer in an advertisement that plays between college football games.

The case has been filed under the Elvis Act of Tennessee, made effective last year, which protects a person’s voice from exploitation without consent. The estate said that while it has previously licensed Cash’s songs, Coca-Cola did not approach them for permission in this instance.

The debut novel took the top prize while The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please was named children’s book of the year

The Artist by Lucy Steeds has been named this year’s Waterstones book of the year.

The novel, which is set in 1920s Provence and blends mystery with a love story, also took home the Waterstones debut fiction prize earlier this year, and was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction.

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize is intended to uncover new literary voices whose work reflects the experiences of migration

Footnote Press and Counterpoints Arts have announced a new fiction award celebrating writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds, offering a £15,000 prize and a publishing deal for the winner.

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize for fiction, launching on Thursday, marks the second time the two organisations have collaborated on a prize. In 2023, writers were invited to submit narrative nonfiction, but now the prize will focus on fiction for the first time.

French thriller starring Benoît Magimel has been accused of stealing its story from a 1976 action film

A new Apple TV thriller has been pulled from the schedules because of accusations of plagiarism. French drama The Hunt was due to be released on 3 December, but it has been hit by allegations of similarity to a 1976 film adaptation of a novel, Shoot.

The Hunt stars Cannes and three-time César award winner Benoît Magimel and two-time César winner Mélanie Laurent, who has featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. But press releases about The Hunt, as well as its official trailers, have now been removed from Apple’s site.

Rex is an uber-macho hunter who, together with four equally testosterone-addled buddies, embarks on a hunting trip in the Canadian wilderness. But their weekend is cut short by a rival band of hunters they encounter in the forest, one of whom inexplicably takes a potshot at Rex’s party and grazes the head of one of his buddies. Another of Rex’s friends returns fire, killing the shooter. From there Rex and company scurry off and head back to civilisation. Rex, however, becomes convinced that the dead man’s companions are going to come after him and his friends.

The classic novel is given a new spin with this festive spectacular at Sadler’s Wells East following the fortunes of a fashion designer encountering ghosts of the past, present and future

All photographs by Tristram Kenton

Anastasia Samoylova took a photographic journey up the US east coast – and found herself in America’s unreconciled past just as much as its fragmented present

When north Cornwall residents’ water turned black and gelatinous in 1988, they were urged to mix it with orange squash when drinking. This powerful film lays out the effects of the toxic H2O – and their long struggle for justice

It is becoming a cliche to liken issues-based TV dramas and documentaries to Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Nevertheless, you get the sense that Poison Water is hoping to do for communities affected by the shocking inaction of the water industry what ITV’s hit did for the subpostmasters wrongly criminalised because of a software glitch. A damning one-off, it tells the story of Britain’s biggest mass poisoning and the apparent greed and incompetence that has meant it has loomed large in victims’ lives ever since. There are also parallels with the recent drama Toxic Town, and the continued fight for those affected by poisonous waste in Corby in Northamptonshire.

We open in the summer of 1988, when residents in several towns and villages in north Cornwall noticed something strange about the water coming out of their taps. It was blue in some cases, black in others, and could be gelatinous or sticky. It was also accompanied by a rapid outbreak of ill health, from vomiting and diarrhoea to rashes, blisters and severe headaches. For some, the effects were temporary, but many people went on to have long-term health problems, and there were even premature deaths that families are convinced were caused by the water they drank and bathed in that summer. Water that – because of an error at a treatment facility – had been laced with toxic amounts of aluminium sulphate. It would take more than two weeks for those in power to admit there was a problem. In the meantime, residents were told the water was perfectly safe, and to mix it with orange squash to improve the taste.

Carole Wyatt, a resident of the sleepy village of St Minver, says she didn’t want to speak about the poisoning again. Thank goodness she changed her mind, as she quickly becomes one of the programme’s most outspoken interviewees. There’s blooper-ish humour as Wyatt urges the programme-makers not to edit her down like they did on an episode of the BBC’s Horizon at the time, and to keep in the “good bits”. Things quickly become less droll, as she explains what she wants them to preserve. “Miscarriage of justice, I want that in … before I die I want this truth to come out.” As we learn, justice has indeed been scant – bar a government apology – with calls for a public inquiry unanswered in the intervening years.

Poison Water relies heavily on that Horizon episode and other archive material, and there is a risk that the final product could feel more like a repackaging than an original piece. Naturally, though, taking a four-decade step back from events casts them in a different light. And there are enough new interviews here – with residents, experts and politicians – to bring the whole thing startlingly, discomfitingly into the present. Among those interviewed is Michael Howard, then minister for water and planning under Margaret Thatcher. He is shown a letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, in which an employee of the water inspectorate had urged the government to go easy on the whole thing, lest prosecutions “render the whole of the water industry unattractive to the City” (this was at a time when the government was preparing for the privatisation of the water industry). Howard says he isn’t sure he ever saw the letter. “I hope you’ll emphasise that it was a long time ago and I can’t remember,” he adds. He strongly denies any suggestion of a cover-up or collusion, describing it as “a terrible mistake which should never have happened”.

