What is the effervescent new boss at Pitlochry theatre planning for his first season? Huge names, undersung stars – and a King Lear played by ‘the woman who changed my life’

‘Holy shit!” This was the instant response of one venerable theatre critic when Pitlochry Festival theatre sent round embargoed copies of the plan for Alan Cumming’s inaugural season. The man himself sits back in the cavernous workshop behind the theatre building, dapper in a grey plaid suit. “I loved that,” he says gleefully.

When the Hollywood star was announced as the new artistic director of Scotland’s only major rural theatre last September, there was widespread shock – not least that Cumming answered an open recruitment call – followed by feverish speculation over which A-list pals he might charm away from London or New York to perform in Highland Perthshire.

After a decade, the Netflix hit is bowing out. Ahead of its last episodes, the show’s creators and cast talk about big 80s hair, recruiting a Terminator killer – and the birds Kate Bush sent them

How do you finish one of the biggest and most popular TV series of the last decade? Three years after season four came out, the fifth and final season of Stranger Things is about to make its way into the world. Millions of viewers are getting ready to find out what happens to the Upside Down and whether the plucky teens of Hawkins, Indiana can fight off Vecna for good, but it is early November 2025, and its creators Matt and Ross Duffer are finding it difficult to talk about. It’s not just because they’re feeling the pressure, or because the risk of spoilers and leaks is so dangerously high. It’s because the identical twin brothers from North Carolina are just not ready. “It makes me sad,” says Ross. “Because it’s easier to not think about the show actually ending.”

A decade ago, hardly anyone knew what the Upside Down was. Few had heard of Vecna, Mind Flayers or Demogorgons. In 2015, the brothers – self-professed nerds and movie obsessives – were about to begin shooting their first ever TV series. Stranger Things was to be a supernatural adventure steeped in 80s nostalgia, paying tribute to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. Part of their pitch to Netflix was that it would be “John Carpenter mashed up with ET”. Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine were in it, so it wasn’t exactly low-key, but it was by no means a dead-cert for success, not least because it was led by a cast of young unknowns. The first season came out in the summer of 2016, smashed Netflix viewing records, and almost immediately established itself as a bona fide TV phenomenon.

With his murder conviction overturned, the Jamaican star is back performing. He talks about his illness, regrets, and how he felt about dancehall going global while he was behind bars

There’s a moment when I’m interviewing Vybz Kartel in the courtyard of the Four Seasons hotel in Tower Bridge, London, and the UK government emergency alert test rings on my phone. He is panicked by it and jumps up. “Me ready fi run you know!” he says, which has us both laughing.

It is a funny moment, but also a jolting one considering that it arrives in the middle of him discussing the lasting psychological effects of prison. Kartel, 49, real name Adidja Palmer, had been incarcerated across different institutions in Jamaica following his conviction for the 2011 murder of his associate Clive “Lizard” Williams. Following a lengthy appeal process, he was released in July last year after the ruling was overturned by the UK privy council (which is the final court of appeal for Jamaica due to the nation being a former British colony).

The celebrated American mezzo-soprano has graced the world’s top opera houses, but is equally passionate about performing to first-timers – and inmates

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American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato apologises for the bed hair as we chat via zoom from Tasmania, where she’s preparing a series of concerts to mark her first time performing in Australia. “I’m windswept”, she laughs as she pats down her signature spiky blond hair. “I’m having a week of vacation, which is rare for me.”

Downtime for DiDonato is made rarer by a punishing touring schedule that sees her perform around the globe in recitals showcasing her extraordinary vocal technique, while juggling major roles in classical and contemporary opera. She’s a regular at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and has sung in the world’s top opera houses, including Milan’s La Scala and Covent Garden in London.

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The actor and the director of Train Dreams – a quietly powerful tale of a logger in 1900s Idaho – on the slog of getting it made, the joy of motel living and why human-made things will always beat AI

America was built by men like Robert Grainier, the stoical lumberjack at the heart of Train Dreams. Grainier cuts the trees and tames the forest and lays the ground for railroads and towns. Technically, then, Train Dreams is a western. But he never once ropes a steer, shoots a bandit or circles the wagons ahead of a Comanche attack on the plains. The small print tells a different kind of story.

It was a hard film to pitch, admits the actor Joel Edgerton: an uphill struggle; plenty of studio trepidation. “You go into the meeting and say: ‘Well, it’s a movie about a guy who’s not really making choices for himself. He’s kind of pushed around by life.’”

Fuelled by a loathing of Trump, the war in Gaza and anger at ‘the same old chauvinistic crap’, the 75-year-old – who cut her teeth with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and more – has no plans to stop protesting

When I speak to Dee Dee Bridgewater, the jazz singer is preparing for a concert that evening in Des Moines, Iowa, performing classy selections from the Great American Songbook. But even though she has also recorded this material for her recent album Elemental, Bridgewater is not really in the mood. “I just don’t feel like it’s the time to be doing love songs and whimsical songs from the 1920s and 30s,” she says. “They’re beautiful, but there’s some kind of spirit and energy pushing me to sing songs saying: people, we have to protect our democracy.”

Bridgewater is one of American jazz’s foremost voices. Capable of crooning and confronting, the two-time Grammy winner has a career that spans six decades and has never stopped evolving. She cut her teeth sharing the stage with several of jazz’s greatest band leaders – Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon – before branching out into acting; singing pop and disco; and working out of France, the UK and Mali, always with a determination to create on her own terms.

Royal Court theatre, London
Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s drama toggles between digital and physical worlds as it traces a scholar’s grim compulsion

‘It’s not that deep,” Ani’s friend assures her. Who cares if she watches a lot of extreme pornography? But after the light is switched off, Ani can’t get through their impromptu sleepover without masturbating to porn on her phone. The friend wakes up next to her and exits in disgust.

The same scenario has already led Ani, a 30-year-old academic, to break up with her partner. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, she was using porn next to her boyfriend in bed. Fleabag darkly regaled us with her voracious YouPorn habit but Ani, despite her robust reasoning in their argument, is deeply troubled by her behaviour. So, too, is her father when Ani hides away in her old childhood bedroom with her laptop.

Hambling and Lucas join forces, Roger Fry gets a rare show and an aerial daredevil captures stormy Scotland – all in your weekly dispatch

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
These two very different artists became friends after meeting at the Colony Room (where else?) and now show together in an encounter of British art generations.
• Sadie Coles HQ, London, 20 November to 24 January

Footage shows the man jumping the red carpet barricade of the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good, then rushing towards and embracing the star

A court in Singapore has charged a man who grabbed Ariana Grande at a premiere of Wicked: For Good on Thursday night with being a public nuisance.

