Design Museum, London
The Fantastic Mr Fox’s snappy outfits, an intricate model of the Grand Budapest Hotel and dozens of stop-motion puppets are all among the 700 objects in this sugarcoated quirkfest

Terrible things happen in Wes Anderson films. In his latest, The Phoenician Scheme, a man is casually split in half in an aircraft crash. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the patriarchal protagonist feigns a terminal illness in order to weasel his way back into his estranged and dysfunctional family. In The Grand Budapest Hotel the “heroic” concierge Monsieur Gustave is essentially a killer and the fictional Republic of Zubrowka is in the tightening grip of a fascist regime.

All this is played for knowing comedic effect (the splatted bisection resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon; Zubrowka is a brand of Polish bison grass vodka), while lavishly sugarcoated in a set dressing of eccentric curios, outlandish costumes and saturated colour. Anderson aficionados will be familiar with the drill, a bit like finding a gnat in a cupcake, delivered in a series of perfectly composed vignettes.

The Yorkshire comic was going nowhere with his act which relied on gimmicks, set-pieces and standing on tables. So he decided it was time to live a more interesting – and stressful – life

What’s the opposite of an overnight success? Should we call Ian Smith a slow burner, a sleeper hit? The Yorkshireman’s last two shows, both fantastic, were nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, he has a popular Radio 4 series, Ian Smith is Stressed, and growing TV visibility. Now he’s embarking on a second UK tour. But breakout success was a long time coming for the 37-year-old. “I did my first gig when I was 17,” he tells me over coffee in London, “which I find horrific. It makes me feel old.”

What took him so long? Might one factor be that Smith’s is a traditional brand of standup – fretful everyman sends up his own anxiety – in a culture that prizes the new and different? That can’t be it, he says. “Because I had so many gimmicks! That was a big part of my standup.” He cites the high-concept shows (comedy in a bath; comedy on a bed) that made Tim Key’s name. “I loved standup with slightly theatrical set-pieces. That was my voice for four shows. I got a review that said, ‘Ian substitutes writing jokes with standing on tables and shouting at people.’ And it was fair enough. I went through a real standing-on-tables phase.”

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Offeh’s show blares and jostles with life as he mimics Mammy, listens to self-help advice and gets naked for Grace Jones’s anatomically impossible Island Life pose

Mmmm ... Mm-mm. Mmmmmwwwwwmmm. MMM. Sometimes sexy and sometimes sleepy, sometimes like a kid making airplane noises or doing an impression of a creaking door or maybe a whale, the sound of Harold Offeh humming and ummming fills the lobby of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Mmm, he goes, mmm-mm-mm. He up-speaks and mumbles and wrings a whole world of feeling out of this disembodied overture. The title of Offeh’s show, including that Mmm, is a quote, from a song on Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy. “Gotta try a little harder / It could be sweet,” runs the lyric, which is also printed in big gloopy lettering on the gallery walls, behind Offeh’s video screens, his photographs and other graphic interventions. The show blares and jostles with life, with song and dance, with skits and routines, with public moments and private performances on the loo and in the bathroom.

For more than two decades Offeh has been a moving target. Here’s the Ghanaian-born Offeh as Haroldinho, in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, shuffling samba steps and wearing typical, Brazilian blue worker’s overalls, his adopted name appliqued on the back. Dancing in the streets and on the beach, he sways and smiles, an object of mild curiosity to passersby. In Rio, people often assumed he was Brazilian. Here he is again, now on the streets and shopping centres of Walsall, Oxford, Liverpool and Chester, in Stockholm and Banff, in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, wearing a Victorian-era magnifying lens in front of his face, which distorts and exaggerates his features. Given the suspicious looks he gets on the British streets, you worry for his safety.

The hit BBC crime drama is coming back to screens for the first time since its record-breaking 2021 finale

BBC hit crime drama Line of Duty has been confirmed to return for a seventh series. A new six-part season following police anti-corruption investigations was today announced by the BBC.

“We couldn’t be more delighted to be returning for a seventh [series],” said creator Jed Mercurio. “Corruption in this country is supposed to have come to an end while Line of Duty was off air so I’ve been forced to use my imagination.”

The great potter explains why he turned his decades-long fixation with Axel Salto – maker of unsettling stoneware full of tentacle sproutings and knotty growths – into a new show

Potter and writer Edmund de Waal, a dark silhouette of neat workwear against the blinding white of his studio, is erupting with thoughts, all of them tumbling out of him at once. He is giving me a tour of the former gun factory on a London industrial estate gently disciplined into architectural calm. It has work stations for his staff (it’s quite an operation); store rooms; and a main space nearly empty but for some giant black lidded vessels he made in Denmark, as capacious as coffins. At either end, up discreet sets of steps, are the places of raw creation. One, with its potter’s wheel, is where he makes; the other, with its desk and bookshelves, is where he writes.

He opens a door to the room housing his two mighty kilns, its back wall lined with rows of shelves with experiments in form and glaze, and tells me of his irritation when people comment on the sheer tidiness of the whole place. “It’s porcelain,” he says with passionate emphasis. Dust and dirt are the enemy. Potters, he points out, “have struggled for hundreds and hundreds of years to keep things clean so that they don’t blow up in kilns, or don’t bloat or don’t dunt or all the other myriad things that can happen”. He is old enough, he says, to have had the kind of potter’s apprenticeship that involved the endless sweeping up of clay dust. Dust is the traditional bringer of potter’s lung – the chronic condition, silicosis. Clouds of dust surround any pottery-making endeavour, if you’re not careful.