Will AI take all our jobs? Prevent all crimes from being committed? Or finally develop skills beyond that of a trainee copywriter? Here are television’s finest depictions of our imminent future…

There aren’t many television shows yet about how AI affects our daily lives. After all, there isn’t much dramatic potential in shows about creatively flaccid people using ChatGPT to write woeful little Facebook updates. But that is not to say we haven’t come close.

For years, fiction about AI tended to be exclusively about killer robots, but some shows have taken a more nuanced look at how AI will shape our lives over the next few years. Here are the best of them.

The mightily stressful and incredibly close-to-the-bone BBC show traces the demise of four ancient worlds – and it’s wildly prescient stuff. Will we never learn?

Rome, 24 August, AD410. The empire that’s dominated Europe for five centuries is on the brink of collapse, its capital at the mercy of a barbarian leader. What do the people do? They do as they’ve always done. The rich scramble to hide their wealth. The poor run for their lives. The fateful decisions of a tiny number of power-obsessed men bring the mightiest civilisation on Earth to its knees. Sounds familiar? And yet. No one saw it coming … OK, apart from us, the hollow-eyed cynics of the future, watching the BBC’s latest iteration of a landmark series from the discomfort of our own civilisation’s real-time plummet.

The first, less-close-to-the-bone Civilisation aired in AD1969. An equally un-self-aware era when it was totally fine for a man in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark) to chart western culture’s triumph over the barbarians. (Some may say: plus ça change.) Next, in 2018, came its well-intentioned successor fronted by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga. Which, like a weak emperor, was trying to be everything to everyone and thus, not unlike ancient Rome’s Honorius, suffered mixed reviews and plunging ratings. Now the sumptuous threequel strides into the arena, all fire, war, disease, disaster and slick Netflix-era dramatic re-enactments. It also comes, somewhat aptly, at a time of deep existential crisis within the BBC itself. Which in less ancient times was the instrument of another empire that fell …

Journalist Hazel Martin talks to Eddy and Moira Ross, whose son was the chief suspect when he was just 15. Plus: secrets are revealed in The Ridge. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
In 1994, 26-year-old Shamsuddin Mahmood was shot dead as he served food in an Indian restaurant in Orkney. Fourteen years later, teenager Michael Ross was found guilty of the murder. Ross still denies it, and he speaks from prison in this true-crime series. As journalist Hazel Martin re-evaluates events, she also talks to Mahmood’s family, Ross’s mother and some of those who worked on the shocking case. Hollie Richardson

From a newer, greener Top Gear to the greatest comedy of all time, here are the series Guardian readers most want back on our screens

As Line of Duty and Doctor Foster both return for new series, we asked what TV programmes you’d like to see revived next. Here are your responses.

This tale of one family’s six-year ordeal just highlights what an unserious country Britain became in that era. The cast, including Joseph Fiennes, are excellent

“My name is Nazanin. I do not know why I am here.”

“Everyone says that.”

He tries to play the stoic in this look at the incredible changes to disabled peoples’ lives that tech could bring. But the radical benefits of one piece of kit leave him visibly moved

If a celebrity wins Strictly Come Dancing, alongside the glitter ball trophy, they can expect the BBC to gift them a variety of vehicles for their newfound audience. Stacey Dooley rung in New Year’s Eve and presented a makeup challenge. Rose Ayling-Ellis got two documentaries and a guest spot on Doctor Who. Now, 2024 champion, comedian and self-declared geek Chris McCausland has his first major appearance: Seeing into the Future, a deep dive into the growth of AI and technology and what it means for him and others with sight loss.

Much of the action takes place in Silicon Valley where McCausland, who gradually became blind by his early 20s, explores whether the land of big tech could give him “a whole new level of independence”. We meet McCausland as he uses his iPhone to pick his clothes for the day. Holding up a navy shirt, the AI app – with an alarmingly human cadence – tells him it’s clean but has a few wrinkles he might want to iron out. Before voice-controlled smart assistants, McCausland used to have to cut the labels of each piece of clothing into a shape and use touch to work out what he was looking at. It’s a primer to any luddites watching of how far tech has already come and how, for many disabled people, such innovations aren’t just a fun thing to have – they’re life-changing.

The reader grapples with fascism and complicity through the eyes of a mute autistic girl being treated during the second world war

As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.

In the fourth volume of the occult Morning Star cycle, a Faustian pact haunts a misanthropic artist who finds miraculous success

Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?

Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.

Genius and arrogance play leading roles in a new biography of the man who helped uncover the structure of DNA

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.

The first scholarly biography in more than 100 years of the man who immortalised the Tudor court does not disappoint

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Hans the Painter” did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.

It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, only to be horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking “nothing so fair as she hath been reported”. The union lasted six months.

True to his irreverent style, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) thanks his psychiatrist, his gastrointestinal doctors and his drug dealers

Rabih Alameddine has won the National book award for fiction for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), a darkly comic saga spanning six decades in the life of a Lebanese family.

The novel, which traverses a sprawling history of Lebanon including its civil war and economic collapse, is told through the eyes of its titular protagonist: a gay 63-year-old philosophy teacher confronting his past and his relationship with his mother and his homeland.