Video footage shows Johnson Wen jumping over a barricade at Universal Studios Singapore and rushing at Grande on the red carpet. Grande’s co-star Cynthia Erivo immediately jumped in to help protect her and Wen was moved away.

The director has revealed suitably grand scale of his forthcoming Homeric adventure, which was shot with Imax cameras and stars Matt Damon as Odysseus

Christopher Nolan says he has used more than 2 million ft of film for his adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, which is in post-production, after the director finished shooting in August.

In an interview with Empire magazine, Nolan said: “I’ve been out on [the sea] for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’s ship out there on the real waves, in the real places … We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.” He added: “We shot over 2 million ft of film.”

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi lead the Saltburn writer-director’s Charli xcx-soundtracked take on Emily Brontë’s novel, referred to as ‘the greatest love story of all time’

Emerald Fennell’s vision for Wuthering Heights is coming into focus.

The first full-length trailer for the Saltburn writer-director’s already controversial adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel sketches out an epic love story – “the greatest love story of all time”, according to a title card – beyond the erotic visuals of the first trailer.

Well-preserved oak and maple boats used for transport and fishing to be displayed in Peterborough

After lying undisturbed in mud for more than 3,000 years, three rare bronze and iron age log boats have emerged to offer fresh insights into prehistoric life.

The boats were among nine discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry 13 years ago – the largest group of prehistoric boats found in the same UK site. Most were well preserved, with one still able to float despite its long incarceration.

Closeup of studded stilettos in trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 causes fashion debate on social media

Posting the first trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Instagram on her birthday this week, the film’s star Anne Hathaway captioned the video with “it’s everybody’s birthday”, prompting copious comments featuring emojis of flames, hearts and – of course – the red shoe now associated with the film’s poster.

But with the trailer circulating on social media, it’s the shoes that have become the focus of fashion debate – and not in a good way.

Radio host uses chart songs that didn’t quite make top spot to highlight issue of Windermere pollution

If you Sit Down and wonder why Britain’s streams, rivers and lakes are so filthy, you’re probably Holding Out for a Hero to halt this Scandalous discharge of sewage.

Step forward the Lake District Radio DJ Lee Durrant, who will go Radio Ga Ga with a 24-hour live broadcasting marathon on Friday, playing songs that peaked at No 2 in the charts to highlight the ongoing stench of not quite Golden Brown “number twos” floating downstream.

The Royal Ballet’s Perspectives brings together a George Balanchine classic, a new work by Cathy Marston and Peck’s Everywhere We Go, with music by Sufjan Stevens

All photographs by Tristram Kenton

Between 1934 and 1936, artist Dorothy Waugh was commissioned to create 17 posters for the National Park Service, a groundbreaking opportunity for a female designer at the time. Her designs, which were both accessible and avant-garde, are being celebrated in an exhibition for the first time at New York’s Poster House. Blazing A Trail: Dorothy Waugh’s National Parks Posters is on display until 22 February 2026

The X-Files star is at his charismatic best as a ruthless multimillionaire who hires Jack Whitehall as a sinister nanny. It’s like The White Lotus meets The Talented Mr Ripley

I can’t say I had “Jack Whitehall stars with David ‘The X Files/ Californication’ Duchovny in glossy TV thriller” on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are, and a good time with it can be had by all. Alongside, perhaps, a smidge of national pride to see the daft lad from Fresh Meat, Bad Education and Travels With My Father all grown up and holding his own.

The glossy thriller in question is Malice, in which Whitehall plays Adam, a tutor promoted to manny (male nanny, for those not au fait with rich people’s terms), who is bent – for reasons as yet unknown – on ruining high-rolling businessman Jamie Tanner (Duchovny). Whether he has it in for the rest of the Tanner family and friends, or they are just doomed to be collateral damage, is not clear, but that doesn’t spoil the machiavellian fun.

When dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was imprisoned, her husband went on hunger strike – to force Britain to act. Narges Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes reveal how they brought their nightmare to the small screen

When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in Iran in 2016, it wasn’t immediately obvious what had happened – but within 100 days, we had the contours of the story. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, held a press conference. He had amassed 780,000 signatures on a petition for her release, and delivered a letter urging the same thing to former PM David Cameron. This, it transpired much later, was after murky meetings with the Foreign Office in which civil servants insisted that the best thing, both for Nazanin’s release and the safety of her parents and brother in Iran, was to lay low and let diplomacy take its course.

“It was state hostage-taking,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard Ratcliffe in the BBC’s four-part drama Prisoner 951. “It clearly goes on, and innocent people and families are completely disrupted and tarred for life. And now I’ve told this story, I look at anyone that might be accused of something, and I don’t quite believe it.”

This is far from the first new version the cooking show’s attempted. But it might just be its most dull

If there is one tried and true formula when it comes to television, it is this: when you run out of ideas, bring the kids in. This formula is why everything from MasterChef to The Great British Bake Off to Taskmaster has, at some point, bitten the bullet and introduced a junior version. And now it’s time for Come Dine With Me to join the gang.

Which is probably a bit late, all said. It took five years for MasterChef to bring in a junior version, and just one for Bake Off. Meanwhile, Come Dine With Me is 20. To call it long in the tooth would be a profound disservice to long teeth.

The historian heads to Australia to unearth the fallout of the American revolution. Plus: the mother of medieval smackdowns. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
By the 1770s, Britain was transporting 45,000 Africans into slavery every year. David Olusoga visits Bunce Island, where captured Africans were sold, to continue his epic series about the empire’s legacy. The fallout of the American revolution then takes him to Australia – which, of course, had already been home to natives for at least 40,000 years, including the Tasmanian Truganini. Hollie Richardson

In this excellent series, Flack’s mother Christine is steely and resolute as she questions a growing number of inconsistencies and demands answers about her daughter’s death

On the evening of 15 February 2020, news broke that the television presenter Caroline Flack had been found dead at her London home. Almost six years later, her death by suicide still feels shocking. Caroline was one of Britain’s most beloved hosts, best known as the face of Love Island UK. She had also presented The X Factor, and won the 12th series of Strictly Come Dancing alongside Pasha Kovalev. As well as an enviable TV career, she had the kind of girl-next-door approachability that made viewers feel as though they knew her off-screen as well as on it. Yet in the months before her death, her career had seemingly started to crumble, as she faced charges of assault by battery against her boyfriend, Lewis Burton.

This new series comes from the makers of the 2021 documentary Caroline Flack: Her Life and Death. While that film sensitively examined the emotional issues that had beset Flack since adolescence, Search for the Truth concentrates firmly on the months that followed the alleged assault against Burton in December 2019. Caroline’s mother, Christine, has analysed the evidence and spoken to experts – among them Caroline’s former publicist, and the former chief prosecutor of the crown prosecution service (CPS), who once personally referred to the case as one of domestic abuse. Christine’s goal is to ascertain whether her daughter was treated differently by the justice system because of who she was. In other words: did Caroline’s public profile transform a charged row between a couple over accusations of infidelity into something with far more serious consequences?

This adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s masterly novel, set in 70s Belfast, sees a Catholic teacher drawn into a dangerous affair with a Protestant barrister. It really hits a nerve

We could be happy together, if only we weren’t here and it wasn’t now: the tragedy of sweethearts caught up in conflict, their love overcome by others’ hate, is an old and powerful story. Trespasses, an adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s novel, written by Ailbhe Keogan, hits that nerve.

A small town outside Belfast, 1975: rancour, suspicion and grief shadow every moment in the thwarted life of Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a Catholic primary-school teacher in her mid-20s who is giving up her spare time to work shifts in her brother’s pub. The priests at the school are hollering bigots, telling the children that every Protestant is an evil enemy, despite one of the kids being the son of a Catholic father and Protestant mother. Cushla takes an interest in the boy, who tends to arrive at school without a coat, and his elder brother, who shows signs of secretly sharing Cushla’s love of reading. She gives them lifts back to their house on a flag-strewn Protestant estate, at the risk of her car being pelted with bricks, and redoubles her support for the family when the dad has his legs and skull broken by vengeful neighbours.

Attenborough’s latest extravaganza is packed with such high drama it’s like Game of Thrones … if Cersei was a hyena. If only it hadn’t been bumped down the schedules because of Strictly

As I watch a leopard hunt in Kingdom, the BBC’s latest David Attenborough-narrated documentary, I find myself thinking about a YouGov survey from a few years ago that found that half of Britons wouldn’t take a free trip to the moon, with 11% turning it down because “there isn’t enough to see and do”. As well as it providing a fantastic insight into the great British public’s psyche (would outer space be better if it had Alton Towers?), I can’t help but wonder if it also explains the pressure that TV commissioners feel under to find new ways to interest the pesky human race in sights that would previously have been greeted with wonder.

Back in 2017, Blue Planet II was the most-watched programme of the year, with 14.1 million viewers tuning in to see dolphins surf on prime time. Today, the six-part Kingdom has been bumped to the teatime slot, and finding out which Strictly celeb’s rumba has been voted the most mediocre is deemed more important to the schedule.

The actor’s account of his big Hollywood break – and how it almost never happened

Michael J Fox has already eked out four books of Hollywood memoir, so the justification for a fifth – written with longtime collaborator Nelle Fortenberry – ought to be good. It is: the subject of these 176 pages is a three-month period in 1985 when Fox was simultaneously shooting his breakout sitcom role in Family Ties and the career-defining American classic, Back to the Future.

That’s two more-than-full-time jobs for one little guy, necessitating that the then 23-year-old actor work 20-hour days, six days a week. This schedule was only possible because the mid-1980s was a time before showbiz labour laws caught up with basic human decency. These days, we’re told, a standard contract “demands two weeks of buffer time on either side of a job”, while Fox didn’t even get an hour.

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.

The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody-mindedness and belligerence

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle.

FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.

Full of word games, in-jokes and grisly murders, this debut pours gleeful scorn on the pretensions of contemporary literary life

Freud would have had a lot to say about a novel in which the central premise is writers being murdered. A manifestation of a repressed desire to eliminate rival literary talent? A clear case of the death drive? Either way, there’s some twisted business going on in Andrew Gallix’s chronically funny debut novel, Loren Ipsum.

The morbid if intriguing premise quickly becomes secondary to an insouciant satire on the vanity fair of present-day literary culture. Not since Paul Ewen’s How to Be a Public Author has so much gleeful scorn for pretentious authors, critics and scenesters been poured on to the page. Taking its title from the placeholder text used while preparing a book for print, the novel features an eponymous protagonist, a journalist resident in Paris, who is researching a monograph on the reclusive English author Adam Wandle. Loren Ipsum somehow manages to be both the book’s moral centre and a shapeshifting cipher for everything that’s wrong with contemporary literary life. With “a heart of frosted glass”, she is “all blurred features and radio static”. Her own first novel, Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, was published by Galley Beggar in 2019. Her favourite bookshop is Shakespeare and Company (“she had all their totes”), and her best party frock is “part Mondrian, part Battenberg”. The knowing list of Loren’s favourite things is peak Bougie London Literary Woman and wickedly spot-on. It’s that kind of book. By the end, you can’t see the modernism for all the posts fencing it in.

One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suits

In the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar avenges his wife’s infidelity by ordering her execution and marrying a new virgin every night, having each of them beheaded by sunrise so they won’t have time to cheat. When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and those become the stories we’re reading.

As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book – a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights – Shahrazad’s feat of creativity “refuses the present emergency – the contrived drama of a powerful man”. The echo of life in the Trump era is deliberate; for Winterson, the means by which Shahrazad changes her predicament holds out hope for a progressive politics currently losing ground to “radical-rightwing thuggery”. “A better story starts with a better story,” she writes. “Reason will not win the day. Without imagination nothing changes.”

In the Norwegian master’s latest example of ‘mystical realism’, one man makes a dreamlike, hypnotic voyage through life

“I have always known that writing can save lives,” said the Norwegian author Jon Fosse in his speech accepting the 2023 Nobel prize in literature. “And if my writing also can help to save the lives of others, nothing would make me happier.” Rare is the novelist who talks in such language these days: fiction tends to know its modest place. Fosse, who is also a poet and an essayist, and one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, follows his own path. A case in point: Septology (2019-2021), published across three volumes, running to more than 800 pages, containing a single sentence. Forget formalism, though; his fictions, often set in fjordic Norway, are disintegration loops, quiet and incantatory, emotionally overwhelming.

At fewer than 120 pages, Vaim, his first new work since winning the Nobel, is a wisp of a thing. Divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, it begins with Jatgeir sailing on a small boat from the small town of Vaim to the big city of Bjørgvin (Bergen). His mission is to buy a needle and thread to fix a missing button. It’s a long journey and, not just at one shop but at two, he gets royally ripped off, being charged far over the odds for a single spool. He huffs and seethes, but says nothing to the storekeepers themselves. What a hick, we might think. What a chump.

Crowe is wittily cast as the pompous Nazi in this tale from behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials, but Malek is deeply silly as army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley

Here is a movie promising the juiciest of real-life stories from history. Before the Nazi war-crime trials at Nuremberg that started in November 1945, an obscure US army psychiatrist called Dr Douglas Kelley was ordered to interview the prisoners, chief among whom was Hermann Göring. This was supposedly to establish their fitness for trial, but was really intended to gain inside information as to how they would conduct their defence. Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans.

