As coming-of-age drama nears its end, part of its appeal is nostalgia for the noughties shows viewers grew up with

It was billed as a show for teenagers, but you would be hard pressed to find a millennial woman who has not watched – and become mildly obsessed with – The Summer I Turned Pretty.

The coming-of-age drama, based on Jenny Han’s novel trilogy of the same name, has quietly grown into a global phenomenon for Prime Video. The first two episodes of its third and final season drew 25 million viewers, triple the audience of its debut.

I was afraid to be near people for two-and-a-half years, but then I got a chance to meet the band I loved – and the experience changed everything

I have always had a degree of health anxiety, but when Covid hit, it really spiked. At home with the family, I made sure we washed all our food and even then I didn’t feel safe eating it. I would bring in the post and then be worried about touching the front door. I’d shower for ages, trying to wash the virus away.

I’m a journalist, so before the anxiety set in I was a pretty outgoing and adaptable person. But from the start of lockdown until September 2022, I didn’t go anywhere indoors other than home or the hospital. I didn’t even walk down a street for a year and a half, for fear of passing too close to someone.

The odd-couple presenters’ wits are perfectly matched in this treat of a travelogue. It’s a good-natured, sweet show that walks comfortably in contentious territory

Indian travelogue shows with British TV presenters are as predictable as they are popular. Here, let me sketch the formula on the back of this samosa. Take, I don’t know, Sue Barker and James Redmond. Whack them in front of the Taj Mahal, then in a tuk tuk. Let them eat pav bhaji. Earnest closeup, while regarding temple carvings. Shot of begging children, while they reflect on what a country of contrasts this is. Much saris and smiling. Close on moment of spiritual epiphany, which evaporates by the airport. It’s a hit!

So I am unaroused by the prospect of Rob and Rylan’s Passage to India (Sunday 14 September, 9pm, BBC Two), the genesis of the three-part series being that Rob Rinder’s favourite novel is the namesake title by EM Forster. Should we send Patrick Kielty to a Kyoto entertainment district because he likes Memoirs of a Geisha? Still, the pair won a Bafta for their previous jaunt around Italy, so I decide to give them a chance.

The Priestdaddy author on quitting social media, Maga conspiracies and how her second novel grew out of a period of post-Covid mania

There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,” she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know.” Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical”.

This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.

The year’s biggest night in television sees plenty of nominations for Severance, The Studio, The White Lotus and Adolescence – but who will win?

It’s that time of year again, where you consider all that you have and have not watched in the vast world of television. The Emmys are back, more or less kicking off the Hollywood award season with a healthy mix of Emmy stalwarts and beloved newbies. Will voters choose between the head (Severance, with a leading 27 noms) or the heart (The Pitt) for best drama? Will The Studio sweep the comedy awards? Here are our picks for the night:

The oedipal thriller with Robin Wright raises the household temperature to nail-biting, while Jade Thirlwall goes solo with groove. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

For three decades, he has played one of the UK’s greatest ever comedy characters. But how different is he to Alan Partridge really? Ahead of the presenter’s new show about mental health, Coogan is put in the psychologist’s chair

The line between Steve Coogan and Alan Partridge is a blurry one. The love of cars. The clothes. They’ve both done their own live arena tours. They even share a face. But if you ever needed proof that they’re not actually the same, it’s the fact that when I meet him for breakfast at his London hotel, he’s not at the buffet with an oversized plate, the staff aren’t giggling at him, and we’re not in a Travel Tavern.

We’re here to talk about his new show, How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge). It’s the latest instalment in the wider Partridge universe in which he presents digital radio, writes books, successfully podcasts, goes on tour, and made his BBC comeback on magazine programme This Time. (The character is now co-written with the Gibbons brothers, rather than Armando Iannucci and Peter Baynham.)

The mock rockers are back with a long-awaited sequel to their comedy classic, and the relentlessly prolific troubadour delivers the first album of a proposed quartet

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
Out now
Following up one of the greatest comedies ever made is a tough act, but here come Rob Reiner et al to have a bash at rekindling the magic. Luckily the subject matter of an ageing band still determined to take it to 11 has plenty of real-world touchstones to keep this particular parody relevant.

From CMAT’s provocative pop to Taylor Swift’s 12th album, plus tours from Kneecap, Lady Gaga and Stereolab, here’s the pop not to miss – while in classical, Mark-Anthony Turnage adapts The Railway Children

• See the rest of our unmissable autumn arts preview picks here

Andrea Riseborough and Sarandon deliver a decade-hopping drama, superstar standups hit the road and Shobana Jeyasingh rewrites Shakespeare

• See the rest of our unmissable autumn arts preview picks here

The season’s standouts include mighty Picassos, mesmerising mushrooms, the visions of Kerry James Marshall, the combat photography of Lee Miller – and a return trip to space

• See the rest of our unmissable autumn arts preview picks here

Late-night hosts react to the killing of the rightwing activist and warn against the trend of political violence in the US

Late-night hosts reacted to the assassination of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk and decried the rising tide of political violence in the US.

Anna Netrebko’s presence on stage called a ‘disgrace’, despite soprano condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Dozens of protesters have gathered outside the Royal Opera House to demonstrate against an eminent Russian opera singer nicknamed “Putin’s diva” who performed on the opening night of Tosca.

Anna Netrebko, 53, one of the world’s best-known sopranos, who draws full houses for her performances at leading opera houses globally, has denied being an ally of the Russian leader.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners could make him the first Black best director, Kathryn Bigelow could be the first woman to win best director twice – and there are more record-breaking contenders to come

In Venice, Telluride and Toronto, the red carpets have been rolled up and the dust has settled on the film festivals which traditionally function as Oscar launchpads. Back in Hollywood, publicists are recalibrating campaigns and pundits are placing their bets on the big films and performances of the upcoming awards season.

A few key contenders are still yet to be seen, but at this stage of the race, one thing seems clear: come next March, records will be broken. A victory for any of the three current frontrunners would mean unprecedented scenes on the podium.

Rebecca Lucy Taylor will play Maggie, a role originated by Helen Mirren, in a ‘landmark’ 50th anniversary production in London in March

Fifty years after Helen Mirren originated the role, Rebecca Lucy Taylor AKA Self Esteem is to play a raging rock star in a West End revival of Teeth ’n’ Smiles by David Hare.

It will take Taylor back to the Duke of York’s theatre, where she performed a four-night “theatrical presentation” of her third album, A Complicated Woman, in April. In Hare’s 1975 play she takes the lead role of a singer, Maggie, in an imploding band who put on a concert for a Cambridge University May ball at the end of the 1960s. The mood is summed up by the band’s closing number, Last Orders on the Titanic. Taylor will contribute additional music and lyrics to original song by the brothers Nick and Tony Bicât respectively.