The return of Charlie and Lola; the second lives of trees; the dangers of time travel; a YA Bluebeard retelling and more

The Street Where Santa Lives by Harriet Howe and Julia Christians, Little Tiger, £12.99
When an old man moves in on a busy street, only his little neighbour notices; with his white beard and round belly, she’s convinced he’s Santa. But when Santa falls ill, other neighbours must rally round to take care of him. Will he be better in time for Christmas? This sweet, funny, acutely observed picture book is a festive, joyous celebration of community.

I Am Wishing Every Minute for Christmas by Lauren Child, S&S, £12.99
Twenty-five years after their first appearance, this delightful, engaging new Charlie and Lola picture book is filled with Lola’s excited impatience as she and her big brother get everything ready for Christmas.

An enraged behemoth breaks free from a government black site bent on revenge, but there is not much here aside from some monster action

‘We’re going to need more wallpaper” turns out to be the Nordic answer to “We’re going to need a bigger boat”, after a 50-metre troll has just swept a leg through someone’s soon-to-be-renovated house. When the quips revolve around interior design, you know Norwegian big-budget film-making is taking a softer path than its raucous American inspirations.

This is a Netflix sequel to Norwegian horror comedy Troll with the original director Roar Uthaug returning, and home is clearly a theme dear to the franchise’s heart. The first film’s Scandi-kaiju was returning to its roots, on a mission to trash Oslo. But the new “megatroll” – looking like Danny McBride in the throes of a full-body fungal infection – is headed for Trondheim, bent on revenging itself on the nation’s founding father and chief troll-scourge, King Olaf. Trollogist Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) and ministerial adviser Andreas (Kim Falck) return, again trying to hold the authorities back from simply lighting up the enraged behemoth after it escapes from a government black site.

Underpowered David Michôd film fails to land the story of the groundbreaking 90s female boxing champion and the horrendous abuse she faced at home

An uninspired and undirected performance from Sydney Sweeney means there’s a fatal lack of force in this movie from director and co-writer David Michôd. It manages to be unsubtle without being powerful. His subject is Christy Salters Martin, who under the grinning tutelage of Don King became the world’s most successful female boxing champion in the 90s and 00s but faced a misogynist nightmare outside the ring.

The film fails to deliver the power of the traditional boxing movie, or the real importance of a story about domestic abuse and coercive control, or the sensory detail of true crime. It relies on the simple fact of a woman pioneeringly taking on what had once been solely a man’s sport and relapses into cliche. Christy, with her frizzy hair and brown contact lenses, doesn’t seem to plausibly develop as a character throughout the film, and it sometimes seems as if Michôd is slightly more engaged with her gargoyle of a husband-slash-manager Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster with a standard-issue combover and paunch.

Daniel Craig is joined by a sparkling array of talent including O’Connor, Glenn Close and Josh Brolin in this latest murder mystery with a religious undercurrent

Rian Johnson’s delectable new Knives Out film is a chocolate box: mouthwateringly delicious on the first layer and … well, perfectly tasty on the second. Daniel Craig returns as private detective Benoit Blanc, in a slightly more serious mode than before, with not as many droll suth’n phrases and quirky faux-naif mannerisms, but rocking a longer hairstyle and handsomely tailored three-piece suit.

Blanc arrives at a Catholic church in upstate New York to investigate the sensational murder of its presiding priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, a ferocious clerical alpha male played by Josh Brolin, thundering his reactionary views from the pulpit. (That “Monsignor” title can only be bestowed by the pope incidentally: presumably Benedict XVI or John Paul II, not milksop liberals like Francis or Leo XIV.) And prime suspect is the sweet-natured, thoughtful junior priest Father Jud Duplenticy, amusingly played by Josh O’Connor, who was upset by the Monsignor’s heartless attitudes and was caught on video threatening to cut him out of the church like a cancer. Atheist Blanc faces off with the young priest, a worldview culture-clash which leads to an extraordinary encounter with the Resurrection itself.

Follow-up to 2016 animation about talking animals living in a utopia is a soulless film-by-numbers affair filled with corporately approved jokes

Another day, another supremely competent, passably-but-not-overwhelmingly funny digitally animated family comedy featuring talking animals. It’s not AI, but it might as well be. This is Zootropolis 2, which is named Zootopia 2 on its home turf in the US. (Is the reference to lefty ideas such as “utopia” too dangerous for the all-important foreign territories?) If this is the second in what promises to be a continuing series, perhaps Z3 will be cautiously hailed as a return to the franchise’s “dark” roots.

We are back in the magical wonderland of Zootropolis, in which all animals live together, big and small, prey and predator; a place, in fact, where the comedy lion can lie down with the hilarious back-talking lamb, and all the animals provide undemanding voiceover work for comedy talent such as Alan Tudyk, who makes a minor vocal appearance. As before, our heroes are an odd couple of cops in the ZPD or Zootropolis Police Department: idealistic young rabbit Judy Hopps (geddit?), voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, and sly fox Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman, a creature once on the wrong side of the law but now a supposedly reformed character who has joined the police.