But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley: an eye-rolling, enigmatic-smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest which makes it look as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers. Leo Woodall plays the American army translator Howie Triest, Michael Shannon is the US chief prosecutor Robert H Jackson and Richard E Grant is British Tory MP David Maxwell-Fyfe who (for all that his postwar career as home secretary was notorious for the homophobic persecution, which helped drive Alan Turing to his grave), is actually shown to be crucial in cross-examining the Nazis. All of these actors do their best, but the figure of Kelley himself is a ridiculous cartoon.

A grim, grave-faced look at Jesus realising he is in fact the son of God is a bafflingly acted and messily made bore

It’s hard to know how seriously one should take a film that casts Nicolas Cage as Joseph, the carpenter who acted as the adoptive father of Jesus. One might expect, with the actor still relying on his trademark California intonation and histrionic outbursts, that this would be another one of his late-stage career larks, like playing Dracula or himself. But in The Carpenter’s Son, a bafflingly serious stew of horror, drama and fantasy, it slowly starts to dawn on us that this is in fact, not a joke. What it is I couldn’t tell you but entertaining it most definitely isn’t.

The film, from Egypt-born, London-raised writer and director Lotfy Nathan, is inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a text seen as heretical by some, which offers highly debated “insight” into the early years of Jesus. Nathan begins by clueing us into the fact that this isn’t your vicar’s Sunday school biblical drama, as a screaming cave-based birth sequence is followed by a bonfire of babies, King Herod’s men throwing on more and more as mothers wail at the side. Cage’s unnamed carpenter and the new mother at his side (FKA twigs) escape and we leap forward to see them moving into a remote village with their teenage offspring, known as the boy (Noah Jupe).

The actor and comedian was Oscar-nominated for her film debut 40 years ago, then won an Academy Award just five years later. As she turns 70, we rate Goldberg’s greatest hits

Or: Winona, Overshadowed. Predominantly, that is, by Angelina Jolie, whose movie-stealing turn as one of Ryder’s fellow patients at a late-1960s US psychiatric hospital won her an Oscar. Don’t discount Goldberg’s contribution, though. Soothingly understated as Valerie, the chief nurse, she and fellow staff members, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Jeffrey Tambor, provide the emotional grounding over which their younger co-stars (also including Elisabeth Moss and Brittany Murphy) can soar.

Skeletons rattle and good people turn bad in ruthless tale that is very well played but not quite lethal enough

A bit of a throwback to the kind of noir-tinged black-comedy-dramas of yore where good people break very bad, this quietly ruthless film sticks to the template but throws in some new-fangled touches. It also draws on the talents of a cracking roster of supporting players, who add a substantial amount of texture and colour to the proceedings, not least among them the film’s own director Alex Winter, best known for playing Bill opposite Keanu Reeves’ Ted. In a peripheral but significant role, Winter plays a sad-sack stoner, the kind of tragic loser Bill might have grown up to be if he and Ted had never encountered George Carlin and his most excellent time machine.

That said, something feels a bit undercooked here, perhaps due to Winter’s direction or Michael MB Galvin’s script, which seems to lack a little torque in the last turns of the screw. The set-up is simple enough, a quite relatable for anyone who has an ageing parent and shiftless siblings. Meg (Kaya Scodelario) has outsourced the care of her widowed mother Judy (Ingunn Omholt) to home-help Grace (Billie Lourd, gloriously trashy) while Meg raises her kids and tries to get her business selling stuff on Facebook up and running. When Judy has a stroke, Meg’s wannabe screenwriter brother Noah (Josh Gad) arrives in town and the two siblings must prepare for their parent’s death and the division of assets.

David Osit’s documentary takes a disturbing look at the televised shaming served up by the hit show To Catch a Predator

It’s too soon to know for sure, but this may end up being ranked as one of the best nonfiction films of the year. At least let’s hope lots of people get to see this, even if it’s a mistake because they meant to buy a ticket for Predator: Badlands. Instead of an alien hunter with gnarly teeth, this offers a profoundly troubling meditation on our collective thirst for revenge – or at least the kind of bizarre performance art version of revenge as served up by reality TV show To Catch a Predator, a US series that ran from 2004 to 2007 and which featured weekly footage of paedophiles and would-be paedophiles being duped, shamed and arrested.

Predators’ director David Osit, at first just an offscreen voice but eventually a fully seen (in every sense) presence, explains that he used to watch To Catch a Predator avidly as a young man. Every episode was roughly the same: a man is observed arriving at a suburban house, expecting to have sex there with a teenaged girl or boy who is in fact a hired actor who has lured the target over. Then journalist Chris Hansen would step out from behind a doorway to confront the target with transcripts of interactions he had been having with the decoy. The target would then usually start crying and pleading for mercy;and then, in a final theatrical act of cruelty, he’d be told he was free to go only to be arrested seconds later by waiting law enforcement officers working with the show.

There’s great access in this look at the comedian and actor’s life, from time with the subject himself to his many peers, but there’s depth missing

Being Eddie, a new Netflix documentary on Eddie Murphy, isn’t his best movie. It isn’t his worst. It’s something to justify signing the 64-year-old to a $70m production deal in hopes that he might finally be moved to return to his standup comedy roots and deliver the long-anticipated follow-up to his seminal 1987 special Raw. With access to the subject and his archival material bought and paid for, Being Eddie is free to focus on other aspects of Murphy’s life, opening with indulgent shots of his gothic mansion and its retractable roof. While the camera gawks at the spoils of Murphy’s 40-plus year career, he remains at pains to tell viewers that his day-to-day routine isn’t much different from theirs: he goes to work, hangs out with his family and falls asleep to MTV’s Ridiculousness. He thinks it’s the funniest show on TV, in fact, and would much rather binge that blooper series (which he likens to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s avant-garde work) than reruns of his greatest hits.

That would be a bold confession to share even if it wasn’t coming from arguably the funniest person who has ever lived, and Being Eddie wastes no time in making Murphy’s claim to that title ironclad. For confirmation, director Angus Wall starts out by consulting with other recipients of major Netflix deals: Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld. It’s just hard to digest all this reverence for Murphy from comedians who have grown increasingly out touch and comfortable with punching down at marginalized groups.

Homegrown, female-driven scary movies in which witches and zombies lay waste to invading troops are proving popular in Ukraine. But why seek out horror on screen if you have so much of it in real life?

When Ukrainian horror movie The Witch: Revenge started filming in late 2023, the costumes for the Russian soldiers were sourced straight from the battlefield. “They were real Russian uniforms. The captured soldiers or the dead soldiers, they just took those uniforms and cleaned them, and we used them,” the film’s producer, Iryna Kostyuk, says, speaking from Kyiv. Having cleaned the uniforms, the film-makers then had to dirty them up again so they looked suitably lived-in. Some of the vests still had names written in them – and several had names crossed out, presumably because Russian soldiers had filched them themselves from fallen comrades. “It was quite a challenge for the [Ukrainian] actors to wear them,” the producer says.