Bringing her black-belt screen presence to the role of Elphaba, Erivo leads a fine cast in a zingily scored conclusion to the hit origin story

Director Jon M Chu pulls off quite a trick with this manageably proportioned second half to the epic musical prequel-myth inspired by The Wizard of Oz – and based, of course, on the hit stage show. It keeps the rainbow-coloured dreaminess and the Broadway show tune zinginess from part one, and we still get those periodic, surreal pronouncements given by the city’s notables to the diverse folk of Oz, those non-player characters crowding the streets. But now the focus narrows to the main players and their explosive romantic crises, essentially through two interlocking love triangles: Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard – and Glinda, Elphaba and Prince Fiyero, the handsome young military officer with whom both witches are not so secretly in love, as well as possibly having feelings for each other.

Jeff Goldblum is excellent as the Wizard, who pretty much becomes the Darth Vader of Oz: a slippery carnival huckster who is realising that his seedy charm is corroding his soul. Jonathan Bailey pivots to a much more serious, less campy, more passionate Prince and Ariana Grande is, as ever, delicate and doll-like as Glinda, though with less opportunity for comedy. But the superstar among equals is Cynthia Erivo, bringing her black-belt screen presence to the role of Elphaba, and revealing a new vulnerability and maturity. Elsewhere, Marissa Bode returns as Nessarose, Elphaba’s wheelchair-using half-sister; Ethan Slater is Boq, the Munchkin working as her servant; and Michelle Yeoh brings stately sweetness to the role of the Wizard’s private secretary Madame Morrible.

From Chicago to Stan & Ollie, the Oscar-nominated actor has sung on screen for years. Now he arrives on stage – inside a trunk – to serenade the audience

In one of Hollywood’s nicer ironies, character actor John C Reilly finally made it big with a song about being invisible. His Oscar-nominated performance as the duped and devoted schmuck Amos Hart in Kander and Ebb’s Chicago was defined by his solo, Mister Cellophane. Director Rob Marshall had him sing it in an empty theatre so Amos doesn’t even get an audience for his big number.

More than 20 years later, Reilly has dusted off a not dissimilar tailcoat and rouged his cheeks once more under a new moniker, Mister Romantic, and this time there’s a full house. Backed by a four-piece band he is here to win our hearts with 90 minutes of jazz standards and popular songs, plus the odd chanson and comic verse. After a dozen or so dates in the US, the show has a short run this week in London at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, whose beautifully restored interior and history as a music hall fits Mister Romantic like a glove.

We would like to hear your favourite characters whose gamechanging arrivals lifted the shows they were in

From Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones to the Hot Priest in Fleabag, we have picked our favourite 18 TV characters whose gamechanging arrival in later seasons have lifted their whole show. Now we would like to hear yours. Who is your favourite late-arriving TV character and why?

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Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which was looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during the second world war, sells at Sotheby’s auction

A painting by Gustav Klimt has sold for a record-breaking $236.4m (£179.7m, A$364m) with fees, making it the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction and the most expensive work of modern art sold at auction.

The six-foot-tall painting, titled Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, was painted by the Austrian painter between 1914 and 1916 and shows Lederer, a young heiress and daughter of Klimt’s patrons, draped in a Chinese robe.

A ‘wrong judgement call’ by staff at the London arena meant two fans of the pop star – a vocal supporter of Palestine – were asked to remove FC Palestina football shirts

The O2 arena has apologised after two women who separately attended a Lorde concert on Sunday night had their FC Palestina football shirts confiscated by staff who alleged they contravened venue policy.

Francesca Humi, 30, and Chloe Grace Laws, also 30, were each stopped by venue security and told they would have to remove their shirts – which bore the word “Palestine” – or be ejected. Staff members claimed it was against policy to wear garments bearing the names, flags or emblems of individual countries, and that it could cause offence to other gig-goers.

Director Joachim Trier’s family drama has five nominations, including best actor for Skarsgård, while Oliver Laxe’s techno thriller Sirāt has four nominations

Norwegian director Joachim Trier is leading the race for a triumph at the European film awards, with five nominations in key categories for his family drama Sentimental Value.

The Cannes Grand Prix winner is nominated for best European film, best screenplay and best director, with further best actor and best actress nominations for Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve.

Regarding music played in UK nightclubs, more than £5.7m each year is allegedly allocated by performing rights societies to the wrong artists

Electronic music artists, producers and songwriters are missing out on millions of pounds of lost revenue in the UK, after their music appears in DJ sets but the subsequent royalties are not properly distributed, according to new research.

The Berlin-based Fair Play initiative has found that only 28% of the fees paid by the average UK nightclub are being distributed correctly to artists. More than £5.7m a year is allegedly being misallocated by performing rights organisations, and paid out to the wrong people.

Helen Fielding and Renée Zellweger gather in Leicester Square as a new bronze marks 30 years of the diary-writing everywoman who redefined the romcom heroine

Bridget Jones, Britain’s best-loved and most hapless romcom heroine, stands in a creased miniskirt and gaping cardie in the centre of London, clutching her diary and a pen. Alcohol units: 0, cigarettes: 0, calories: 0, weight: 31 stone – and, according to the actor Sally Phillips, “no intention of losing any of it”.

Phillips was in Leicester Square on Monday morning to unveil a life-size bronze of the comedy character, alongside Helen Fielding – who first cooked her up in a newspaper column 30 years ago, and whose novels have now been translated into more than 40 languages – and Renée Zellweger, star of the four Bridget Jones films (with a combined box office of $900m (£683m)).