Band urges fans to avoid secondary sites, where more than 1,000 potentially fraudulent tickets for their shows have been found

Radiohead have condemned ticket resale sites and “exploitative” touts who use them after more than 1,000 potentially fraudulent tickets for the band’s upcoming tour were advertised online before they had even gone on sale.

The rock quintet implemented strict measures designed to limit touts’ ability to buy up tickets for shows in London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Madrid and Bologna, announced to the delight of fans earlier this month.

Next summer, the star will appear in Stratford-upon-Avon first as Prospero and then alongside Helen Hunt in Chekhov’s classic

More than 40 years after his star-making performance as Henry V in Stratford-upon-Avon, Kenneth Branagh is to return to the Royal Shakespeare Company. He will appear in The Tempest and, alongside Oscar winner Helen Hunt, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the RSC next summer.

Branagh, 64, began to build a reputation as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation when he played Henry V, aged 23, in a 1984 season that included roles as Laertes in Hamlet and the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The following year he wrote and directed the play Tell Me Honestly for the RSC. Branagh went on to both direct and star in acclaimed Shakespeare productions during an illustrious stage and screen career that has included breaking an Oscars record as the first person to be nominated in seven individual Academy Award categories. The Tempest will mark his first role for the RSC since he played Hamlet in 1992 and 1993 (first at the Barbican in London and then in Stratford), directed by Adrian Noble.

The sport, a popular pastime of the white elite during the colonial period, has struggled in recent years, but its fortunes may be changing

The spectators on the grandstand at Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi jumped to their feet as the horses competing in the fifth race of the Day of Champions – the last meeting of the season – came around the final corner on a recent Sunday afternoon. “Bedford! Bedford! Bedford,” some roared, punching the air as the horse, jockeyed by Michael Fundi, broke into a gallop on the home stretch, passed the leader, and stormed to victory.

Fundi, who had started the day on top of the jockey standings, was crowned the season’s champion after the last race. At 20, he was the youngest in a decade.

Above: Michael Fundi with Bedford after winning the 2400m Jockey Club Stakes George Drew Challenge Series.

Judges have announced the winning images from the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s annual competition. The photographs will be exhibited at the National Maritime Museum in London from Friday

This 80s-set Australian show about rival newscasters is the best kind of period drama. It’s soapy, highly dramatic and wonderfully camp

The Newsreader is the best kind of period piece in that it makes you reflect not only on the past but on the present. The first two seasons of this Australian drama about rival newscasters managed to cram in some of the biggest events of the 80s: the Challenger disaster; the Aids crisis; rumours of the end of Charles and Diana’s marriage.

As well as seeing the impact those stories had on the world, the series hinged on some perennial themes, too – women being sidelined in the workplace; homophobia; mental illness; and what drives people to stay in their jobs even when everything around them is dripping with toxicity. To watch The Newsreader in an age of boundaries and therapy-speak is to feel at once privileged not to be working in broadcast television in the 1980s, and acutely aware that many of the problems still persist today. As unsettling as it is, the programme has often been excellent: I have a suspicion that if this were a US series, it would be a smash hit.

Soap-based injuries, bleak festive deaths, Hugh Bonneville vomiting blood: we look back on 15 years of highs and lows as the frothy period drama comes to an end with its final spin-off film

Prepare for stiff upper lips to wobble. Clutch monogrammed hankies for period-appropriate eye-dabbing. After 15 years on our screens, the Downton Abbey saga is about to hop in its vintage Rolls and drive off into the soft-focus sunset. The third and final film spin-off, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, is released this Friday, accompanied by a forelock-tugging farewell ITV documentary.

For six series, Downton bestrode the Sunday night schedules like a Grade II-listed colossus. Writer Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs creation followed entitled aristos and their salt-of-the-earth servants at a fictional country pile. Sure, the dialogue was clumsy, the plots soapy and the historical exposition clunked like a stately home’s antique radiators. Yet somehow, it didn’t matter.

This flimsy tell-all about the actor’s decades-long addiction to pills, alcohol and crack-cocaine is far too light on contrition or self-reflection. You pity everyone around him

If it comes as a shock to anyone that at some point in the grip of a decades-long addiction to pills, booze and crack cocaine the essentially heterosexual Charlie Sheen occasionally “turned over the menu” and had sex with men, then I am delighted. I did not know such pockets of naivety could still exist in this benighted world. You sweet things. Enjoy your time!

That this is the fact that has made headlines (the few there have been) around the release of the two-part documentary AKA Charlie Sheen is testimony to how little new information there is in it. How, really, could it be otherwise? Every one of the three acts – which in the film he labels “Partying”, “Partying with problems” and “Just problems” – of his adult life has been comprehensively documented by the media in real time. Sometimes that was via stories sold by the people he partied with, sometimes via public hospitalisations and press conferences called by his father Martin Sheen to try to control the press interest. Sometimes it was thanks to Charlie’s own interviews or call-ins to the likes of Alex Jones’s Infowars shows, or ranting videos posted on YouTube about his “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA” done under the influence, or as a result of the drawn-out divorce proceedings between him and Denise Richards as his substance abuse made their life together untenable. And sometimes it was an amalgam, as when in 2015 he gave an exclusive interview to NBC’s Today show revealing his HIV+ status, to end various extortion attempts people had made over the four years since his diagnosis.

A feast of festive flag-waving at the Royal Albert Hall. Plus, more entertaining silliness as The Count of Monte Cristo continues. Here’s what to watch this evening

6.55pm, BBC Two
From the soundtracks of thriller films to symphonic arrangements of St Vincent’s hits and every famous piece of classical music in between, it’s been another great summer of artistry at the Proms – many of which are still available on iPlayer. It ends with Elim Chan conducting a bumper lineup including usual favourites such as Pomp and Circumstance and Jerusalem. Hollie Richardson

From The Simpsons mauling George HW Bush to South Park’s current head-to-head with Trump, animations are no stranger to political battles. But sometimes, things get far, far more brutal

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that South Park has become “the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era”. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have spent decades taking any potshot they like at whoever they choose, from Saddam Hussein to Guitar Hero to – thanks to their inexplicable 2001 live-action sitcom That’s My Bush! – other sitting presidents.

But by using every episode in its latest series to focus their fury solely at the current US administration, hitting Trump with a combination of policy rebuttals and dick jokes (and daring him to sue them in the process), this is the strongest sense yet that Parker and Stone are out for nothing less than full regime change.

From turning up in person for all of three minutes a series, to beaming in skits via iPad, reality TV hosts are going absolutely minimal effort. Nice work if you can get it

To watch BBC One’s new reality series Stranded on Honeymoon Island is to be hit with a barrage of questions. To be fair, the main question is, “Weird, I thought I was watching BBC One, but this is clearly an ITV2 show. Does this mean my television is broken?” However, the more pressing one is probably, “Where’s Davina?”