The movie, also known as The Konotop Witch, is about a witch who has renounced her powers but re-summons them after the Russians kill her fiance. It was a runaway hit at the Ukrainian box office last year, making $1.4m – a very big number for a country during a war, facing curfews and electricity cuts. It’s also the first in a horror universe cycle, called Heroines of the Dark Times, that Kostyuk is overseeing. Kostyuk and her team have now completed the second film in the series, The Dam. A zombie splatterfest, full of gore and severed heads, it follows a unit of Ukrainian soldiers, led by a female fighter codenamed Mara, who uncover a cold war era laboratory where Soviet scientists conducted nefarious experiments in the 1950s. Mara and her team face the inevitable battle with undead Soviet soldiers – but must also confront their own innermost fears, and learn to trust one another.

The reviews are in for the long-awaited adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel, presented in a purpose-built theatre in Canary Wharf

The Super Bowl optics are all there from the off: a wardrobe of great gaudy glory (the 1960s, with twists of commedia dell’arte, the Palace of Versailles and alien-chic, designed by Moi Tran), a fast-changing set by Miriam Buether and energetic choreography from Charlotte Broom. The first half, prepping us for the gameshow, lacks tension, nonetheless. “We are just hours away from being mortal enemies,” Katniss says. But you don’t feel the dread.

Arifa Akbar, the Guardian

Mia Carragher, daughter of ex-footballer Jamie, is an energetic central presence as Katniss Everdeen, the warrior who fights off rivals in the gory contest that’s the ratings equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing in Panem, the grim state ruled by a foppish elite. But the fact that she’s required to narrate much of the story while sprinting here and there is a distinct flaw.

Playwright Conor McPherson and director Matthew Dunster have set this dystopian tale in a drab, delicately evoked version of Depression-era America, where the inhabitants of District 12 eke out a living amid coal-mining disasters and food shortages. A chorus of townsfolk sway like sun-bleached clothes on a washing line, powerless and adrift, in choreographer Charlotte Broom’s evocative movement sequences.

In the chrome-and-glass dystopia of Canary Wharf in east London, most of the money looks like it’s been blown on creating a hi-tech colosseum. Eight vertiginous banks of seating – some of which move during the performance – open out into a runway, or close in to form the killing fields … Martial arts, modern dance, and hand-to-hand combat are what drive the pageant, heightened by strobe lighting and nasty white noise.

Set pieces rise up from beneath the arena-like stage, and props are lowered from above. Ian Dickinson’s sound design sends the flutter of birds’ wings around the auditorium, bringing us closer to the action; Kev McCurdy’s fight direction orchestrates gasp-worthy duels; and Chris Fisher’s illusions send arrows flying into the bullseye of their targets.

Dunster and McPherson’s unexciting production fails to reimagine and revitalise its source material. Moreover, they don’t critique the queasy subject matter. There’s simply never enough sense that we, the audience, are complicit in what we are seeing … Given that the story is about children killing each other in the name of TV entertainment, the failure properly to characterise the tributes themselves is almost a moral problem.

One aspect that cannot be faulted is the energy, stamina and athleticism of the performers, many of whom come from dance backgrounds. Carragher herself must run tens of miles during each performance; her indefatigability is commendable, even though McPherson’s bewilderingly clunky script leaves her with far too much exposition to plough through.

I wasn’t sold on the casting of a pre-recorded John Malkovich as the manipulative President Snow – it’s somewhat disorientating to have a famous American actor appear at massive scale on the screens every now and again, and the scenes where Malkovich is ‘talking’ to a live performer just feel a bit of an odd thing to be watching.

The Hunger Games: On Stage is at Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre, London, until October 2026

Short story set in 1983, and published a year after the former prime minister’s death, considers ‘what happens when people feel they don’t have a voice’ says director John Young

Hilary Mantel’s controversial story imagining the murder of Margaret Thatcher in the summer of 1983 is to be staged next year in Liverpool.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983 was published in the Guardian in 2014 and gave the title to Mantel’s collection of short stories that year. In the tale, a woman opens the front door of her flat in a “genteel corner” of Windsor expecting a plumber yet finds a gunman entering. He is intent on using her home’s vantage point to take aim at the then prime minister, who is having an eye operation at a nearby private hospital.

In his first hit play, now receiving another starry revival, the celebrated dramatist’s analysis of the American psyche is steeped in European tradition

The British theatre’s long love affair with Arthur Miller continues. This week sees the start of previews for Ivo van Hove’s production of Miller’s first Broadway hit, All My Sons, which has had half a dozen major revivals over the past five decades. Indeed, you could argue that Miller is more honoured here than at home. On his death it was said in the Times Literary Supplement: “He was mourned in England as a revered contemporary, in America as a figure from a bygone age.”

Why this division? One answer, supplied by All My Sons, is that Miller analysed the American psyche while being steeped in European tradition. It is difficult to discuss this particular play without giving away the plot. It is, however, an open secret that it hinges on the unproven accusation that Joe Keller, as a wartime manufacturer of aircraft engines, allowed faulty cylinder heads to be dispatched to the air force knowing they could endanger life.

Kiln theatre, London
The accused of the Pendle witch trials are given a voice but this glib production fails to do them justice

Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute’s musical, inspired by the Pendle witch trials of the 17th century, clearly seeks to turn the accused women from footnotes in history to flesh and blood beings, outrageously wronged and relaying their own stories.

A group of Lancashire women are awaiting their fates behind bars: the church-going Frances (Shiloh Coke) whose husband is her accuser and who has suffered child loss; heavily pregnant Rose (Lauryn Redding); Maggie (Jacinta Whyte), who makes medicine from herbs; and Nell (Allyson Ava-Brown), a midwife or maid to Frances. The drama kicks off with a newly deposited prisoner, Jenet (Gabrielle Brooks), famed for testifying against her family for witchcraft as a child, who is now accused of the same thing.

At Kiln theatre, London, until 17 January

Speaking at a screening of hit play The Fifth Step, the actor reveals he is ‘not comfortable at all on camera’

Slow Horses star Jack Lowden has said it was a “relief” to return to the stage in the intense role of an alcoholic in the West End hit The Fifth Step.

Lowden first starred in David Ireland’s two-hander when it premiered at the Edinburgh international festival in 2024 and he reprised his character in London earlier this year, this time opposite Martin Freeman. “It’s always a relief to be on stage,” said Lowden. “I don’t really feel comfortable at all on camera.” He continued: “Whenever I get to be on stage, I instantly feel at home. A lot of actors do say that, which can sound like shite sometimes, but I genuinely do mean it. I feel more at home on stage than I do in life and I don’t know why that is at all.”