Set to an on-the-nose soundtrack of Creedence Clearwater, an elite squad of soldiers are suitably unprepared for their large-toothed assailants in this jungle thriller

Aimed squarely and unabashedly at viewers who love soldiers, gore and dinosaurs – as well as dinosaurs goring soldiers – this adaptation of Ethan Pettus’s 2017 novel is deeply repetitive but weirdly watchable. Although shot in Australia with a mostly Australian cast sprinkled with a few American actors, it’s supposed to be set in Vietnam in the late 1960s as the US armed forces take on the Viet Cong.

But there are other forces to contend with, and we don’t just mean covert Chinese or Soviet operatives, although the latter do feature significantly here. It turns out a nefarious scientific experiment by one of the aforementioned factions has accidentally ushered a whole army of dinosaurs into the jungle and they’ve begun gaily munching their way through anyone who gets in their way. When one squad of Green Berets go missing, Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven, hamming it up lustily) assigns the elite Vulture Squad to go in and find out what happened. The troop are led by square-jawed Sgt Ryan Baker (Home and Away veteran Ryan Kwanten) who commands your typical assortment of grunts representing, as we’ll soon see, a range of intelligence quotients that make them ill-equipped to cope with the challenge they are about to face.

The US president has reportedly asked Paramount for a fourth instalment of the cop comedy starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. Whether he wants an acting credit or has suddenly come over all inclusive remains to be seen

It is said that by 328BC, having made empires kneel to him, Alexander the Great wept … for there were no more worlds to conquer.

Similarly, having solved the Middle East and Ukraine issues with only a couple of technicalities to iron out and put an end to so many other wars as well, Donald Trump may also be tempted to sob at having run out of important tasks. And yet, just as he is about to kneel in anguish on the Oval Office carpet, he is apparently perking up at the thought of one more mighty challenge.

‘The control room buttons were upside-down ice-cube trays, one space suit had a dish-drying rack on it – and the special effects guy wrote the theme tune lyrics’

In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback.

New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme
A fresh telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s story deploys circus skills and inventive design to create a memorable merworld

The Little Mermaid is big business this Christmas, with versions of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale at Hull Truck, Nottingham Playhouse and Newbury’s Watermill, all buoyed perhaps by Disney’s 2023 blockbuster. Adapter Theresa Heskins and her co-director, Vicki Dela Amedume, present theirs as an all-ages gig-theatre show. We’re even introduced to each member of a house band nestled among the audience before meeting the main characters.

Rhiannon Skerritt plays the title role, here named Coralie, in a production that accentuates how Andersen made her the littlest of several merfolk. The romance isn’t entirely extinguished but the power of siblinghood rises to the surface instead in this telling, which also stresses the suspicion and division between the inhabitants of land and water.

At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 24 January

White Bear theatre, London
Writer Gary Owen stitches together glimpses of contemporary life with a spin on Arthur Schnitzler’s classic that doesn’t quite coalesce

Gary Owen’s gentle dance of linked fragments joins a long list of plays taking after Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, an 1897 drama structured as a kind of musical chairs. With interlocking scenes between two actors at a time, they rotate every few minutes. It’s a useful device for packing variety into a single story, like tossing a big salad of ideas. Though neatly performed by its young cast, this new, modern-day mix by the writer of the incomparable Iphigenia in Splott struggles to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

La Ronde caused controversy, deemed immoral and too sexual for the stage. Ring Ring takes a far softer approach. Owen seeks to illuminate the modern anxieties that keep us awake at night: the things we fear to share, to pass on, to tackle by ourselves. We have nervous couples, anxious about whether to become parents. People working dead-end jobs who hope a shag will help them forget their existential dread. Individually, the scenes are quick and full of yearning, a beautiful bluntness to Owen’s dialogue. Collectively, we miss a sense of accumulation or forward momentum.

Arcola theatre, London
Hanging around backstage while their chances to play Brutus and Cassius fade, two unnamed actors start to act out their own drama

This is no glamorous dressing room: no telegrams, fizz or floral tributes. Instead, there’s an ailing pot plant and a bucket to catch the drips. It’s the understudies’ lair in a West End production of Julius Caesar. Some big name plays Caesar (consensus is he’s a bit of a dick), while our guys cover the chief assassins. They don’t even get their own names here – just Understudy Brutus and Understudy Cassius.

Night after night they skulk, waiting for the call that never comes, the show Tannoy an implacable reminder of the parade passing them by. For the show’s 100th performance, they celebrate with party hats, microwave popcorn and a run-through of the play they may never deliver for real.

At Arcola theatre, London, until 20 December

Stephen Poliakoff’s 1991 film Close My Eyes, about incestuous siblings, echoes as the actors return in David Eldridge’s End, playing a couple facing a cancer diagnosis

First there was Beginning. Then Middle. And now David Eldridge’s superlative trilogy about different couples at successive stages has come to a close with End. All three can be appreciated individually but the final play, which opened last week at the National Theatre in London, poignantly overlaps with its predecessors. If you’ve seen the other two, you can’t help but draw connections between them as much as you may find familiarities with your own relationships. Before too long, an enterprising theatre should stage all three plays together.