To look on iPlayer, Stranded on Honeymoon Island – in which a bunch of strangers get married to each other and are then shipped off to a remote island with only each other for company – is absolutely a Davina McCall show. There are five figures on the show’s thumbnail, but four of them are pushed back into the middle distance, while McCall looms heavily in the foreground, towering over everyone else like a preternaturally delighted Godzilla. And that would be fine … were McCall actually part of Stranded on Honeymoon Island.

This brilliantly slippery beast of a drama pits an adult son’s girlfriend against his mother in all-out war. Robin Wright is excellent as the parent with an … interesting dynamic with her child. Yikes!

‘This one’s different,” a son says to his mother when she teases him about his latest girlfriend. Clever, he says. Stunning, ambitious, funny – “you remind me of her”. Something flickers across Mummy’s face. “She reminds you of me?” she says, and it is not really a question.

Welcome, friends, to The Girlfriend, an adaptation of the excellent psychological thriller by Michelle Frances, and an answer to the question many of us have surely pondered – just how much of an incest vibe can one get away with instilling in a shiny prestige miniseries, and can anyone get Robin Wright to star and make the whole thing disturbingly credible?

A data scientist rebuts 50 arguments against green technology with lively pragmatism and authority

What are we going to do about the climate crisis? As extreme weather events become the new normal, we still hear from “sceptics” who think the energy transition is unnecessary, a massive leftwing plot. Hannah Ritchie, a global development data scientist and the author of Not the End of the World, has followed that work up with a book that addresses 50 objections to the adoption of greener technology.

To start with, we need some tough love. It’s time, Ritchie insists, to abandon the slogan “Keep 1.5 alive”, referring to an aspiration to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. “The 1.5C target is dead,” she announces flatly. “The public – who are repeatedly told that 1.5C is still within reach – will start to lose trust when we pass that target.”

The Naked Light by Bridget Collins; Exiles by Mason Coile; Alchemised by SenLinYu; Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei; Big Time by Jordan Prosser

The Naked Light by Bridget Collins (Borough, £18.99)
The latest from the bestselling author of The Binding is set in England and focuses on three “surplus women” after the first world war: bored, lonely Florence, her fey niece Phoebe, and Kit, a bohemian artist haunted by memories of wartime France, where she painted masks for wounded soldiers to wear over horrifically damaged faces. Their village is on the Sussex Downs, overlooked by an ancient face carved into the chalk, reputed to protect inhabitants from a hungry spirit. But since the death of the last member of the family traditionally bound to look after it, the face is fast disappearing beneath the grass, and something frightening is stirring in the land. Atmospheric, psychologically astute and beautifully realised, this is a brilliantly original literary take on folk horror.

Exiles by Mason Coile (Baskerville, £16.99)
In 2030, three astronauts arrive on Mars, on a one-way mission to prepare for full-scale colonisation. They find their robot-built base, the Citadel, severely damaged, and one of the robots missing. The remaining two offer different explanations: the missing robot malfunctioned and caused the damage before fleeing, or the Citadel was attacked by an unseen, hostile alien force, and the third robot went in pursuit and has not returned. A taut, terrifying thriller, sadly the last work from Mason Coile, a pseudonym of award-winning author Andrew Pyper, who died in January.

A storyteller who lies in service of truth meets a writer who doesn’t believe in true stories in this sophomore work set in Adelaide and post-revolutionary Iran

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Does a novel need a factchecker? Not for the kinds of truths that Amin, the scruffy protagonist of Hossein Asgari’s second novel, Desolation, holds dear. He accosts a young Iranian-Australian writer in an Adelaide cafe and announces that he has a story for him: “It’s a true story, not one of those made-up, pointless whatever it is that you people write.” The writer is sceptical – “I have no interest in a true story, if such a thing exists” – but he listens.

The writer is never named and Amin is not the stranger’s real name but, over a series of meetings in parks and cafes, Amin tells the writer his story. The bulk of the novel follows Amin’s life in post-revolutionary Iran, in the aftermath of the war with Iraq, and is narrated in the third person by a writer. But which one? Asgari is an Iranian-Australian writer who lives in Adelaide and he dares the reader to identify him in or with the narrative. Desolation flirts with the narrative conventions of autofiction but has loftier preoccupations than the relationship between the author and narrator. During one of their last meetings, Amin tells the writer: “You can add whatever you want to my story as long as you’re telling the truth even when you lie.”

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Desolation by Hossein Asgari is out now (Ultimo Press, $34.99)

A chatty, self-deprecating memoir recalls the podcaster’s start in TV and his lifelong friendship with comedian and film-maker Joe Cornish

The writer and comic Adam Buxton’s first memoir, Ramble Book, dug into his childhood and his relationship with his father, who featured as the cantankerous BaaadDad in Buxton’s 1990s pop culture series The Adam and Joe Show. I Love You, Byeee is the follow up in which he remembers his late mother, Valerie, and reflects on his TV career which began with him landing a job at Takeover TV, a showcase for new talent on Channel 4, where he brought in his childhood friend Joe Cornish.

Fans of The Adam and Joe Show will find reminiscences about the pair’s toy movies, where they recreated films such as Titanic and Trainspotting, and their radio shows on XFM and 6Music. Buxton is candid about the strain of their working relationship and his feelings of insecurity when Cornish went off to direct his first film, Attack the Block, without him.

As the hit thriller returns to our screens, its creator talks about false starts, surprise inspirations – and why he never looks inside Jackson Lamb’s head

It is hard to imagine anyone less like the slovenly, has-been MI5 agent Jackson Lamb than his creator, Mick Herron. “He must come deep out of my subconscious,” the 62-year-old thriller writer jokes, sipping mineral water at a rooftop bar in his home city of Oxford, a world away from London’s Aldersgate where his bestselling Slough House series is set. In a “blue shirt, white tee” (fans will get the reference), he is softly spoken with a hint of a Geordie accent. Herron is often described as the heir to John le Carré and “the best spy novelist of his generation”, according to the New Yorker. Unlike le Carré, he’s not, and never has been, a spy. Mysteriously, though, Wikipedia has given him “an entirely fictitious” birthday. “I got cards. I got a cake,” he says.

For the uninitiated, the novels and award-winning TV series follow a bunch of misfit spooks exiled to Slough House from MI5 for various mishaps and misdemeanours, so far away from the shiny HQ in Regent’s Park that it may as well be in Slough. The joke is that these hapless underdogs (nicknamed “slow horses”), under the grubby reins of Lamb, always triumph over the slicker agents and “the Dogs” at the Park.

The US author on his early love of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the genius of Judy Blume, and finding perfection in Agatha Christie and Gustave Flaubert

My earliest reading memory
I recall lying in the bath, age seven or eight, reading the final page of Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself, then turning to the novel’s opening and beginning again. Memory is untrustworthy, but Blume is a genius who has that effect on her reader.