Live theatre, Newcastle
Jamie Eastlake’s play addresses the forces pushing a young man towards the far right – and the school meals supervisor set on saving him

When did society become so polarised? Angela (Joann Condon) reckons it was 2005 with Jamie Oliver. As a dinner lady, she had to throw out the Turkey Twizzlers when the TV chef turned his guns on junk food. It is a wonky analysis but you can see where she is coming from.

Her confusion is partly the point. Playwright and director Jamie Eastlake wants to make sense of a country pulled to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s far-right protests and to Just Stop Oil’s civil disobedience. In a complex world, we are reassured by simple answers, but what is the actual cause of our discontent?

(Otoroku)
The British free-jazz pianist Pat Thomas leads his quartet through a powerful fusion of Sufi inspiration, rhythmic intensity and improvisational fire

In April 2022, the wild and inquisitively wilful British free-jazz keyboardist and composer Pat Thomas was improvising with his eyes shut in the company of his quartet أحمد [Ahmed] at Glasgow’s Glue Factory. The music was dedicated to the 1950s-70s legacy of the late Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk bassist, oud player and early global-music pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the inspiration for the group’s work. When Thomas emerged from his trance, he was astonished to hear that an ecstatic crowd had been dancing the night away around him.

He shouldn’t have been surprised. Since أحمد [Ahmed]’s inception, their collective heat has fused abstract improv and groove music from all over the world: Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, dub, jungle, electronics, and the 1990s free-improv of Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill and drummer Steve Noble have all inspired Thomas. Saxophonist Seymour Wright has absorbed the sax vocabulary of Evan Parker and the insights into collective improv and avant-swing of AMM drummer and teacher Eddie Prévost. Eclectic partners Joel Grip (bass) and Antonin Gerbal (drums) power and expand these infectious, volatile energies.

Overpowering, explosive and intense, the trio’s contemporary form of psychedelia is rebooted for the troubled, disturbing climate of 2025

From Brighton
Recommended if you like Osees, Ty Segall, the noisier bits of King Gizzard
Up next Currently working on a debut album for release next year.

A city with its own psych festival, and indeed a gig promotion company called Acid Box, Brighton has no shortage of lysergic left-field rock bands. But while most of their local contemporaries tend to the more recumbent end of the psychedelic spectrum, Oral Habit deal in what they call “the ear-rattling psychic dream of choked-up acid punks”, a sound that feels overpowering, explosive and intense: you could say it’s more closely aligned to the disoriented racket of mid-60s freakbeat than the pie-eyed beatitudes of the Summer of Love; equally you could suggest it’s a very contemporary form of psychedelia, rebooted for the troubled, disturbing climate of 2025.

(Shelter Press)
The New York poet and multi-instrumentalist uses granular synthesis alongside their ‘dysfluency’ to craft a moving meditation on listening, identity and freedom

In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.

‘Prince’s Purple Rain guitar was in the corner of the studio and his lava lamps were everywhere. You couldn’t help but be inspired’

I was in a band in Hull called Akrylykz. When the Beat came to play at the Welly club we gave them a demo tape. Then they invited us to tour with them. Later, after they split up, Andy Cox and David Steele were looking for a singer for a new band and they remembered me. Fine Young Cannibals felt right straight away. After The Tube filmed us doing Johnny Come Home, we just took off. Then somebody must have noticed me on telly because suddenly I was getting film offers, and I appeared in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Scandal.

As the Jazz Cafe and Ronnie Scott’s expand, and Blue Note eyes its arrival, proprietors say there’s an energy in the scene – but financial pressures remain

As small gig venues around the country nervously eye their futures amid rising utility prices and a cost of living crisis, one corner of the live music scene seems to be thriving: London’s jazz clubs.

The Jazz Cafe is extending its Camden venue and opening an east London location, Ronnie Scott’s is being refurbished, and New York’s iconic Blue Note club, which has already spread to Japan, Brazil, Italy and China, will open its first London venue next year. And while financial pressures remain, a host of other, smaller venues are bringing in vibrant new audiences.

Accused of obscenity and sued by police and Tory MPs, Libertine outraged the establishment as part of Crass. Now she’s back – and she hasn’t mellowed with age

‘Things haven’t changed,” sighs Eve Libertine as she contemplates her new album. “All those songs are as relevant as they ever were.” The album in question, Live at the Horse Hospital, shows no sign that one of punk’s most anti-establishment figures is mellowing with age. Recorded at one blistering London live show in April 2024, Libertine collaborated with Chilean guitarist Eva Leblanc, reimagining tracks from Libertine’s back catalogue including ones from her time singing with 1970s anarcho-punk pioneers Crass. Produced by Crass founder Penny Rimbaud, it treads a path between performance art, experimental music and earth ritual; with her strident operatic tones, Libertine sounds like a soothsayer foretelling an apocalypse. It’s not an easy listen, but that was never the case with Crass, either.

“We never had much fun, to be honest,” Libertine says. “It was really heavy going at times. We were angry; we were trying to say things in a way that was confrontational and shocking to get a reaction. And we definitely did.”

The keyboard player on his heroin overdose, how Kurt Cobain wanted to be gay and why his memoir will ruin his Christian relatives’ Thanksgiving dinner

When Roddy Bottum began work on his remarkable autobiography The Royal We, the Faith No More keyboard-player knew exactly the book he didn’t want to write. “The kind that has pictures in the middle,” he says, via video-call from Oxnard, California, where he’s completing a new album by his group Imperial Teen. “I’m not a big fan of rock memoirs – they’re the most predictable, name-droppy, sub-literature experiences.”

The Royal We certainly isn’t name-droppy – Bottum doesn’t even use the surnames of his bandmates. And while he outlines the group’s origins and early development, this takes a back seat to his “youth escapades” in San Francisco, “before the internet, before that city got ruined”. Much of the focus is on his sexual awakening, and how the related secrecy and shame have affected his life. “I was having sex with men when I was very young, 13 or 14,” he says. “It was such a taboo, and that set the tone of my life.” In the memoir, episodes involving his cruising public toilets and parks as a teenager are recounted unflinchingly and unapologetically. “I had sex with older men in bushes,” he writes. “Shamefully at first, proudly later. Fuck off.”

Wigmore Hall, London
In a deftly curated programme, youthful compositions rubbed shoulders with music from her most productive period, the 1920s

Among the plethora of female composers finally receiving their due in recent years, Rebecca Clarke stands out for sheer quality and consistency of inspiration. Born in 1886, she studied with Stanford, worked with Vaughan Williams and, as a virtuoso violist, became one of the first professional female orchestral players in London. Relocating to the United States, her output declined, but her spirited chamber music and more recently her rediscovered songs, have proved fertile ground for today’s performers.