Beginning charted the drunken burgeoning of romance between a pair at a house party who are on each side of 40. Middle is about a marriage in crisis, with a young child also in the equation. Tenderly directed by Rachel O’Riordan, End finds Alfie and Julie squaring up to his cancer diagnosis after spending decades together. But the casting of the new play gives it an extra resonance as it reunites Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves more than 30 years after they starred together in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes. I found the memory of that 1991 film complements the play enormously.

Jermyn Street theatre, London
Abigail Pickard Price’s stripped-back staging conjures ghost stories, seaside dreams and Dickensian tragedy through three performers’ dazzling transformations

The first approach of the festive season can always be marked, in theatreland, by the rearing Christmas spectre of Charles Dickens. Here is something different from Scrooge and his ghosts, though just as bracing a warm-up to the season of goodwill. Three actors perform this zesty bildungsroman about a Victorian boy’s travails through misfortune, adventure – and a formative trip to Yarmouth.

Adapted and directed by Abigail Pickard Price, who was behind last year’sthree-person Pride and Prejudice, this is so much more than a parlour game. Produced by the Guildford Shakespeare Company, it is performed by Luke Barton (from Pride and Prejudice), Louise Beresford and Eddy Payne, and bears the quick-witted theatricality of the old Reduced Shakespeare Company. Like them, it retains the essence of the original, whittled down, with delightful dollops of mischief and invention.

Polka theatre, London
This spellbinding adaptation uses a bulging dramatic toolbox of clever effects and manages to be both epic and intimate

Some children’s books – simple stories from familiar worlds – transfer to the stage without much creative heavy lifting. Philip Pullman’s fairytale of volcano scaling, talking elephants and “The Greatest Firework Show in the Galaxy” isn’t one of them. But with buckets of imagination and a sterling cast, Lee Lyford’s new production for six-to-12-year-olds is both epic and spellbindingly intimate. My seven-year-old guest, Artie, isn’t familiar with the book but is immediately enthralled and, at times, so far on the edge of his seat I fear he’ll collide with the woman in front.

Lila dreams of becoming a firework-maker like her dad; he isn’t so keen. So when he’s tricked into revealing the final secret to his craft – winning Royal Sulphur from a fire fiend atop a volcano – Lila’s off like a rocket, via jungles and pirates. Her friend Chulak, learning more about the dangers in store, goes in search of protective water with the king’s vociferous white elephant, Hamlet.

Tognetti/Australian Chamber Orchestra
(ABC Classic)
Under Richard Tognetti the ACO has established itself as world-class and this 50th anniversary live recording of these two great concertos are a wonderful souvenir of a remarkable group

Over the past quarter of a century the Australian Chamber Orchestra has become a regular visitor to Europe, establishing itself as one of the world’s foremost chamber bands. The group was founded in 1975, and this pairing of perhaps the two greatest violin concertos in the repertory is being released to mark the ACO’s 50th birthday. The soloist and conductor in both works is Richard Tognetti, who has been the orchestra’s leader and artistic director for the past 35 years.

Both recordings are taken from concerts given in Sydney’s City Recital Hall, the Beethoven concerto in 2018, the Brahms last February. The close recorded sound very faithfully reproduces the intensely involving approach of the ACO when heard in the flesh, with its amalgam of modern playing techniques with the use of historical instruments (gut strings, period wind). For both concertos the orchestra’s permanent core of 20 players was more than doubled with guest instrumentalists from other Australian orchestras, but the suppleness and coherence of its textures are as persuasive as ever.

Barbican Hall, London
From ghost-story minimalism to wartime memory, Rani’s two new works, premiered here, shimmer with imagination, although issues of balance diminished the piano concerto

In a crowded post-minimalist world, Hania Rani has carved herself out a respectable niche. The Polish pianist and composer’s erudite yet accessible work often defies genres, appealing to classical, jazz and electronic aficionados alike. This concert comprised two 40-minute premieres and fell pretty firmly into the classical category, yet the lively audience skewed significantly younger than the Brahms and Beethoven crowd. Stylishly performed by the envelope-pushing Manchester Collective, it felt like quite the happening.

Shining occupied the first half, a piece devised for the kind of 12-piece band favoured by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It’s based on a short story by Jon Fosse; a stream of consciousness tale of a man lost in the woods at night. Opening with sinister discords on bass clarinet, bassoon and horn, its motifs shifted and spun. A pall of smoke and half-lit players conjured images of a ghost story told around a campfire at midnight.

Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne
The US pop-rapper is a ferocious and cheeky stage presence, backed by a fantastically tight band who bring an 80s funk to her biting songs

When Doja Cat’s Ma Vie world tour kicked off in Auckland last week, some fans immediately complained – not about her voice (pristine) or her band (ferociously funky), but about the lack of costume changes. This is the way of modern pop stardom: spectacle, not music, is what gets phones in the air, with footage that then gets picked apart on TikTok and Instagram.

Doja Cat has been singing about this inanity for years – “You follow me, but you don’t really care about the music,” she spat out on her 2023 track Attention – and in Auckland, she was having none of it. “I’m not your fucking costume monkey, I move at my own pace and break my fucking back out there every night so you can keep your bullshit opinion to yourself,” she wrote on X after the show. “You are not the artist, you are the watcher.”