My favourite book growing up
We’re always growing up; we’re always choosing a new favourite. For me, once, this was Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. Later I’d have said JD Salinger’s Nine Stories. Later, still, John Cheever’s Collected Stories, Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, my favourite changing as I did. Maybe I’m finally old enough to understand that favourite is impossible to designate. Or maybe I’d say my current favourite is Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

When Khrzhanovsky’s colossal immersive project on the horrors of the Soviet Union launched in 2019, it caused uproar in east and west alike. Now, he plans to release its ‘mother film’, to expose the ‘huge danger’ the world faces today

In late July this year, a few days before his 50th birthday, the exiled Russian film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky was landed with a 50,000 rouble (£450) fine by the Presnensky District Court of Moscow. This punishment was ostensibly for a Kafkaesque administrative offence relating to “procedures for the activities of foreign agents”. Khrzhanovsky himself thinks it was a symbolic birthday warning from the Russian authorities that he is still on their radar.

“It’s clear it is absolute nonsense,” Khrzhanovsky says. “I will not pay it. I am not a Russian citizen and I don’t want to pay any money to the Russian state.” He renounced his Russian citizenship last year, and is now a British, German and Israeli citizen.

In 2015, a scrappy group of film-makers tapped into the ‘anxiety of what the city would become’ under Beijing’s increasing influence. Now screening at the Hong Kong film festival UK, it resonates in new ways

A taxi driver struggles to keep working as his native language of Cantonese is sidelined for Mandarin. Petty gangsters do the work of the authorities amid a violent debate about a national security law. Supporters of Hong Kong independence are jailed.

In 2015, a scrappy group of Hong Kong film-makers imagined what their semi-autonomous city could look like under the increasing influence of the Chinese Communist party (CCP).

Ahead of his new film Brave the Dark, the star of Mad Men and The Terror (and the son of Richard Harris) answers your questions about his favourite pub, feeling seasick in Hamlet and playing John Lennon

You seem to have a predilection to play real-life characters who die prematurely. Who would you like to play who lives to old age? NeilHV
Well, I don’t know if that’s true. Captain Crozier [from The Terror] didn’t die, and Lane Pryce [from Mad Men] wasn’t real. I would love to play [the 19th-century US president] Ulysses S Grant. His history has largely been written by southern US historians and so his achievements have largely been denigrated. But his campaigns are taught in all the military academies around the world. Despite a pretty disastrous presidency, he still managed to [sign a] Civil Rights Act – and he destroyed the Ku Klux Klan.

When the civil war broke out he sold firewood by the side of the road to try to put food on the table for his family. Eight years later, he was president. It’s the kind of quintessential American success story, but history doesn’t regard him that way.

Fifty young men compete in an endurance event, during which they are shot in the head at point-blank range if they slow down, in this horrific buddy story adaptation

If you like your dystopian scenarios lean and extremely mean, then look no further than this Stephen King adaptation, which is surely one of the grimmest mainstream movies we’ve had for some time. The blunt premise is custom built for death and suffering: 50 young American men are selected by lottery for an annual marathon march. If any walker slows to less than three miles per hour, or strays off the road, they are removed from the competition – by being shot in the head at point-blank range. The final survivor wins whatever they want, they’re promised.

Why these men would volunteer for a competition with such unfavourable odds we’re left to wonder, as the broader authoritarian society in which the story is set – which looks a lot like 1960s America – is barely seen or explained. It’s clear who we’re rooting for though: Cooper Hoffman’s Ray Garraty, who is dropped off at the starting line by his tearful mother (Judy Greer), then it’s off to the races. Garraty is an all-round decent soul, who befriends and encourages his fellow competitors, particularly Pete, played by British actor David Jonsson (who’s come a long way from Rye Lane). Their growing friendship is the film’s heart, and both actors are innately charming and natural, though both have deeper, darker histories and motivations to reveal.

This award-winning Australian feature mixes madcap comedy with a who’s who of queer performers to produce a magical, joyful gem

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It’s hard being a lesbian space princess. In this buzzy and giddily ambitious new Australian animated film, Saira (Shabana Azeez) – once voted the most boring royal in gay space – is a perpetually single introvert with a passion for closeup magic (she’s “good with her hands”). After her heart is thoroughly broken by Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel), all finger-guns and sapphic swagger, Saira is devastated – but there’s no time to cry, because Kiki has been kidnapped by the Straight White Maliens (played by Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly, and Zachary Ruane of Aunty Donna) and only Saira’s legendary magical labrys can save her.

Except Saira has never been able to summon the labrys which is her birthright. And also, of course, a lesbian space princess can cry while she fights to not just save her ex but also win her back: it’s her quest – she can cry if she wants to.

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Many felt Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza docufiction was robbed when Jim Jarmusch’s latest took the top prize. Yet accusations of moral cowardice on the part of the jury are naive and unfair

There are standing ovations and there are jury decisions.

Jim Jarmusch’s droll, quirky, very charming film Father Mother Sister Brother got a mere six minutes for its standing ovation at Venice – though one day we’re going to have to introduce some Olympic-style standardisation to these timings. But it got the top prize, the Golden Lion, from Alexander Payne’s jury.

Toronto film festival: the actors play off each other beautifully in an intimate London-set comedy drama about art, commerce and the mess in-between

It seems like Steven Soderbergh might have developed a late case of anglophilia, the retirement-teasing director situating himself in London for three films within the last two years. The first was a needless, throwaway Magic Mike sequel, but then this spring he gave us the delicious spy caper Black Bag, a juicy riff on both John le Carré and Agatha Christie that dared to imagine a monogamous and supportive marriage as the epitome of sexiness. Unlike Woody Allen, who cursed us with a string of London-set clunkers after Match Point (Cassandra’s Dream, a film that cast Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor as cockney brothers, easily the most heinous), Soderbergh seems to be sticking around for reasons other than a nice holiday, his second offering of 2025 also feeling notable. It’s a quieter project than his last, a delicate two-hander closer to an intimate stage play, but it finds him playing in yet another unexpected part of the sandpit, a director thrillingly seeking new challenges.

Like that film, it seems inspired more by storytelling than simple technique (unlike the fantastic Covid-set surveillance thriller Kimi or the hard-to-love ghost story Presence) and again he’s reunited with a screenwriter he’s previously worked with before. Like the frequent Soderbergh collaborator and Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, writer Ed Solomon has also mastered the art of taking a blockbuster cheque. His credits include Charlie’s Angels, Men in Black, Super Mario Bros and, more recently, the Now You See Me movies, but his first film with Soderbergh was 2021’s ensemble crime drama No Sudden Move, and he’s brought another smaller, more character-driven story his way. The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.