In a deftly curated programme, the culmination of a Wigmore Hall Clarke study day, youthful compositions rubbed shoulders with music from her most productive period, the 1920s. Ailish Tynan opened proceedings, her soaring soprano and snappy diction illuminating songs that suggested the influence of Vaughan Williams. Ravel, in Orientalist mode, hovered over settings of Chinese poetry, perfect material for Kitty Whately’s fresh, flaming mezzo-soprano with its cushioned lower register. Ashley Riches’ warm baritone embraced Clarke’s memorable melody for Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens while raising a smile in The Aspidistra, a melodramatic song about the calculated murder of a pot plant.

Fröst/Nordberg/Kobekina/Dubé/Andersson
(Sony)
The virtuosic musician’s effortless phrasing and imaginative collaborations make this collection short but sweet

Perhaps every musician worth their salt turns to JS Bach sooner or later. The German composer was dead before the clarinet as we know it today was established, but Martin Fröst, his playing as silkily eloquent as ever, makes the short but sweet selection on this recording very much his own.

There’s an intimate feel to the whole thing, which was recorded at Fröst’s studio in the Swedish countryside, with the fellow musicians sleeping over. The tone is set by the aria from the Goldberg Variations, with a hint of a jazz sensibility thanks to Sebastián Dubé’s bass, Fröst’s melody seamless on top. Fröst duets with his viola player brother Göran on two Inventions, and with himself, double-tracked, on the G major Sinfonia; fair enough, few others would be able to keep up. Yet though this is lightning fast, it still holds to the quiet, unassuming mood.

St Paul’s Cathedral, London
The composer conducted two of his own choral works – one a world premiere, alongside a majestic performance of Vaughan Williams’ fifth symphony in a polished and enjoyable evening

He is a virtuoso of the jaunty rhythm and the doyen of the singable tune. He has a way with suspensions – crunchy enough for resolution to break through like sunlight, but strictly PG-rated compared with the harmonic adventures of his contemporaries. His music is as unfashionably essential as a five-pack of M&S briefs, as ineffably English as queueing.

From two royal weddings and a coronation to choir rehearsals, school assemblies and carol services across the UK and North America, British composer John Rutter has dominated the anglophone choral scene for six decades. At 80, he is in a league of his own: a niche national treasure, even referred to as “the composer who owns Christmas”.

As she prepares to star in Janáček’s The Makropulos Case for the Royal Opera, the great singer explains that she does not play ‘the happy, jumping, sexy lady’

Ausrine Stundyte has been in the room for just over two minutes when she looks me in the eye and declares: “I am totally not a feminist.” I am slightly taken aback. Moments earlier, I had been watching the Lithuanian soprano rehearse Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case, which the Royal Opera is staging for the first time this autumn, in a new production by Katie Mitchell. Stundyte takes the work’s central role – and Mitchell is a director famous for her explicitly feminist approach.

Stundyte, it turns out, has also surprised herself. A few days after we speak, she emails a clarification: she isn’t against women’s rights. But it bothers her, she explains, when “women see men as the problem and themselves as victims. When you put yourself in the role of a victim, you give away your own power.”

Activision; PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC
With a deafening onslaught of massive shootout set-pieces in exotic locations, an evolving campaign mode and excellent multiplayer offerings, this maximalist instalment of crazed carnage is a hoot

It seems like an anachronism now, in this age of live service “forever games”, that the annual release of a new Call of Duty title is still considered a major event. But here is Black Ops 7, a year after its direct predecessor, and another breathless bombard of military shooting action. This time it is set in a dystopian 2035 where a global arms manufacturer named the Guild claims to be the only answer to an apocalyptic new terrorist threat – but are things as clearcut as they seem?

The answer, of course, is a loudly yelled “noooo!” Black Ops is the paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed cousin to the Modern Warfare strand of Call of Duty games, a series inspired by 70s thrillers such as The Parallax View and The China Syndrome, and infused with ’Nam era concerns about rogue CIA agents and bizarre psy-ops. The campaign mode, which represents just a quarter of the offering this year, is a hallucinogenic romp through socio-political talking points such as psychopathic corporations, hybrid warfare, robotics and tech oligarchies. The result is a deafening onslaught of massive shootout set-pieces in exotic locations, as the four lead characters – members of a supercharged spec-ops outfit – are exposed to a psychotropic drug that makes them relive their worst nightmares. Luckily, they do so with advanced weaponry, cool gadgets and enough buddy banter to destabilise a medium-sized rogue nation. It is chaotic, relentless and stupidly pleasurable, especially if you play in co-operative mode with three equally irresponsible pals.

Announced in 2020 by the Game Awards as an inclusive programme for the industry’s next generation, the Future Class initiative has now been discontinued. Inductees describe clashes with organisers and a lack of support from the beginning

Video games have long struggled with diversification and inclusivity, so it was no surprise when the Game Awards host and producer Geoff Keighley announced the Future Class programme in 2020. Its purpose was to highlight a cohort of individuals working in video games as the “bright, bold and inclusive future” of the industry.

Considering the widespread reach of the annual Keighley-led show, which saw an estimated 154m livestreams last year, Future Class felt like a genuine effort. Inductees were invited to attend the illustrious December ceremony, billed as “gaming’s Oscars”, featured on the official Game Awards website, and promised networking opportunities and career advancement advice. However, the programme reportedly struggled from the start. Over the last couple of years, support waned. Now, it appears the Game Awards Future Class has been wholly abandoned.

The Fortnite tie-in is only the latest in a longstanding relationship between The Simpsons and video games, showing how the hit sitcom has survived as a cultural icon

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And so Fortnite has done it again. Over the past five years, developer Epic Games maintained the relevance and awareness of its ageing online shooter by churning out pop culture collaborations, from Marvel to John Wick to Sabrina Carpenter. For limited periods, players get to take part in the game as their favourite movie characters and music artists, an arrangement that provides refreshed audience numbers for the game – and a tidy revenue stream for the brands.

Now it’s the turn of The Simpsons. This month, the Fortnite island has become a miniature Springfield, complete with popular characters and well-known locations. If you want to play as Homer and shoot up Moe’s Tavern, you can. If you want to take Bart to Kwik-E-Mart for a squishee, go ahead. Everywhere you look there’s a fun little Simpsons Easter egg, from the fact that the Battlebus (which delivers players on to the island) is now driven by Otto to the presence of Duffman, Seymour Skinner’s steamed hams and drooling aliens.