The actor will appear opposite British film star Noah Jupe in a production directed by Robert Icke opening in March

Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink is to make her West End debut next year in Romeo and Juliet, opposite British film star Noah Jupe, in a production directed by Olivier award-winner Robert Icke.

Sink, who plays Max in the Netflix sci-fi hit, started her career on stage. She was cast in the lead role in the musical Annie when she was 10, and remained in it for 18 months in New York. “I was a Broadway kid, so I’ve always dreamed about doing a show in the West End,” she said. “To get to do that in one of Shakespeares’s most famous plays under Rob’s direction with Noah will be such an exciting challenge. London theatre has this incredible energy, and I can’t wait to be a part of it.” Sink becomes the latest in a line of US stars who have made their West End debuts in recent years, including Sigourney Weaver (The Tempest), Brie Larson (Elektra) and Susan Sarandon (Mary Page Marlowe).

Photographer Claire Beckett captured the soldiers and civilians who dress up as Afghans and Iraqis in military bases across America. They play everything from insurgents to shoppers in mocked-up firefights

Edna O’Brien on her sofa, Joseph O’Connor in his garden, Seamus Heaney surrounded by books … British photographer Steve Pyke on capturing the greats of Irish literature

This heart-stopping Danish investigation about a mob lawyer turned whistleblower is more dramatic than Scandi-noir as it drops one huge revelation after another. It’s easy to see why it absolutely rocked Denmark

As film-maker Mads Brügger explains at the outset of this four-part documentary series, a black swan is the name given to an event so extraordinary that you could never have seen it coming. In this case, Brügger’s black swan isn’t an event so much as a person: a lawyer named Amira Smajic, a “once in a lifetime” source for a journalist and the person who – he says – could “force us to rethink Danish society”. Smajic has spent years acting on behalf of some of the country’s most infamous criminal gangs, and is now exposing their activities as part of this major investigation for the state-owned broadcaster TV 2. Crucially, it’s not just the criminal underworld that Smajic is laying bare, but also their white-collar accomplices – the seemingly respectable businesspeople and lawyers unfazed by escapades involving dirty money and fraudulent invoices. It’s a co-dependent arrangement – one section of society “is feeding the other, and vice versa”, says Smajic.

It would be an understatement to say that The Black Swan made an impact on Danish viewers. Half of all Danes watched it when it aired in 2024, and it sparked a string of police investigations, as well as a tightening of laws around money laundering and gang activity. It has also turned the country’s almost prelapsarian vision of itself on its head. Brügger – a steely, often sandpaper-dry compere who has previously gone undercover in North Korea for the film The Red Chapel – claims making The Black Swan has shown him that the country could be “grim and dark”. Simply put: something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

One of the most prolific and popular actors of his generation, he reflects on therapy, homophobia, why he suspects now is the worst time in history for trans people, and his secret life as a geek

Russell Tovey’s best characters often seem to have it all together, typically as a barrier to further interrogation. Take his recent projects: in surreal BBC sitcom Juice, Tovey plays Guy, a buttoned-up therapist with a seemingly perfect life, hobbled by an aversion to recklessness. Then there’s the closeted Andrew Waters in award-winning American indie film Plainclothes, a well-respected married man of faith who secretly cruises New York shopping mall toilets. Even in the forthcoming Doctor Who spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, Tovey’s character, Barclay, is an ordinary office clerk who is swept up into a planet-saving mission while trying to keep his family from falling apart. In each performance, Tovey anchors his characters with a beguiling mix of strength, empathy and vulnerability.

In interviews, the immaculately put together Tovey, 44, often seems similarly well-adjusted, speaking eloquently about his acting, his passion for art (he co-hosts the successful podcast Talk Art and has co-written three books on the subject) and his advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community. Flaws, if there are any, are carefully stage-managed.

There are shades of Gossip Girl, Desperate Housewives and everything Nicole Kidman has appeared in for the last five years. Put your brain aside, and enjoy

That its ultra-wealthy characters live in a place called Richford Lake tells you almost everything you need to know about the glossy new thriller Wild Cherry. Yes, it’s another entry in the increasingly popular eat-the-rich genre. Yes, it has shades of The White Lotus and everything starring Nicole Kidman for the past five years. Yes, most of the budget has gone to wardrobe, with any woman over the age of 30 apparently allergic to synthetic fibres and every actor seemingly cast primarily for her ability to carry off swagged silk and cashmere in warm beige tones. Yes, you should have bought shares in the colour camel years ago but it’s too late now. Yes, the insular community and soapy vibe suggests an ancestry that includes Desperate Housewives and Gossip Girl. Yes, in short, it’s trash with pretensions. But trash with pretensions is as fun a way to spend the long winter evenings as any, so why not set your brain aside and enjoy it?

We begin with the obligatory the-future-as-prelude scene, which here involves four women – two older, two younger – standing in a well-appointed bathroom in their underwear scrubbing blood off their hands. We then flashback to begin the six-part journey to finding out what the jolly heck is going on.

Fans and experts consider whether the artist may have been neurodivergent. Plus: inside the biggest Irish dancing challenge in the world. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
JMW Turner is an enigma. But while he didn’t leave behind a diary, he did leave 37,000 private sketches that give clues to his character – and they have been made public for the first time. Clinical psychologist Orna Guralnik, actor Timothy Spall (who played the painter in Mr Turner), artist Tracey Emin and naturalist Chris Packham are some of the fans who search for insight via these pages – and question whether he was neurodivergent. Hollie Richardson

Mortified documentarian James Blake meets young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives

Just as you can accurately measure the quality of a documentary about pornography by the number of examples of its subject that it does not show, so too you can judge a programme about “incel” culture/the manosphere/toxic masculinity by the amount of time it does not devote to the noxious leaders of the subculture. Porn documentary makers often seem to use their commission to indulge their own murky fascinations, or at the very least fill the screen with naked women as an easier way to hook viewers than constructing a decent programme. Similarly, stuffing any programme with footage of the poster boys’ diatribes, generally about pussies (female, metonymically; males metaphorically), power and the need for men to wield one over the other is a titillating opportunity and an easy shortcut to engagement.