The Christophers is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution

Peacock theatre, London
Starting from a single dancer, an intricate moving patterns of limbs forms a complex weave of shifting patterns in Sadeck Berrabah’s technically impressive show

There’s no denying that it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a mass of bodies moving in unison. Every chorus line and corps de ballet knows it. It has been scientifically proven that we get pleasure from seeing bodies sync up, and French choreographer Sadeck Berrabah’s show, Murmuration Level 2, is on point when it comes to this. The show’s title refers to the mesmerising, morphing formations of flying birds, whole flocks coordinated seemingly by instinct. In this show, nothing has been left to instinct and these dancers have been drilled within an inch of their lives, creating intricate moving patterns. When an arm hits a 90 degree angle, it’s not 89, or 91, but bang on 90, all 30 dancers at exactly the same time. This is technically very impressive.

Berrabah got his break with a viral YouTube video and has gone on to work for pop acts such as Shakira and Black Eyed Peas. You can see how his style would be so eye-catching in short-form video. You could imagine him on Britain’s Got Talent. The dance is based predominantly on tutting, a street style so-called because it looks a bit like hieroglyphics (King Tut, you see), with very exact, geometric movements of the arms and hands. The cast are dressed in black, sleeves to their elbows, leaving forearms and hands almost floating in space. From a single dancer the effect multiplies to make a complex weave of shifting patterns, a physical fractal. The challenge, not quite met, is how to take this cool effect and keep it interesting for 75 minutes. Meanwhile, the soundtrack of continuous dancey, chill out-y loops, is like a bed; background music. Not enough to carry the show.

Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London
Fizzing with intelligence and featuring a catastrophic misunderstanding and a deeply symbolic cigar, this richly imagined play feels all too plausible

If there were a theatre prize for grabby titles, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran would win it. Much as Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, spotting that James Joyce, Lenin and the artist Tristan Tzara coincided in Zurich in 1917, audaciously fantasised their interactions, Marks and Gran even more boldly posit that, if Adolf Hitler had seen a shrink in Vienna in the early 20th century, it might plausibly have been Sigmund Freud.

Beginning with a title-explaining scene in which an Austrian mother seeks advice on her young son’s nocturnal bedwetting and nightmares, Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler contrives encounters across three decades: with Hitler as a patient; house-painter; hiker near the Freuds’ summer house in Berchtesgaden (giving, it is implied, ideas to Hitler); war-wounded corporal; and, ultimately, Führer.

Marylebone theatre, London
Russian director Alexander Molochnikov’s play within a play raises vital questions about the cost and creativity of exile but is undone by its own cleverness

This is a play about the making of a play in a time of war. The latter is Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, and a fictional director, based on a real-life director, is producing it when Russia declares war on Ukraine. If that sounds like meta leaps within somersaults, Russian director Alexander Molochnikov does a heroic job of making it enjoyable, if antic.

It begins with rehearsals at the Moscow Art theatre and travels to New York where fictional director Kon (Daniel Boyd), loosely based on Molochnikov, lives in exile after his public criticism of Putin’s war.

Royal Court theatre, London
Katie Mitchell, Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson’s ‘experiment in performance’ uses expressive performance and inventive sonic effects to bring a wordless world to life

Down the road from the Royal Court, a building is adorned with the bust of a cow – a reminder that this area of London was once home to grazing dairy cattle and has history as farmland. Cow | Deer, an hour-long “experiment in performance”, co-created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, is a sort of theatrical rewilding as the Upstairs stage is given over to a summer’s day in the life of a heavily pregnant cow and a young roe deer.

Past productions at the Court have featured live animals, including half a dozen goats (eponymous stars of Liwaa Yazji’s play) and a scene-stealing goose (in Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman). Here, the pair’s presence is instead painstakingly felt through myriad foley sound effects and field recordings. Standing at hay-bale desks, a cast of four – Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matsvai and Ruth Sullivan – get to work making noises with natural materials and manmade objects: gravel and tinsel, raffia and rope, a hot water bottle and a watering can. Plants and herbs are ground up throughout, their scent slowly filling the room.

Òran Mór, Glasgow
A naive Scottish academic is granted an audience with the genocidal Cambodian dictator in Jack MacGregor’s play

If you met a genocidal dictator how would you react? For the Scottish academic who is granted an audience with Cambodia’s Pol Pot in Jack MacGregor’s play, the first encounter leaves him blandly upbeat. “He seems quite nice,” he tells his friend, a sceptical American journalist.

His naivety verges on the comic, but the play is at its most gripping when it takes the opinions of this specialist in economic history seriously. Played by Bobby Bradley, and known only as Stranger, he is the author of In Defence of Kampuchea, a paean to the Khmer Rouge, and is predisposed to see the good in policies such as the centralisation of a money-free economy.

At Òran Mór, Glasgow, until 13 September. Then at Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, 16–20 September.

In his reverse-chronology play about a married couple dealing with an affair, Harold Pinter asked the audience to find meaning in unspoken words

I didn’t see Harold Pinter’s Betrayal on stage until after I’d read it. I’m pleased about that – it means I’d “seen” it for myself first. The play is about a married couple, Robert and Emma, and the affair that she has with his best friend, Jerry. It has a reverse chronology, starting in the present day when the affair is over and ending years earlier as it begins, and shows what each of them knows or doesn’t know over the course of that time. I immediately thought: this is how I want to write.

I loved its spareness and economy. How taut the language was. Unspoken words filled the room, giving it energy and unpredictability and drama. It showed me how much you can leave for the actors to work out and play with. How much the words matter, but the silences, too.

(tak:til/Glitterbeat)
On their third release in 18 months, this exceptional musician draws from folk story, Breton influences and nature to explore the sublime potential of its title

Welsh musician Cerys Hafana’s first release on the brilliant subsidiary of Hamburg-based global music label Glitterbeat explores the full sublime potential of its title, one all too often invoked to mean meekness and sweetness. Opening track Helynt Ryfeddol (An Incredible Ordeal) introduces a folk story about an old man drawn towards the purest music he has ever heard, sung by a bird, to which he listens until it stops. He returns home to find his house entirely changed and lived in by different people. Seven tracks later, the title track tells us that the bird was an angel, and that the man went away for 350 years, never to be seen again.

Angel is the third release by this piercingly beautiful singer and exceptional, adventurous musician in 18 months. (Their collection of precise piano instrumentals, Difrisg (Differing) was released by Instant Karma back in June, while 2024’s guitar-led EP The Bitter combined the eerie melancholia of Broadcast with a Welsh twist on sultry Americana.) The piano returns for Angel, but Hafana also builds striking patterns on their best-known instrument, the Welsh triple harp, and draws from Breton influences, including folk dance rhythms and a call-and-response technique, kan ha diskan.

Amsterdam combo blend funky post-punk, turntablism and ‘miscellaneous objects’ in a giddy mix beguiling a growing cross-genre audience

From Amsterdam
Recommended if you like Adrian Sherwood, ESG, Hidden Operator
Up next New charity single benefitting Plant een Olijfboom released 20 September

Devon Rexi make tripped-out, percussion-heavy rhythms that are as sexy as they are strange. Though the Amsterdam-based group have only released two EPs and maintain an elusive online presence, they have developed a steady cult following in guitar and dance music circles alike.