Doja Cat’s Ma Vie world tour continues in Brisbane on 29 November and Sydney 1-2 December, before heading around the world.

Members of the groundbreaking, politically revolutionary group talk about the state of hip-hop and the US government’s attacks on people of color

For the first time in 35 years, Billboard’s Hot 100 chart does not include a rap song among its top 40 hit records. Anyone who’s been listening to the music for at least that long can list myriad reasons why that’s now the case: all the beats sound the same, all the artists are industry plants, all the lyrics are barely intelligible etc. For hip-hop forefather Abiodun Oyewole, though, it boils down to this: “We embraced ‘party and bullshit’, my brother.”

Fifty-seven years ago, on what would have been Malcolm X’s 43rd birthday, Oyewole cliqued up with two young poets at a writers’ workshop in East Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) to form what would become the Last Poets, a collective of bard revolutionaries. They outfitted themselves in African prints, performed over the beat of a congo drum and advocated for populism in their verses. The group has had many configurations over the years, but Oyewole, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan abide as the standout members. The trio is all over the band’s self-titled first album – which was released in 1970 and peaked at No 29 on the Billboard 200. Their follow-up album, This Is Madness, made them ripe targets for J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro campaign against the emerging figures the then-FBI director deemed politically subversive. Notably, Oyewole could not contribute to that album because he had been incarcerated for an attempted robbery of a Ku Klux Klan headquarters, serving two and a half years of a three-year sentence. (He was trying to raise bail for activists who had been arrested for striking back at the Klan.)

Aviva Studios, Manchester
Earplugs safely distributed, the band proceed to rattle ribcages with a two-hour show that showcases their unique ability to mesh the dreamlike with the apocalyptic

When every entrant is handed earplugs it begs the question: why not just turn things down? Lessening their legendary volume, though, would reduce the impact of the My Bloody Valentine live show as a multi-sensorial, physical and musical experience. You wouldn’t experience every bass drum like a heartbeat, undergo the peculiar, otherworldly sensation of a ribcage rattling with sound or – during the encore – a noise so ferocious that it feels as if a gale force wind is flapping at your clothes.

My Bloody Valentine are, of course, credited with inventing shoegaze, the ethereal, dreamlike, effects-laden genre that has been rediscovered by the TikTok generation. However, at times here they seem to have more in common with noise warriors such as Einstürzende Neubaten than the drippier home counties combos that followed them.

After getting dropped by a major label, the Leonard Cohen-influenced south Londoner kept going, and has now won fans in Rosalía, Sabrina Carpenter and more. But writing for the Bard is the best of all, he says

Three years back, Matt Maltese was in a casual co-writing session with some friends. Out of it came a song called Magnolias, a stripped back piano ballad about imagining his own funeral. “I didn’t think anything of it,” he says. “And then two years later, we heard some quite bizarre whispers that Rosalía had somehow heard it.” It was true: six months ago, Maltese was sent the Spanish pop star’s demo of the song. He tried not to get too excited, even when, a few weeks back, a blurred-out photo of a Rosalía album tracklisting appeared online. “On the WhatsApp group we were like: I think that says Magnolias!”

Magnolias ended up as the final track on Rosalía’s new operatic masterpiece, Lux: one of the most talked-about albums of the year, currently sitting in the UK Top 5. Maltese first heard the finished song the day the album came out, when he’d got back to London from a US tour. “I took a long jet-lagged walk and listened to the whole album to contextualise it. It’s extraordinary.” On Magnolias, Rosalía changed some words, he says, “and dramatised it incredibly. It’s exquisite. It’s a gift from someone, somewhere, that it fell into her lap.” It’s all anyone has wanted to talk to him about since. “I’ve had a lot of follow backs on Instagram,” he smiles.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Noah Sebastian’s vocals switch deftly from croon to scream to whisper, but the genre-hopping US metalcore band lack chemistry on the big stage

Melodic metalcore band Bad Omens are pulling out all the stops for their first UK arena headline tour. In the first five minutes, we’ve experienced huge riffs, pillars of fire and supernatural horror-inspired visuals. Formed in 2015, the US band found mainstream success in 2022 with their third album The Death of Peace of Mind, which embraced the kind of hooky pop songwriting and complex storytelling that made the band irresistible on TikTok. Although their fourth studio album is yet to be released, this tour represents their graduation to the same league as genre titans Bring Me the Horizon, who they supported last year. Opener Specter is enough to justify this step up: an anthemic recent single as atmospheric as the dry ice crawling around frontman Noah Sebastian.

Although tonight’s set list is rooted in metal, it showcases the band’s ambitions towards other genres, incorporating elements of industrial, electronica and drum’n’bass. This fluid approach is anchored by Sebastian’s supremely adaptable vocals, which switch from croon to scream to whisper, even deftly mimicking the flow of metal princess Poppy during their collaborative single VAN. Dying to Love is pleasingly gothic, Nowhere to Go is relatively perky pop punk, and Impose finds commonality between breakbeats and double-kick metal drums. Drummer Nick Folio deserves a particular mention for balancing visceral crunch with expansive resonance. The band’s willingness to lean into zeitgeisty pop sounds is key to their mainstream appeal: The Death of Peace of Mind is reminiscent of the gloomy R&B of the Weeknd, by way of Bring Me the Horizon – all falsetto and moody beats with heavy metal drops.