Belfast broadcaster James Blake admirably avoids this trap in his hour-long film Men of the Manosphere. It has snippets of the loudest, vilest voices, doing their loudest, vilest thing, telling young, disaffected, vulnerable men what they want to hear: that the problems in their lives are the fault of women, feminism, woke society, beta men and anyone who is not full of ambition, independent spirit and willing to subscribe to the influencer’s latest course on how to be a successful man. If you have spotted any inconsistencies here, you are probably a blue-pilled cuck and not the target market, so please move along.

A chance viewing of the comic’s World Tour of Scotland made me swap Australia for the Highlands, although things didn’t quite go to plan …

I was 23 and thought I had found my path in life. I’d always wanted to work with animals, and I had just landed a job as a vet nurse in Melbourne. I was still learning the ropes, but I imagined I would stay there for years, building a life around the work. Then, five months in, the vet called me into his office and told me it wasn’t working out. “It’s not you,” he said, “I just really hate training people.” His previous nurse had been with him for decades; she knew his every move. I didn’t. And just like that, I was out of a job.

I drove home crying, feeling utterly adrift. I wasn’t sure whether to try again at another vet clinic or rip up the plan entirely and do something else. After spending a few days floating around aimlessly, trying to recalibrate my life, I turned on the TV, needing something to take my mind off things. And there he was: Billy Connolly, striding across a windswept Scottish landscape in his World Tour of Scotland documentary.

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.

The author of Palestine turns his attention to the legacies of Indian partition in this brilliant portrait of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots

Joe Sacco is one of a very small number of graphic novelists who have smashed through into the mainstream. His masterwork is Palestine, a collected volume of single-issue comic books he created in the 1990s, documenting the violence in Gaza. His technique is to embed as a journalist in a war zone and interview people on the street, telling their stories with pictures. Lessons on global politics emerge from ultra-local conflict and depictions of day-to-day life.

Palestine propelled Sacco to fame, drawing comparisons with Maus, Art Spiegelman’s two-volume saga about Polish Jews during the Holocaust with Nazis portrayed as cats, and Jews as mice. These works are sold prominently in bookshops, not in musty basements packed with racks of polyethylene-sheathed superhero comics. Alongside a couple of others, Maus and Palestine signalled that graphic novels, as they became known, could be serious works of fiction, nonfiction and journalism. Palestine itself is as depressingly relevant today as it was in the 1990s. In December 2023, it was reprinted for the first time in a decade, after selling out following the 7 October attacks.

An intimate soiree builds to a horrific climax in this visceral novel about a young woman tasked with hosting a meal for her fiance

Literature loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to more recent offerings such as Sarah Gilmartin’s The Dinner Party and Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, an intimate soiree provides the perfect recipe of claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink their teeth. The preparations are usually unduly stressful, the guest list dynamic unpredictable, the quantity of alcohol borderline obscene – in short, as a device it has all the ingredients for total, delicious carnage.

The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose debut The Dinner Party centres on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiance Andrew and his two male colleagues. To make matters more challenging, it is the hottest day of the year, the menu is rabbit (despite Franca’s vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat.

As the author publishes a new story collection, we rate the work that made his name – from his dazzling Booker winner to an account of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him

“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become: garrulous, playful, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s messy but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is already here. (Rushdie’s first choice of career was acting, and he honed his skill in snappy lines when working in an advertising agency.) Not a great book, but one that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a fascinating beginning to a stellar career.

Book publishing websites in Australia, the UK and New Zealand appear to be using fake testimonials and AI staff pages to lure aspiring writers into handing over their money

An aspiring Australian writer met an apparent scammer face-to-face before realising she may have become a victim of a suspicious international publishing venture.

Australia’s National Anti-Scam Centre is now investigating the case of a website luring people seeking a foothold in the increasingly crowded space of vanity and self-publishing. The Guardian has uncovered similar suspicious websites operating in the UK and New Zealand, as well as two others operating within Australia.

Toxic male behaviour of David Szalay’s protagonist reflects real-world concerns about a ‘crisis of masculinity’

In the immediate aftermath of David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker prize, one feature of the novel stood out: how often the protagonist utters the word “OK”.

The 500 times István grunts out the response is part of a sparse prose style through which the British-Hungarian Szalay gives the reader few insights into the inner workings of a man whose fortunes rise and fall.

Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm

We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.

The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.

Cotillard plays a movie actor starring in a production of The Snow Queen in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s unwholesome story of yearning

An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. It wittily fuses the real and the fictional into a trance-state – and that’s the state that I’ve sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadžihalilović, but not here. Dreamily strange it might be (and in fact, on the face of it, entirely preposterous) this movie had me gripped with its two outstanding lead performances – from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini – and a clamorous musical score.

Cotillard plays a diva-ish movie actor called Cristina, who is the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen being filmed on a soundstage which is in a remote and snowy spot in late 60s France; she is gorgeously costumed in a sparkling white form-fitting gown and crown, a look she carries off with great unsmiling hauteur. Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenage girl in a foster home nearby, stricken with memories of the death of her mother, whose bead necklace she keeps. In her loneliness and grief, Jeanne has projected her feelings into an obsession with the story of the Snow Queen, an obsession further displaced at another remove into idolising the teen girls who ice-skate at the local rink. One day she runs away, stealing the ID of an older girl called Bianca and breaks into the film studio to sleep overnight; she somehow gets a job as an extra, astonished to realise what story is being filmed, and it is here that her gamine prettiness and air of demurely sensitive adoration for the queen catches Cristina’s eye.