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Is the pranksy artist’s latest show a worrying comment about Britain’s discarded rope problem – or a joke at the expense of the buy-anything art world?

How long is a piece of string? David Shrigley can’t answer that, but he can tell you how much it weighs: 10 tons, apparently. His latest installation is literally an exhibition of 10 tons of old rope, accumulated by him over months, and left in towering mounds in this swanky gallery in London’s Mayfair. Most of it is marine rope, destined for landfill. It’s hard to recycle this stuff, it seems, and there’s an endless supply of it dumped around the world. So Shrigley scooped up as much of it as he could find, piled it up and put a massive price tag on it.

The work can be yours for £1m. And that’s the point of the show: this is literally money for old rope. It’s not that deep – it’s just an idea taken to its logical conclusion, an idiom taken too far, a pun taken too literally.

The American takes strange film stills and turns them into monumental watercolours, full of Catholic guilt and paranoia – and it’s made him the most talked-about painter of the moment

‘All paintings are in their own way accusations and confessions,” says Joseph Yaeger. “It’s what Polygrapher is about.” This is the title of the artist’s new exhibition, his first since joining the prestigious London gallery Modern Art in 2024, for whom it marks the opening of new premises in St James’s.

Honesty is important to Yaeger, whose upbringing in the US in Helena, a town that he says ambitiously calls itself the capital of Montana, was as decent as it was unremarkable. “We’d sit down for dinner together every night, we’d go to church every Sunday, we’re polite almost to a fault, and traditional in almost all senses of the word.”

In our always online, AI-imperilled lives, simply looking at a painting can improve wellbeing and offer creative guidance. For my new book, artists and writers shared their advice on how to live life artfully

How many times a day do you reach for your phone? Do you jump at a notification, spend journeys locked in on your tiny black mirror? What about during meals, or when you wake up? Does it make you feel enriched, alive? I am just as guilty as the next person: swiping, liking, scrolling. But in a world built to distract us, how can we take five or 10 minutes away from that, and instead add something enriching to our lives?

I like to look at artists for the answers. They get us to slow down and think about different ways of looking; to notice nature and beauty; time changing in front of us. They remind us of the joys of making, and in a world where AI is attempting to outsource our creativity to machines – the delight of discovering something for ourselves. Artists see the potential in something: like a word that can be joined up into a sentence that can grow into a paragraph, or book; or a tube of paint that can be used to create an image. Not only can these get us to see something from a different perspective, or teach us something about their world, but hold our attention, and invite stillness, too.

It may be a midlife crisis, says the man behind seven-metre installations of the Earth, moon and Sun who has planted 365 trees in a 100-year project in Somerset

Luke Jerram, whose art installations have travelled the world, is philosophical about his latest project bearing fruit beyond his time on Earth.

Known for his Play Me I’m Yours street pianos project and his Museum of the Moon artwork – a seven-metre diameter sculpture of the moon featuring detailed Nasa imagery of the lunar surface – Jerram is now working on Echo Wood, a living, breathing installation made of native British trees.

David Zwirner Gallery, London
From cruel pictures of elderly widows to a shocking image of motherhood, the American photographer’s genius is on full display in a show that finds ugliness all around her

In 1971, at the age of 48, the American photographer Diane Arbus killed herself. Someone should have seen the clues, for her photography is not so much tragic as utterly alienated from the human species. Here is a woman nursing her baby, a modern Madonna – except the woman’s limbs are as thin as an addict’s, her face wizened and the infant resting in her arms, dressed in baby clothes, is a monkey. Just to make clear that this is an absurd, miserable travesty of Madonnas and motherhood Arbus captioned it: “A woman with her baby monkey, NJ, 1971.” It is an utterly pitiable image of desperation, of someone trying to make sense of a life that can’t be made sense of. And the despair mirrors that of Arbus herself.

You might want to see her many images of gender-blurring positively. There’s a photograph called Transvestite at Her Birthday Party, NYC 1969: she lies on her bed laughing, double chinned and gap-toothed in a blond wig, in a shabby hotel room with balloons. But Arbus actually said how macabre and pathetic she found the occasion: “She called me up and said it was her birthday party and would I come and I said, ‘How terrific.’ It was a hotel on Broadway and 100th Street … I’ve been in some pretty awful places but the lobby was really like hades.” The elevator was broken so Arbus walked up to the fourth floor. “You had to step over about three or four people every flight. And then I came into her room. The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.”

National Gallery, London
Joseph Wright of Derby’s vivid paintings depicted Enlightenment thinking and illumination amid the dark. So why are they so terrifying?

He looks like he’s up to no good. In the depths of the night, under trees and clouds turned silver and black by the full moon, a man is at work with a shovel. Is he burying a body or digging bits up for a Frankensteinian experiment? After all, this painting was done by Joseph Wright of Derby, a friend of pioneering scientists and industrialists in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, leaders of the new science that would inspire Mary Shelley.

But the man beside the foaming river Derwent is not collecting body parts. He’s doing something just as nefarious by 21st-century moral standards: blocking a fox den so the foxes can’t get back in and will be easy game for the hunt tomorrow. Maybe Wright shares my compassion for foxes, because An Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent genuinely is a bit sinister. Yet it has a hypnotic beauty. Two light sources – a lantern and the moon – make this night anything but dead as we almost hear leaves rustle, white water rush and the earthstopper’s spade clunk. It’s one thing to paint a landscape by day. Wright makes one come fantastically alive by night.

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

Margot Robbie’s company to make movie based on Northern Ireland academics’ stories of poverty and prison

It started as a trawl of dusty archives for an academic project about female Irish emigrants in Canada and the US by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic for research.

The subjects, after all, were human flotsam from Ireland’s diaspora whose existence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.

When Nicola Thorp was growing up in Blackpool, the ‘kebab girl’ who had gone missing less than a mile away, aged 14, was spoken of as a cautionary tale. But what really happened to her? For the last three years, Thorp has been finding out

It has been more than 20 years since 14-year-old Charlene Downes went missing in Blackpool. Last captured on CCTV on a Saturday night in November 2003, Charlene still hasn’t been found, and the truth of what happened to her remains unsolved. Nicola Thorp, an actor, writer and broadcaster, who grew up in the town, describes Charlene’s disappearance, considered to be murder, as “a wound for Blackpool”. Over the last couple of decades, the case has been clouded by rumour, far-right rhetoric and police failures. In a new podcast, Charlene: Somebody Knows Something, she has set out to clear up some of the speculation, and expose how Charlene was repeatedly failed by those around her.

Many in the town, she says, still believe the two men who were first tried in 2007 – a retrial was ordered, which then collapsed amid “grave doubts” about the evidence – got away with murder. That in itself, she says, is an obstacle to finding out who is really responsible.