Musicologist Peter Wollny chanced upon the manuscripts in 1992 and authenticating them took half of his lifetime

The best fictional detectives are famed for their intuition, an ability to spot some seemingly ineffable discrepancy. Peter Wollny, the musicologist behind last week’s “world sensational” revelation of two previously unknown works by Johann Sebastian Bach, had a funny feeling when he chanced upon two intriguing sheets of music in a dusty library in 1992.

His equivalent of the Columbo turn, from mere hunch to unravelling a secret, would take up half his life.

Various venues, Huddersfield
World and UK premieres launched the opening concerts of this compelling gala of new sounds, mixing precise ensemble play with electronic tracks and unlikely percussion sound effects

To the uninitiated, November may not seem the ideal time for a trip to Huddersfield. I arrived to find the Pennines under a thick blanket of cloud and the temperature hovering around zero. So it’s just as well that music is a largely indoor pursuit: since 1978, autumn here has meant the annual influx of big names in experimental and avant garde music for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival. Once a draw for postwar heavyweights including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen and John Cage, the HCMF remains the UK’s largest international festival dedicated to new music, with more than 30 world and UK premieres on this year’s programme.

The opening night featured three. In Huddersfield Town Hall, London-based Explore Ensemble sat in a pool of spotlights, the magnificent Victorian space made intimate. A new version of Canon Mensurabilis by Lithuanian composer Rytis Mažulis saw repetitive shimmers of microtonal dissonance interrupted by sparse octaves and fifths. The performance’s astonishing precision blurred the line between acoustic sound and an electronic track that gradually took over. Bryn Harrison’s The Spectre … Is Always Already a Figure of That Which is to Come worked a still more persuasive magic. Opening with what sounded like a creaking seesaw scored for chamber ensemble, shards of acoustic material were followed by ghostly echoes on a prerecorded electronic track. There were beautiful details – rough shivers of violin tremolo, flutters of bass clarinet, pedal-washed piano circling – but the work’s ultimate payoff came in its longer arc. The feedback loop gradually reversed so that the musicians responded to their electronic counterparts – the process of haunting complete and utterly compelling.

From Minecraft chess and coding for kids to retro consoles and Doom on vinyl for grown-ups – hit select and start with these original non-digital presents

Gamers can be a difficult bunch to buy for. Most of them will get their new games digitally from Steam, Xbox, Nintendo or PlayStation’s online shops, so you can’t just wrap up the latest version of Call of Duty and be done with it. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful accessories and fun lifestyle gifts to look out for, and gamers tend to have a lot of other interests that intersect with games in different ways.

So if you have a player in your life, whether they’re young or old(er), here are some ideas chosen by the Guardian’s games writers. And naturally, we’re starting with Lego …

The use of AI in the surprise game-of-the-year contender has sparked a heated cultural and ethical debate, and raised existential questions for artists, writers and voice actors

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Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.

In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”

Forty years ago, the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the markets in Japan and the US. But in Europe, a technologically superior rival was making it look like an ancient relic

There’s an old maxim that history is written by the victors, and that’s as true in video games as it is anywhere else. Nowadays you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Nintendo Entertainment System was the only console available in the mid-to-late 1980s. If you were brought up in Nintendo’s target markets of Japan and North America, this chunky contraption essentially was the only game in town – the company had Mario after all, and its vice-like hold on third-party developers created a monopoly for major titles of the era. But in Europe, where home computers ruled the era, the NES was beaten by a technologically superior rival.

The Sega Master System was originally released in Japan in the autumn of 1985 as the Sega Mark III. Based around the famed Z80 CPU (used in home computers such as the Spectrum, Amstrad and TRS-80) and a powerful Sega-designed video display processor, it boasted 8kb of RAM, a 64-colour palette and the ability to generate 32 sprites on screen at one time – making the NES (based on the older 6502 processor) look like an ancient relic.

The artist and his wife, novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, lost seven pregnancies before their daughter was born. They explain how his nude paintings of her helped them process their grief – and eventual joy

‘The subject comes with huge baggage and I like that,” says Tom de Freston. The painter and I are in his studio in a village outside Oxford, surrounded by nude portraits of his wife, the novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave. “I wanted to ask, ‘What does it mean as a male artist to be looking at the female figure? And where does the agency sit?’”

We have been talking about Titian’s Poesie series, how those paintings – commissioned by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Spain – fetishise the naked female body. “Obviously there’s other things going on in them … I think Titian’s often prodding at morality and power,” De Freston says.

Tate Britain, London
JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show. But who cares when the work is so sublime you can hear the squelching and smell the river?

Turner or Constable: who’s the boss? Tate Britain’s exhibition of work by the two artists, subtitled Rivals and Originals, fudges the question. Born a year apart and both alumni of the Royal Academy schools in London, each was keenly aware of what the other was doing, in a British art world that was as febrile and competitive, if immeasurably smaller, than it is today (although you should try the Italian Renaissance if you want full-blooded rivalries and enmities). Sometimes, they sought the same collectors and painted the same subjects. Turner was encouraged from an early age by his father, a Covent Garden wigmaker and barber; Constable was the son of a Suffolk mill owner and grain merchant who wanted him to take over the family business.