The streamer continues its annual onslaught of forgettable festive films with a mostly charmless romance set in France

At the risk of sounding like the Grinch, I must once again bemoan the release of Christmas movies before Thanksgiving; the temperatures may be dropping at long last, but it’s still too close to the gloominess of daylight savings and too far from the belt-loosening of the actual holidays to fully indulge in Netflix’s now-annual buffet of cheap Christmas confections. Nevertheless, their content conveyor belt rolls on, offering treats about as substantial and enduring as cotton candy beginning in mid-November.

Like American chocolates that no longer, in fact, contain real chocolate but sell like gangbusters on Halloween anyway, the Netflix Christmas movie, like rival holiday movie master Hallmark, is relied upon, even beloved, for its brand of badness, for its rote familiarity (nostalgic casting, basement-bargain budgets, styrofoam snow, knowingly absurd premise) and uncanny artificial filler, for its ability to deliver hits of sugary pleasure while still somehow under-delivering on expectations. At worst, these films are forgettable train wrecks (last week’s A Merry Little Ex-Mas); at best, they are forgettable fun, such as the Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle Falling For Christmas, of which I remember nothing other than cackling with my friend on her couch. (Actually, at best they are memorably ludicrous, such as last year’s impressively unserious Hot Frosty.)

As his sequel to Wicked prepares to storm Christmas, the director talks about the dynamism of Grande and Cynthia Erivo – and why his Wizard of Oz riff is quite simply one of the greatest stories of our time

Let’s start with a quick recap on the first Wicked film. Its premise: what would the legend of Oz look like, told from the perspective of someone other than that cute but dozy blow-in, Dorothy? The wicked witch, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), is entirely green, and has therefore been ostracised since childhood. Glinda (Ariana Grande), the good witch, is everybody’s princess but, after a time, the two become best friends. I’ll skirt over how the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow come about, suffice to say that, in the film at least, their backstories make perfect and resonant sense (except for the Lion, but never mind). The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is not a good guy – but is he a bad guy? The morals swirl, in an expertly handled way.

The first film left us at the point of discovery that Oz, far from being a magic paradise, was actually built on foundations of discrimination, oppression, enslavement and mendacity – or, if you like things simple, fascism. The fact that the slave-caste is the animal kingdom rather than a human out-group doesn’t make this opulent fantasia feel any less pointedly topical. “Any timeless story feels timely,” director Jon M Chu says, “because it’s about the human condition. When people become too powerful, what happens to the powerless? That cycle, unfortunately, challenges us every few generations, and maybe this is our moment. We’re the adults in the room now.”

As Gore Verbinski’s AI-apocalypse film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die hurtles towards us, it’s clear from the over-caffeinated trailer that we won’t be getting another ponderous parable about robot souls, digital enlightenment or the hubris of man

It’s easy to forget, given the current glut of robot-uprising doom flicks, that Hollywood has been doing the artificial intelligence thing for decades – long before anything resembling true AI existed in the real world. And now we live in an era in which a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it is perhaps surprising that there hasn’t been a huge shift in how film-makers approach this particular corner of sci-fi.

Gareth Edwards’ The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about AIs being the newly persecuted underclass as 1962’s The Creation of the Humanoids, except that the former has an $80m VFX budget and robot monks while the latter has community-theatre production values. Moon (2009) and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are both about the anxiety of being trapped with a soft-voiced machine that knows more than you. Her (2013) is basically Electric Dreams (1984) with fewer synth-pop arpeggios.

Punchy, old-school stunt work, inventive baddie-splattering and a simple plot as our grizzled Finish prospector finds a new foe in his Soviet-occupied homeland

In 2022, the Finnish indie action movie Sisu had the look of a one-hit wonder. Pitting a grizzled prospector against an entire platoon of Nazis, writer-director Jalmari Helander heeded the lessons of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, principally that there is serious cinematic value in going pedal-to-the-metal along a single, straight narrative line. That profitable sleeper hit now yields this choice follow-up, which somehow feels more expansive while still clocking in under 90 minutes.

Having seen off the SS, indomitable hero Aatami (Jorma Tommila) gains a tragic backstory and a new, vicious postwar foe in the tremendously named Red Army butcher Igor Draganov, played by wily James Cameron favourite Stephen Lang. Again, the economy of Helander’s approach proves striking and thrilling. No unnecessary obstacles have been placed between the audience and a good time at the movies: we get one scene of Aatami dismantling his family home beam by beam and one scene of Draganov being sprung from jail before the pair intersect in the back roads of Soviet-occupied Finland. Cutting to the chase grants Helander time to craft set pieces in which Aatami outthinks and outflanks the Red Army’s might; in this respect, Sisu 2 is a more-of-the-same sequel. The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.

A searing documentary on the laundries sees a determined young human rights lawyer join survivors and campaigners in a fight for truth and accountability

At least 10,000 women and girls were imprisoned in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, forced into unpaid labour and subject to cruelty and suffering. This documentary narrated by Imelda Staunton tells the story of the campaign to hold the Irish government to account for its role in the laundries, mother and baby homes and industrial schools for children. A key figure in that campaign is Maeve O’Rourke, an impressive young Irish human rights lawyer whose master’s thesis at Harvard Law School served as a key legal submission in the legal fight for justice.