Fifty years after the release of Wish You Were Here, we count down the best of the band’s Syd Barrett years, their difficult recovery and later reunion

Low on memorable tunes, big on racked, strangulated lead vocals, possessed of a worldview that makes every other Pink Floyd album look like a gushing font of Pollyanna-ish optimism, The Final Cut is a slog. But The Gunner’s Dream cuts through the gloom, thanks to a heartbreaking, fragile melody.

We’ve assembled some of the freshest voices in food to bring you their finest tips and shoppable picks, from dreamy dinners and alfresco feasts, to the simple joy of a punnet of strawberries

True Turkish hospitality means providing more food and drink than your guests could ever consume. Here’s a great way to do it … with a little help from the 2024 Young MasterChef judge, best known as Big Has

I spent a lot of my childhood sitting in the passenger seat of my dad Kamil’s Volvo, on the barbecue run, listening to Turkish radio. We would usually get the same things: chicken breasts for mum, boneless thighs for the rest of us, and some sort of lamb on the bone for dad. He would purposely butcher it poorly, leaving bits of meat on the bone to grill slowly and pick at as he cooked for the rest – a “trick” he had learned from his dad. My love for barbecues, cooking over live fire, and entertaining, definitely stems from him.

Barbecues would always start with an impromptu announcement at the table after Sunday morning family breakfast. Mum would begrudgingly agree, knowing the mess my dad can produce in about 20 minutes. It didn’t take much persuading in my house to get the mangal [Turkish barbecue] lit. We didn’t need perfect blue skies. A dry day and enough sunlight to see us through to the evening would be enough to seal the deal, although dad has been known to barbecue under a tree in a bin bag if the weather didn’t cooperate.

Superhost and influencer Saff Michaelis loves nothing more than throwing a party. And if there’s one thing she’s learned, it’s to let shops she trusts do some of the heavy lifting

There is something so deliciously informal about summer hosting. Gone are the elaborate table lays, multiple courses and floral arrangements of the colder months. In exchange, we simply dust off the garden furniture, open a pack of olives and hope for the best. Picnics in the park segue straight into rosé-fuelled suppers – usually under the dappled shade of a tree your partner has been aspiring to prune since the sun first appeared.

Through these little moments with family and friends, it becomes apparent that hosting is more than a hobby; it’s a love language. Independently of what’s served at the table, hosting is a way of providing meaningful in-person interactions in an age when much of our lives feel digitised and somewhat mundane.

‘Special moments demand a suitably special menu’

From fizz destined to make a girls’ night sparkle to a watermelon needed for an alfresco summer salad, we asked three shoppers to share the meaning behind their latest online order

The meaning behind the choices we make can get lost in the rhythm of routine, particularly when it comes to the groceries we order week in, week out. But there’s a whole lot more than dinner in our shopping baskets, as these shoppers reveal. Even the most prosaic items can conjure a memory, speak to a value, or make good on an intention. It’s life, delivered by Ocado …

Reena Mistry. Photographs: Helena Dolby

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
Rattling through her 80s hits the singer is clearly revelling in the nostalgia – in a showcase that makes her a strong candidate for the Glastonbury legends slot

‘Who remembers the 80s? Good – I don’t!” Cheerful, barefoot and sparkling in sequins, Belinda Carlisle is walking her infatuated audience down memory lane. Each song on this greatest hits tour comes with a timestamp and a story, and right now she’s introducing Mad About You, the 1986 single that transformed her from a member of record-breaking all-female rock band the Go-Go’s into a glossy solo pop star with the love songs to match. Tonight, as back then, Carlisle’s distinctive, shivering vibrato finds a streak of hedonism inside its lyrics about dizzy infatuation.

This show hits shuffle on the big singles and key album tracks that Carlisle and her smiley five-piece band have been touring for years, and it opens with real attack: the title track of 1989 album Runaway Horses is earthy and elemental, Carlisle blasting big rock “whoa-oh-oh”s over punchy drums and a juddering riff. She clearly delights in performance, camping it up and pretending to faint during I Get Weak, and swinging an imaginary lasso for the moody, loosely psychedelic Circles in the Sand. An uncertain start to La Luna briefly breaks the spell, but when Carlisle is in full power, it’s as if a wind-machine is always blowing in her direction.

The tension between co-founders Roger Hodgson and Davies – who has died aged 81 – was the driving force of a band who refused to fit into any genre

It must be odd to have been a band’s co-founder and joint frontman and to know that when thousands of people came to see you, they did so on condition that not only did you play songs you neither wrote nor sung, but had also initially agreed not to perform. That was what happened to Rick Davies, who formed Supertramp with Roger Hodgson in 1970. Hodgson left the band in 1983 – on the agreement that he took his songs, and Davies took the name. But touring as Supertramp is impossible without The Logical Song or Dreamer or Breakfast in America, and so, to Hodgson’s irritation, Davies played the songs.

It was fitting though, because the tension between Davies and Hodgson was very much the driving force of Supertramp. Davies loved jazz and blues, whereas Hodgson was in love with pop. And it was in the combination of their two impulses that Supertramp found their greatest success. If you were to define a “Supertramp sound” it would be Hodgson’s keen tenor backed by Davies’ burbling keys: Hodgson may have written the band’s biggest hits, but Davies supplied their shape. And he had plenty of his own songs to sing.

The frontman advertised the sale of one of indie’s most significant catalogues in a shockingly cavalier manner. With estranged bandmates among the other stakeholders, legitimate bidders may be hard to find

• Morrissey puts his business interests in the Smiths up for sale ‘to any interested party’

There is a well-trodden line about assessing the trustworthiness of online bargains: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. It comes to mind when looking at the extremely unusual way in which Morrissey is apparently seeking to offload his business interests in the Smiths. This is not like the forensic and formal processes behind huge catalogue sales in recent years such as Sting, Bob Dylan, Queen, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd or Paul Simon.

A post on Morrissey Central – the outlet for all official Morrissey communiques – says the singer has “no choice but to offer for sale all of his business interests in ‘the Smiths’ to any interested party/investor” and that he wants out. Maybe psychologically this is the closure he needs – the band will never reform, given bassist Andy Rourke’s death in 2023 and Morrissey’s clear personal and political differences with guitarist Johnny Marr – but, in straight business terms, this is shockingly cavalier.

(Matador)
His last album was criticised for being too upbeat during Trump 1.0 but became a phenomenal live show, and the Talking Heads frontman remains sunny – almost to a fault

It is seven years since David Byrne released his last solo album, American Utopia. So much has happened in the intervening period that it’s easy to forget that, initially, the record received a mixed response. There was praise for its expansive and experimental approach: songs built on rhythms by Brian Eno were handed over to a wide selection of producers to tinker with, then Byrne compiled the finished product. Part of a larger multimedia project called Reasons to Be Cheerful, it attempted to engender a spirit of positivity, but there were complaints that this amounted to a blithe abdication of responsibility amid the first Trump presidency. Respectful long-service-medal reviews coexisted with angry fulminating over the complete absence of female contributors.