As well as their contrasting backgrounds, their temperaments could not have been more different. A scene from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall as Turner and James Fleet as Constable, plays in the show, presenting the two painters bickering on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1832. Turner added a touch of red, in the form of a buoy, to his seascape Helvoetsluys; the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea in order to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, on which the painter had been working for more than a decade. But whatever their rivalry entailed, it was hardly the odd-couple bromance between Van Gogh and Gauguin depicted in the 1956 Vincente Minnelli movie Lust for Life (Gauguin: “You paint too fast!” Van Gogh: “You look too fast!”). It is worth remembering that Constable once wrote in a letter: “Did you ever see a picture by Turner, and not wish to possess it?”

A former sailors’ haunt has been reimagined by more than 40 creatives for the closing weekend of the Fremantle biennale

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Making my way up a creaky, carpeted staircase, I step into what feels like a different world – a building I’ve passed hundreds of times yet never set foot in. I am standing on the first level of Fremantle’s former P&O hotel, and am immediately taken aback by its weathered, almost cinematic beauty: tall stained-glass windows, dark timber mouldings and an iron-framed balcony peering over High Street like some forgotten lookout.

First built about 1870 and renovated during the gold-rush era, for almost a century this building was a magnet for wharfies and crewmen, with its 31 rooms and a raucous sailors’ bar known as the Cockpit. But despite being in the centre of Fremantle’s busiest street, this historical relic has largely remained empty and off-limits for decades.

Left: Sculptural artist Abdul Rahman Abdullah’s work, In the name, draws on his childhood when the scarcity of halal meat brought animal slaughter and butchery into his family’s suburban back yard. Right: A chandelier forms part of his work Wednesday’s Child

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A Shakers-inspired exhibition has united the three-time Oscar winner and conceptual artist Suzanne Bocanegra

A small-town police chief of plainspoken decency in Fargo. A working-class mother driven to seek justice for her daughter in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. A modest, resilient woman finding dignity in life on the road in Nomadland.

The actor Frances McDormand’s three Oscar-winning performances display rare versatility but have empathy at their core. But qualities were on display last week when she joined the conceptual artist Suzanne Bocanegra at the opening of an exhibition featuring adult-sized cradles.

A RIBA report says “stark displays of sexism” are driving women from the profession. If we don’t fight this systemic misogyny, we won’t just lose dazzling designs – we’ll have a world only fit for 6ft tall policemen

If one were to think “Brazilian 20th-century modernist genius”, one might alight on Oscar Niemeyer, but see also the Italian émigré Lina Bo Bardi, who developed an Italian-style modernism with a Brazilian accent in her adopted homeland. Her Teatro Oficina, in São Paulo, was named by this paper as the best theatre in the world.

Five hundred miles away is one of my favourite residential buildings, A la Ronde; an eccentric 16-sided home in Exmouth, Devon. It was designed in 1796 by Jane and Mary Parminter (two “spinster” cousins, in the words of the National Trust) and relative John Lowder. The cousins, who were not professionals, had been inspired by their Grand Tour of Europe (an unusual undertaking for women at the time) and, in particular, the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. The critic Lucinda Lambton described the cottage orné with Byzantine inflection as embodying “a magical strangeness that one might dream of only as a child”.

In three thrilling works by Caravaggio, the same boy’s face crops up. As one – the astonishing Victorious Cupid – arrives in Britain, we ask: who was this anarchic model and muse?

The boy howls as his head is held down, a huge thumb pressing into his cheek as his father’s mighty hand holds him by the neck. This is The Sacrifice of Isaac and I am looking at it in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, feeling distressed by how Caravaggio has so chillingly rendered the face of this suffering child from the biblical tale. It looks as if Abraham, who has been told by God to kill his son, could break his neck with just one twist. Yet Abraham’s preferred method is with the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac’s throat. One thing’s for certain – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work was a great actor. There is not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

Standing in front of the painting, I know this is a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same boy – recognisable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each, that richly expressive face steals the show. In John the Baptist, he looks mischievously out of the shadows while cuddling a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome’s streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked kid running riot in a well-to-do house.

The sportsman pretends to be a psychologist in a new show which sees him square up to his reality show pal. Plus, refugees share moving stories of hope

“This show is pseudopsychologist Joe,” announces Celebrity Traitors star Joe Marler as he introduces this weekly analysis of a different “client” (famous guest). “Pseudo meaning fake.” The first episode is a delight of an interview – with his “hundy P” Nick Mohammed. Be warned, though, it’s very much a video rather than audio experience. There are around six minutes of the show that rely on visual gags that don’t work for listeners. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

After serving time in jail, actor Allison Mack opens up about her experiences in a group with links to sex trafficking. Plus, a deep dive into Jane Austen

The former First Lady hosts an absorbing new show about her fashion evolution. Plus, Katy Davis explores ‘waiting’ – whether it’s for a bus or an imprisoned lover