O’Rourke had plans for a career in international human rights law until she watched a survivor speaking in a debate on Irish television. We see that footage here, of Michael O’Brien, a former mayor and survivor of rape and torture by priests at a residential school, as he blasts a government minister, white-hot with fury, his trauma raw. It takes your breath away. This thorough documentary hears from campaigners, historians and survivors – including Philomena Lee, forced to give up her son, who was trafficked and sold to rich Americans. Lee was later portrayed on screen by Judi Dench.

The pianist played with the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and more, but remains little known beyond insider circles. This loving doc asks why – but leaves some questions unanswered

This documentary is probably, as they say, one for the heads – for connoisseurs who appreciate a great musician who was never a star. But the flaw of this film, admirably detailed and celebratory though it is, lies for me in the fact that it never pauses to wonder why exactly he was never a star, and what that precisely means. Does star quality consist, in some mysterious way, in a lack of formal musicianship?

Nicky Hopkins was a superbly accomplished pianist who played on records by the Who, the Kinks, Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles (plus solo albums by all four ex-Beatles) and many more. His brilliant work meant he was admired and even hero-worshipped by musicians and producers on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a classically trained Englishman (like Elton John at about the same time, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music) yet sounded as if he learned piano in the Mississippi Delta. And all this was while Hopkins was dealing with serious ill-health; he had Crohn’s disease and later issues with drink and drugs. The latter were at least partly due to a need to dull the pain, in order to keep up with tough recording and touring schedules; it all contributed to his heartbreakingly early death at the age of just 50.

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
All the major characters are present in Sonia Jalaly’s update, but this is also a journey of self-realisation with brisk songs and cartoonish humour

Most people come to Keswick for the mountains and the cream cakes. For 13-year-old Dorothy (Nimi Spiff), they are the reason she wants to get out. What need for scenery and pink icing when she could be in the hubbub of London?

Grieving for her mother and fantasising about her absent father, she is determined to escape to the capital for Christmas. But a Lake District storm is brewing and, after making a break through the upstairs window of her aunt and uncle’s house, she is propelled along a different route.

Its 1981 New York premiere was a disaster but this told-in-reverse musical became a Tony award-winning hit with Daniel Radcliffe. The film version is a tear-jerking joy

I have made enough mistakes as a critic to feel mildly chuffed when a verdict is vindicated. In 1981 I wrote excitedly about a new Stephen Sondheim musical, Merrily We Roll Along, that I had seen in preview in New York; reviled by reviewers and shunned by the public, it then closed two weeks after opening. In 2023-24 the very same musical ran for a year on Broadway, won four Tony awards and was hailed by the critics. Fortunately a live performance of that Maria Friedman production was filmed and I would urge you to catch it when it’s released in cinemas next month.

I say “the very same musical” but that is not strictly accurate. Based on a 1934 play by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart, it is still the same story, told in reverse chronological order, of dissolving relationships: a success-worshipping composer and movie producer, Franklin Shepard, looks back over his life and sees how time has eroded both his creative partnership with a dramatist, Charley, and their mutual friendship with a novelist, Mary.

New Diorama, London
Two stories, centuries apart, are used to chart climate disaster in this ambitious musical with bitty scenes and cumbersome lyrics

This climate disaster musical takes place in a tower block overlooking the Thames. The setting is central because the dystopia has been caused by a biomedical waste dump in the river. London is flooded and this flat on the 16th floor is the safest place to live.

Or so it seems, because things are very opaque in this experimental production. Devised by director Adam Lenson, Stu Barter, Rachel Bellman, Annabelle Lee Revak, Darren Clark and Shaye Poulton Richards, it brings an electro-folk sound to bitty storylines in two timezones. There are the tower block survivors – it is unclear which century they are living in until close to the end when they mention the year 2425 – and a second storyline in the past which might be the 1990s (there is talk of DVDs) in which a couple moves into a luxury high-rise overlooking the Thames (the same 16th-floor flat?).

Brazilian actor will star in The Trial: Enemy of the People, which examines modern political and environmental conflicts

The award-winning Brazilian actor Wagner Moura is to star in a new play being staged at three European festivals next year, in the first joint production since their foundation two years after the second world war.

Moura, who is being tipped for an Oscar nomination for the Secret Agent, will take the lead role in a new production updating the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People to examine modern political and environmental conflicts.

The Shed, New York

The actor indulges his love of the past in a breezily enjoyable play about a man falling for a woman from the 1930s, played by a standout Kelli O’Hara

Tom Hanks is a star who’s always had one foot squarely in the past. As an actor he’s forever been likened to James Stewart, a reincarnation of the charming, essentially good American everyman, a from-another-era lead who’s increasingly been more comfortable in period fare (in the last decade, he’s appeared in just four present-day films). As a producer, he’s gravitated toward historical shows such as Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific; his directorial debut was 60s-set music comedy That Thing You Do! and his undying obsession, outside of acting, is the typewriter, collecting and writing about its throwback appeal.

In his new play, The World of Tomorrow, his fondness for the “good old days” has led to the inevitable, a story about a man with a fondness for the “good old days” who actually gets to experience one of them for himself. It’s a loosely familiar tale of time travel, based on a short story written by Hanks that tries, and half-succeeds, to bring something new to a table we’ve sat at many times before.

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.

Choreographers hear, somehow, a larger heartbeat; it’s fascinating and revelatory to have them reinterpret your compositions, writes the US musician, ahead of a triple bill featuring his music coming to Sadler’s Wells.