A mixed response was business as usual as far as Byrne’s post-Talking Heads career is concerned. He’s pursued an idiosyncratic path – diversions into Latin American music, opera and trip-hop, collaborations with dance producers and St Vincent – but never with results that achieved sufficient acclaim or commercial success to overshadow his former band. But then, something weird happened. The ensuing American Utopia live shows, which used cutting-edge technology and choreography to demolish the conventions of a rock show, attracted deserved hyperventilating praise. A tour that began playing modest theatres wound up filling arenas, spawning a Broadway show, two live albums – one named after a critic’s breathless assertion that it was The Best Live Show of All Time – and a Spike Lee-directed movie.

(Chandos)
With sweeping full-colour piano, Connolly and Middleton pay attention to every word, every harmonic shift in a performance of appealing immediacy

Nothing dusty about the performances on the new recording from the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton, or their music choices, a varied and painterly selection of French and English-language songs. Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer has more often been recorded with orchestra; with piano it unavoidably loses some of its oceanic glitter and heft, but Middleton plays this sweeping, Wagner-inspired music in full colour, and Connolly is a powerful narrator, her rich tone subtly hollowed out for the fleeting moments of bleakness. In Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis she’s not the usual ingenue, but she and Middleton make a worldlier-sounding interpretation work, paying attention to every word and every sensual harmonic shift.

The recording’s title comes from one of Copland’s Emily Dickinson settings, put across here with appealing immediacy. Barber’s Op 10 Three Songs bring longer, more expansive lines from Connolly, and a slight American accent – which broadens for the second song of Night Thoughts, a song cycle by Errollyn Wallen inspired by the artist Howard Hodgkin and written for Connolly and Middleton in 2023. It’s admittedly hard to imagine this particular song done in cathedral English given that its narrator, singing Wallen’s own words, is Ella Fitzgerald. Connolly, who sang jazz early in her career, is surely one of few singers who could be convincing in both this and the angular settings of Dickinson and Shakespeare with which Wallen frames it.

(Decca)
Welsh folk songs and an original composition join Liszt, Chopin, Handel and Elgar in a misty-eyed first half, before a more monochrome performance of Schubert’s Trout Quintet

The second recording from the massed Kanneh-Masons is a family scrapbook. In the first half, all seven of these teen-and-twentysomething siblings get their moment: on the piano, Isata plays some contemplative Liszt and Jeneba plays Chopin; Sheku and his cellist sister Mariatu duet smoothly in Handel; violinists Braimah and Aminata are paired for a Welsh folk tune; pianist Konya accompanies Braimah in Elgar’s Sospiri; and so on. It’s also a tribute to their grandparents’ heritage, their Welsh grandmother getting the biggest musical nod with two folk song arrangements plus Hiraeth, a sweetly yearning original composition by Isata for all seven players. Nothing is mawkish or over milked, yet everything feels a little like a final encore, sending us out misty-eyed.

The second half is taken up by an old family favourite, Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Here Isata, Sheku and Braimah are joined by their friends Edgar Francis and Toby Hughes, on viola and bass, for a performance that’s occasionally sparky but mostly gentle and a little monochrome. It doesn’t match up to some stiff recorded competition – but perhaps that’s not really the point. River of Music reinforces the Kanneh-Masons’ inspiring brand, but maybe next time they will give us something a bit more ambitious.

St Mary’s Church, Haddington, East Lothian
Jacopo Spirei’s double-bill of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and William Walton’s The Bear is huge fun, with baritone Daniel Barrett particularly impressive

From the perfectly enunciated “Merde!” with which Jamie MacDougall’s cuckolded clockmaker Torquemada prefaces the overture to Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, this double-bill pairing the knockabout farce of infidelity with Walton’s lesser-known work is enormous fun.

MacDougall, a company stalwart, is the most experienced in a cast of current and recent Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, but the youth of the singers belies the depth of the characterisation they brought to Jacopo Spirei’s staging (adapted to fit the restrictions of St Mary’s church) that made musical and theatrical sense of the pairing.

(Chandos)
The teeming textures of Nielsen’s 5th symphony are controlled with care and refinement by Edward Gardner, with the Bergen Philharmonic – and soloist Alessandro Carbonare – outstanding

Edward Gardner’s nine years as principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic came to an end in July 2024, but their recording projects together continue to appear. This is the third instalment of Gardner’s Nielsen series with the orchestra, after previous discs featuring the third and fourth symphonies. Like its predecessors, the latest release pairs a symphony with one of Nielsen’s concertos, in this case the Fifth Symphony, completed in 1922, with the work for clarinet composed six years later.

Both works, as well as the early Helios Overture, receive outstanding performances from the Bergen players, and Gardner controls the teeming textures of the symphony with great refinement. Perhaps there’s just a little too much control towards the close of the magnificent opening movement, when the snare-drum player is instructed to do his best to disrupt the rest of the orchestra; a bit more wildness might have made that passage even more powerfully effective, and the surge into the second movement that follows even more cathartic.

After a lacklustre response to the 2025 edition, the game has gone all out to engage players and respond to user feedback

In an open office space somewhere inside the vast Electronic Arts campus in Vancouver, dozens of people are gathered around multiple monitors playing EA Sports FC 26. Around them, as well as rows of football shirts from leagues all over the world, are PCs and monitors with staff watching feeds of the matches. The people playing are from EA’s Design Council, a group of pro players, influencers and fans who regularly come in to play new builds, ask questions and make suggestions. These councils have been running for years, but for this third addition to the EA Sports FC series, the successor to EA’s Fifa games, their input is apparently being treated more seriously than ever.

The message to journalists, invited here to get a sneak look at the game, is that a lacklustre response to EA Sports FC 25 has meant that addressing user feedback is the main focus. EA has set up a new Player Feedback Portal, as well as a dedicated Discord channel, for fans to put forward their concerns. The developer has also introduced AI-powered social listening tools to monitor EA Sports FC chatter across various platforms including X, Instagram and YouTube.

The makers of the forthcoming open-world adventure explain how new gameplay features and an extra-resourceful sword-wielding protagonist set it apart from 2020 predecessor Ghost of Tsushima

Atsu is no samurai. The lead character in Ghost of Yōtei is a wandering sellsword from a lowly family. Her sex and lack of status mean that, following the murders of her family, she has no fixed place in 17th-century Japanese society, and there is no permitted path for her to tread if she is to get revenge on the Yōtei Six, the men who killed her loved ones. As the game’s co-director Nate Fox puts it, “Atsu is not somebody who walks in to a room and people pay respect to.”