When I’m writing music, one of the primary challenges is figuring out how to notate rhythm in a way that is clear to the interpreters. When I hear a phrase in my head it is free of the confines of bar lines, but, in practical application, eventually it needs to get squeezed into recognisable shapes and containers. Every composer has their own strategy (some eschew bar lines entirely, or use alternative notational strategies outside the traditional western systems), but it’s always a negotiation: does the way the composer notates the rhythm correspond to how it should best appear on the flute player’s music stand?

I have distinct memories of being 13, hearing a piece (specifically, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements), basically memorising it from the recording, and then being absolutely shocked when I finally saw the score. “That’s where the downbeat is?!” Stravinsky’s sense of time and my understanding of the same were at variance in a way I still find exciting: the idea that there are infinite superimpositions of a practical system (notation) over a medium (sound) most often experienced by an audience without the score. Understanding that notating rhythm is artificial yet crucial requires both personal precision and empathy with future interpreters.

EFG Jazz festival, Royal Festival Hall, London
The pioneering 81-year-old vibes player, keyboardist and percussionist creates a controlled whirlwind of experimentation and excitement

Absolutely nothing about this set feels predictable: at 81, Mulatu Astatke is still pushing the boundaries of genre. Even on his farewell tour, there is no easing in, either. The father of Ethio-jazz and his band immediately play Tsome Diguwa as if conjuring a thunderstorm, which in turn crashes straight into Zèlèsègna Dèwèl, a piece written in the 4th-century Ethiopian tradition, its harmonic minor tonality sounding almost Arabic.

Astatke has a serious demeanour. Unsentimental, he speaks only to introduce songs or instruct the band like a schoolteacher. But he views his vibraphone with care and bewilderment, playing with intense familiarity yet almost as though discovering it for the first time. His fascination with his instrument holds the audience captive in turn. During Yèkèrmo Sèw – which fittingly translates to “a man of experience and wisdom” – Astatke’s solo fills the room, water-like in its shapeshifting.

As she prepares to release No Lube So Rude, her first album in a decade, the Canadian dance-punk icon will answer your questions

Whether crowdsurfing inside a giant condom or singing alongside a vulva-headed dancer, Peaches has left us with some indelible on-stage images over the years – and there are set to be a few new ones as she goes on tour and releases her first album in a decade. As she does so, she’ll join us to answer your questions.

Peaches, AKA Merrill Nisker, emerged from Toronto’s underground scene in the late 1990s – her peers included Feist, her flatmate above a sex shop – but really came to fame in the early 00s after she moved to Berlin. Her debut EP, Lovertits, was a cherished item on the era’s electroclash scene but it was the a joyous, profane dance-punk track Fuck the Pain Away, from her debut album The Teaches of Peaches, that really took her into the mainstream.

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).

Official Trump social media accounts have been using The Life of a Showgirl snippets to promote his agenda. Why has Swift, who once wanted ‘to be on the right side of history’, said nothing?

In the last two weeks, the Trump administration has used music from Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, in three posts on social media. The first, shared by the official White House account on TikTok, was a patriotic slide show of images set to lead single The Fate of Ophelia. As Swift sings “pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes”, the video cuts to pictures of the US flag, President Trump, the vice-president, JD Vance, and the first and second ladies. The second and third were posted by Team Trump, the official account for the Trump Campaign. One, set to Father Figure, riffs on the lyric “this empire belongs to me” with the caption “this empire belongs to @President Donald J Trump”, while the other, celebrating Melania Trump winning something called the Patriot of the year award, is soundtracked by Opalite.

The Trump administration has found itself in dicey waters for using popular music in the past. The White Stripes and the estate of Isaac Hayes have both attempted to sue the administration for using their music without permission, while artists including Celine Dion, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Abba and Foo Fighters have released statements demanding Trump stop using their songs at campaign rallies and public appearances. Most recently, Olivia Rodrigo condemned the administration after the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram account used her song All-American Bitch on a video promoting its controversial deportation efforts (the song was later removed by Instagram).

(Young)
After 2018’s mellow Honey, the beloved Swede’s heady comeback pairs production worthy of Daft Punk and Moroder with deep romantic realism

At the end of last year, during her triumphant gig at the O2, Charli xcx brought Robyn out onstage. In a sense, it was just the latest in a series of guest appearances on the Brat tour: a string of collaborators from the album and its ensuing remixes – Lorde, Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan and Addison Rae among them – had turned up at different shows to perform their parts live. But as well as contributing her verse to their remix of 360, Robyn also took centre stage, performing her peerless 2010 single Dancing on My Own. Released when at least some of Charli xcx’s audience were still in nappies, it didn’t sound remotely like a throwback even in the context of a gig based around one of 2024’s most acclaimed and agenda-setting pop albums: the star of the show’s willingness to cede the spotlight to her felt like evidence of Robyn’s influence over contemporary pop.

You can see why the Swedish singer-songwriter carries so much clout among pop stars of the mid-2020s. When she opened an album with a track called Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do, she wasn’t joking: after launching as a 90s teen-pop star produced by Max Martin, she rejected the usual strictures placed on female pop – walking away from not one but two major label deals due to lack of artistic control – and seemed intent on following a more idiosyncratic, complex, messy path. She never saw being in the centre of mainstream pop as antithetical to making music with depth, or that touched on contentious issues. Despite the worldwide success of her debut, Robyn Is Here, her second album, My Truth, went unreleased outside Sweden because her US-based label baulked at Giving You Back, a song about an abortion she’d had in 1998: when asked to remove the song, Robyn refused.

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.