Yōtei’s predecessor, Sucker Punch Productions’ 2020 sprawling open-world game Ghost of Tsushima, is the story of a samurai, Jin Sakai, who shreds his honour to defend his homeland. Jin can’t repel the Mongols attacking Tsushima as a noble warrior, but as “the Ghost”, a fear-inspiring legend willing to use any dirty tactic to gain the upper hand, he can. If Ghost of Tsushima is about a man grappling with the trade of one kind of power for another, Yōtei sees Atsu seize the only power she can with both hands.

Shanghai-based developer Posh Cat Studio focused on the satisfying thrill of solving life’s small mysteries in this cosy crime caper

As the latest generation of 18-year-olds is about to find out, starting university is an experience fraught with minor as well as major problems. Oversleeping and missing lectures, forgetting where your study group is meeting, mislaying your books – a lot of your time is spent looking for things.

It is these small mysteries that concern Little Problems, a cute detective game, in which the protagonist, Mary, must use her sleuthing abilities to make it through each day as a new student . Created by Indonesian designer Melisa, who has chosen to go by her first name only, the idea comes from her love of detective stories, but also her wish to take violence out of the genre.

Tate Modern reframes its Picassos in a theatrical light, there’s a hands-on utopia in Gateshead and the Cerne chalk giant gets a colourful new neighbour – all in your weekly dispatch

Theatre Picasso
The Tate collection of Picasso’s revolutionary art is reimagined through a drama-conscious lens.
• Tate Modern, London, 17 September to 12 April

Studio Voltaire, London
The artist’s rich engagement with the singular playwright leads us through landmark shows via midair screens, cat videos and lunch with Richard E Grant

Hilary Lloyd’s Very High Frequency is a strange encounter between the artist and the late British television playwright Dennis Potter, who died from cancer aged 59 in 1994. Lloyd approaches her subject obliquely, via a complex mise-en-scène in the semi-darkened main gallery. There are screens all round. Some you can sit at, others are hung mid-air from wires or mounted on stands or fixed to the walls. High above, a mirror ball twirls, dimly reflected in a shiny black-painted slab that sits low on the floor in front of a translucent hanging curtain. It is a room of interruptions and diversions. What’s that black slab about? A reference to the seams of coal in Potter’s birthplace in the Forest of Dean on the border between England and Wales? I think of the glossy black of a grand piano, and a dance-orchestra backing Al Bowlly, Potter’s favourite 1930s crooner. Does the slab intimate a darkness haunting Potter’s life and work? Moving around is a constant negotiation. Potter’s past collaborators appear and disappear, re-enact moments from his work, reminisce and get sidetracked.

Annotated pages of his scripts, not always easy to read, appear on a screen high above our heads. On another, the Berry Hill Silver Band (in which the youthful Potter once played) practise As Time Goes By. On another screen, sitting at home and speaking with Lloyd, the now 85-year-old broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg remembers his famous last television interview with Potter in 1994, and gets waylaid by a memory of a New York sidewalk encounter with Lauren Bacall. High Frequency is full of delays and diversions.

After the controversy over Amy Sherald’s portrait of a trans Statue of Liberty, trans artists speak about why their work speaks to an important moment

Part of the magic of portraiture is how it renders so much of the human experience accessible to us, things we might never see otherwise. This has been very much on Black artist Amy Sherald’s mind. When I spoke to her in advance of the debut of her exhibition American Sublime, she told me that Black representation was foundational to her practice: “I developed this idea that, when I look at art history, for the most part I don’t see portraits of people that look like me. So it started there.”

That exhibition’s curator, Sarah Roberts, also spoke about Sherald’s passion for representing the LGBTQ+ community: “Amy has thought a lot about her role as an artist and the need for representation, and she has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ rights. This work is thinking about who gets depicted as being American.”

Barbican, London
This extraordinary show is a conversation, across the decades, between two kindred artists who refuse to shy away from the world’s horror and pain

Mona Hatoum’s show begins with an indelible afterimage of modern war. Into a stack of welded steel boxes resembling an apartment block in a city that could be anywhere, Hatoum has melted or blasted holes imitating drone or missile strikes. Parts of interior walls and floors have been shorn away to look like apartments with their fronts blown off. This is the shell of what was once a home to many, emptied out by war, like the buildings you saw on the news last night.

Hatoum created Bourj, which means “tower” in Arabic, for an exhibition in Beirut, the city where she was born into a Palestinian family in 1952. Since 1975 she has been based in London but her art knows no peace. Home and family are perforated by violence. A steel cot resembling a prison cell has cheese wire in place of a soft mattress. A kitchen with small chairs for the kids, alongside larger ones for mum and dad, has been incinerated, and the carbonised fragments of wooden furniture painstakingly reassembled inside wire mesh replicas of what they looked like before the disaster.

At 54, the comic has found a new lease of life by embracing his first love – pottery. He talks about agoraphobia, ADHD and creating ceramic cuddles

In a cavernous room in an old pottery factory, Johnny Vegas is approaching his work and his face is a delight. “Is it wrong to love your own pieces?” he says, seeing his sculptures for the first time in the place they will be shown, on a table lit by beams of dusty sunlight. Called Just Be There, and made in collaboration with the sculptor Emma Rodgers, each form is the result of two people embracing around a soft clay column. The huggers are mostly from Stoke-on-Trent, where Vegas’s work in the British Ceramics Biennial, one of more than 60 artists included, is being shown. Some are collapsed – thanks to a bear hug. Some are more restrained, the clay holding the imprint of people’s feelings about personal space. They’re robust and beautiful, and Vegas looks absolutely thrilled.

The first time he produced a body of work to be on public show, it was for his ceramics degree finals and it ended up accidentally being thrown in a skip. To his tutors’ dismay he insisted on making sculpture rather than the technical ceramics he was supposed to be doing, and had produced a series of abstract female forms. He adds with a laugh: “At our final show, everybody kept writing, ‘I like your candlesticks’.”

Museum’s basement becomes £2m ‘kunstkammer’ full of Schroder family’s exquisite silverware, paintings, bronzes and ceramics

Beneath the Georgian city of Bath, a gleaming treasury of Renaissance masterpieces created for kings, queens, church leaders and scientists is about to be unveiled.

Based on the idea of the Renaissance kunstkammer – an art chamber – the basement room at the Holburne Museum is crammed with scores of exquisite pieces of silverware, paintings, bronzes and ceramics.

The global fashion star chats to famous musicians about her friend – the man behind Ziggy Stardust. Plus, a comedian borrows a Hollywood celeb’s car for off-the-wall interviews

Kate Moss has transformed into Ziggy Stardust for the cover of Vogue, but her connection to David Bowie isn’t just sartorial. They were also friends. The supermodel hosts her first podcast about Bowie’s chameleonic period from 1970 to 1975, when he morphed into an androgynous alien, a glam rock god, a purveyor of blue-eyed soul and everything in between. Elton John, Iggy Pop and Twiggy are among the starry interviewees. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, all episodes out on Wednesday 10 September