He played china mugs, bells, rattles and car horns for everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Benjamin Britten – and once got Laurence Olivier to bang a broomstick. We go behind the scenes of a Radio 3 celebration

Saturday night and the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings is filling up with 300 chattering punters. We are about to record a show that will go out “as live” on BBC Radio 3. This is a one-shot wonder: for one night only, in this drama-documentary, we are exploring the work of percussionist James Blades. Our setup neatly combines the most stressful elements of a live show, plus the key aspect of audience participation which we have – obviously – no proper chance to rehearse. Nerves are fraying. How did it get to this? And who is James Blades anyway?

Born in 1901, Blades was one of the great percussionists of the 20th century, whose life spanned the century itself – he died in May 1999. His blazing talent combined with a startling capacity for hard work took him to the top of his profession and later made him a mentor to music stars as varied as rock drummer Carl Palmer, percussionist Evelyn Glennie and a young Simon Rattle.

(Château de Versailles Spectacles)
Vincent Dumestre and his radiant ensemble bring theatrical flair and exquisite detail to a joyous celebration of England’s patron saint of the baroque

It’s heartening to see European ensembles exploring the work of Henry Purcell, Britain’s very own baroque national treasure. This album, by crack French ensemble Le Poème Harmonique and conductor Vincent Dumestre, centres on one of his absolute masterpieces: Hail! Bright Cecilia, a lavish, celebratory ode to the patron saint of music.

Composed in 1692, its spirited text is full of allusions to musical instruments, including the idea that St Cecilia invented the organ. Purcell’s fertile imagination responded with a dazzling array of illustrative arias, duets and choruses full of sprightly violins, cooing flutes and martial kettledrums. With added harp in the continuo and richly characterful woodwind, Dumestre leads one of the most luxuriant accounts on disc, full of felicitous detail and theatrical flair.

Bertrand Chamayou, Leif Ove Andsnes
(Erato)
Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou find lyrical intimacy and finely tuned emotional balance in Schubert’s late masterpieces for four hands

Schubert’s late works for piano four hands have attracted some starry pairings over the years, from Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter to Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia. Pulling them off requires an affinity for the composer’s distinctively private soundworld and a willingness to share a single instrument, often requiring a different way of thinking about the mechanics of making music.

Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou are thoughtful musicians, and it’s immediately apparent from these affectionately searching accounts that they possess an emotional synergy. The great F minor Fantasia finds the Norwegian spinning seamless lyrical lines over the Frenchman’s cushioned bass. Dynamics are impeccably sculpted; the central Largo is weighty with perfectly balanced trills throughout. They can be playful, too, though their instincts turn inwards, probing the music’s spirit. The return of the poignant main theme is a heart-stopper.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Borough Yards, London
This immersive riot of giant ferns, vine-tangled tree-trunks and sun-struck foliage dissolves in front of your eyes, but leaves you none the wiser about the natural world

Is it me, or is it hot in here? A jungle floats in the darkness on three big screens. Each depicts a riot of giant ferns, vine-tangled tree-trunks and sun-struck foliage in layered, dank profusion. With their jumbles of weathered rock, mossy wetness and tropical vegetation, you can lose yourself in these scenes. But, as I look, mist wafts over a patch of dense greenery as if someone out-of-shot were making with the plant spray.

I’m reminded of those unconvincing jungles in movies and on TV, where the plants have been trucked-in from some garden centre warehouse and arranged on set. Only the camera angles and clever editing stop us from recognising the artifice of it all. In the foreground on one of the screens, you can see rivulets crossing what appears to be a floor of waterproof matting. A small puddle is also forming at my feet. Either the film is leaking, though that seems unlikely, or water is dripping from the ceiling. Through the day, I’m told, the water slowly inundates the sheets of metal that cover portions of the floor, but I arrived too early for the flood.

From flood protection and encouraging wildlife to fixing doors and reducing fuel bills, a new initiative aims to empower residents and make their homes more comfortable

Link Road is home to an unassuming row of Victorian terrace houses in Edgbaston, but inside one of these two up, two downs, a domestic revolution is happening.

At No 33 Link Road, a property bought by community group Civic Square and named Retrofit House, it’s open week. Events include a series of talks, classes and performances – there’s a timetable pinned by the front door so you know when to head to the back bedroom to learn about biomaterials or into the garden for a workshop on mending doors.

Former commissioner for culture Neil Mendoza says the sector must acknowledge the support it gets from all parties

Helen Marriage, a hugely respected cultural leader, writes that “there is no political party that will commit to the kind of investment needed to keep a living art and culture ecology alive” (Durham’s Lumiere festival was a beacon of hope and togetherness – we cannot let the lights go out on the rest of the arts, 11 November). But she also places the responsibility on all of us. She wants the culture sector to make a better case. But can it?

As commissioner for culture in the last government, I remain surprised that large funding decisions directed at culture have been forgotten, devalued and ignored, perhaps because the sources were then from a Conservative government.

The Frattini Bivouac is part of a Bergamo gallery’s experiment to ‘think like a mountain’. But in the thin air of the Italian alps, curatorial ideas are challenged in more ways than one

At 2,300 metres above sea level, Italy’s newest – and most remote – cultural outpost is visible long before it becomes reachable. A red shard on a ridge, it looks first like a warning sign, and then something more comforting: a shelter pitched into the wind.

The structure stands on a high ridge in the municipality of Valbondione, along the Alta Via delle Orobie, exposed to avalanches and sudden weather shifts. I saw it from above, after taking off from the Rifugio Fratelli Longo, near the village of Carona – a small mountain municipality a little over an hour’s drive from GAMeC, Bergamo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – the closest access point I was given for the site visit.

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.

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

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

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.